[0:00]Trump says he's no Winston Churchill. Well, in this respect, I'm very happy that he's no Winston Churchill because Winston Churchill did intervene in Iran and we are living with the consequences of that today.
[0:13]So, um Churchill and his counterparts in the US launched a coup against the democratically elected, uh prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, um because he was nationalizing the oil industry.
[0:27]He said, this oil belongs to Iran. It shouldn't be all captured by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and siphoned out of our country and the wealth taken away from us, a perfectly reasonable position.
[0:39]But Churchill wasn't having any of that. He um prompted the US in particular the CIA to launch a coup, overthrew Mosaddegh, who was a highly popular leader.
[0:52]He was, he was revered by his people to an extent that very few of ours ever are. And installed instead, uh reinstalled the Shah of Iran, [Mohammad] Reza Pahlavi, with his brutal, cruel regime.
[1:07]And when that regime was overthrown in the Iranian revolution in 1979, um one of the main reasons that people gave for that, um new revolution, was the overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953.
[1:21]And 1953. So we are now living, or rather the Iranians are now living with this brutal and horrible Ayatollah regime, which was instituted in response to what the British and the Americans did before.
[1:35]This is what's called imperial blowback. And we think we're being so clever and so brilliant in wading in to countries about which our governments often seem to know very little. Plunging in and um, firing missiles and staging coups and all the rest of it.
[1:56]But we don't think of those long-term outcomes, those long-term consequences, and the absolutely catastrophic effects that they can have many decades down the line.
