Some Iranians are worrying about a repeat of 1953 coup? How? Why? Mullahs are not the late Shah, there is no Mossadegh in our political scene, people are different, the generation is different, we have no US-British backed army, it is a different time, it is a different century! The analogy of 1953 coup in the present time may very well be Rafsanjani's conspiracy to sweep power, not US staging a coup or invading Iran. Furthermore, the only people who really talk about US invasion of Iran are Iranians! No US administration official has ever indicated such desire. US media have only weakly entertained such possibility on slow news days when they have absolutely nothing else to talk about. When we say Iranians would have loved Bush had it not been for the imminent US military invasion of Iran, what we are really saying is that those Iranians have largely made up a reason to hate US otherwise they would have loved not only US but George Bush! I know the claim I am going to make may provoke a lot of anger but I say it anyways. Putting some State Department statements aside, US has pursued a very idealistic policy towards Iran, a policy well in line with what US would like to be known for and stand for. And that ideal is spreading revolutionary liberal values of freedom and pursuit of happiness in a region of the world where tyranny and indulging in sadness has become a way of life. If Iranians would really like to love the US and embrace western democratic values, now is the time to cast aside conspiracy theories and seize the opportunity, because US idealism, whatever the cause is, may not last long.

What we all have seen from the 1979 revolutionary generation points to anything but tolerance. How many really cared about prosecution of the Bahá'í community in Iran? Didn't MKO and communists applaud execution of army and intelligence officers? Didn't communists applaud execution of MKO? And didn't everybody else applaud oppression of communists? What would we have thought about a nation, say in Africa, with such a dark contemporary history? Would we call those people tolerant?