The contemporary Iranian tragedy is all due to a really dumb decision in 1953 by the then respective leaders of the US and UK, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to order their spy agencies to orchestrate a regime change.

The democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, got ousted by what MI6 called Operation Boot and the CIA called Operation Ajax. Why? Because Iran's government wanted to audit BP's books. Not having thought through their regime change further than taking bribes from an oil corporation, Eisenhower and Churchill thought reinstating the shah would do the trick, but it transpired Iranians preferred Ayatollahs to pedo monarchs. So here we are today.

I got all this history from Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads which I read a while back. I'm busy reading Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight about the "Opium War" which is a real eye opener for me. In the swan song of Queen Victoria's empire, the British government decided to orchestrate a regime change in China on behalf of its drug dealers. Until I read this book, I knew very little about this fascinating story.

While this has become "hidden history" in our anglophone world, in Chinese culture this ushered in "Century of Humiliation" which it only recently started to recover from. A problem with China re-emerging as the global superpower is it hasn't forgiven the west for the Opium wars. Scary times.