We gave them the Shah. They gave us Reagan, who wouldn't have won without the Iran Hostage Crisis. By extension, they also gave us the Bush presidencies, the last of which was nearly fatal. More than that, the conservatism that ascended due to what Iranians did weighed down our political system with years of backward conservatism, that's going to take us decades to recover from if it's even possible.
There was never any connection between what the CIA did in Iran (and a lot of other countries) and what US people vote on in elections. Truth is, in 1953, the CIA was a renegade agency. Paranoid, accountable to no one for its covert activities, unsupervised, and flush with cash it raked off freely from the Marshall Plan; at a time when the dollar was the supreme currency in the world.
For people of my generation, the first they ever heard of Iran was the revolution and the taking of the American Embassy. The hatred Iranians showed on television then, and the lawlessness of taking the American Embassy and holding hostages created a bad emotional state among the US people. Being confronted by that level of hatred wasn't conducive to understanding of cause, and that's the kind of trauma that lasts a long time.
Meanwhile, Iranians have punished themselves with the Islamic Republic, far more than what the Shah did. It seems to me those clerics exploited anger over the coup for their own political ends.
I'm not saying they don't have a legitimate grievance, but sooner or later, you have to put a stop to the anger and suspicion, which is traumatic in itself, and get rational about how to come to some understanding.
What the CIA managed to do there can't be done today.
I'm not saying Iranians don't legitimate grievance,
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