Stephen Kinzer’s 2008 book All the Shah’s Men traces the roots of today’s Middle East terror to when the United States and Great Britain engineered the return of the Shah of Iran to power in Iran in a 1953 “coup.”
The Iranian mullah leadership have embraced Kinzer’s view and repeatedly describe America as “The Great Arrogance.”
And since the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Iran “terror masters” have been the primary terror threat to the U.S., murdering thousands of Americans in Beirut, Lockerbie, Khobar Towers, the African Embassies, the World Trade Center on 9-11, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran is an Islamic revolutionary power seeking to expand its writ by terror. Obviously, the set of standards of international behavior established by the western powers upon the end of World War 2 stand in the way of Iran’s ambitions thus their anger at the U.S. and the West for such “great arrogance.”
It is not a coincidence that from 1945 through the end of the Cold War, the rise in prosperity around the world, along with the parallel spread of free and relatively democratic nations, was in historical terms breathtaking.
Especially as the West was simultaneously defending against the Soviet empire and its terrorist accomplices – from cross border invasions as on the Korean peninsula; to guerilla wars in Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua; to terrorism from FARC, the FMLN, the Sandinistas, the Castro and Kim regimes in Cuba and North Korea, respectively, as well as from Iran and Syria and its ally Hezbollah.