Directing anger at Britain may protect US negotiations

By Donald Macintyre

"In detaining local employees of the British embassy in Tehran, the Iranian authorities appear to have mined a deep vein of hostility toward Britain which has lasted, off and on, since the latter's imperialist grandeur in the 19th century. And it isn't hard to enumerate the many flashpoints in the turbulent relationship between Iran and the "little Satan" in more recent times.....

Looming, too, behind these later tensions was the 1953 coup which ousted Mohammed Mossadeq, the popular and elected Persian prime minister. Barack Obama sees this as a sufficiently important event in the history of relations between Tehran and the West to have issued the first presidential disavowal of the US's part in the coup in his Cairo speech this month. What he did not mention was British intelligence's active assistance to the US at the time, or that the trigger was Mossadeq's determination to nationalise Anglo-Iranian oil, the predecessor of BP...."