 If you want to understand the past 70 years of often disastrous U.S. foreign policy and military intervention, look to the 1953 CIA and MI6-backed coup in Iran that removed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and brought back to power the Shah, an authoritarian dictator friendly to U.S. and British interests. The British and Americans didn't anticipate that their interference would ultimately set the stage for an Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, which began the repressive deocracy that rules Iran to this day. I'm standing in front of a filing cabinet of a draw full of documents that essentially changed the fate of my country. In the new documentary Coup 53, director Taghi Amirani argues that this covert operation became the template for American interventionism all over the world and like so many future conflicts in the Middle East, it began with the desire among Western powers to protect their oil interests. Elected in 1951, Mossadegh had made good on his promises to nationalize the industry. And this didn't go down well with the British, who were obviously standing to lose a very, very lucrative resource. They've joined forces between CIA and MI6 and staged a military coup to overthrow Mossadegh and put the Shah back in power, who was much more amenable in doing an oil deal with the Western powers. On paper, it was a huge success. It was quick, it was cheap, no American lives were lost, and it got the results pretty quickly. And I thought, well, we no longer need to put boots on the ground, we don't need to get into wars. I mean, don't forget at the time America was fighting a hot war in Korea, even considering dropping the nuclear bomb. So this was a trouble-free, easy way of changing leaders you didn't like. It didn't turn out to be so trouble-free. In 1979, student protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 hostages for a year and a half, precipitating one of the tensest diplomatic showdowns of the past 50 years. Why do Iranians, I don't condone it, why do Iranians shout death to America? Death to America didn't just come out of nowhere. There's a very good analysis of why even the hostages were taken. I don't condone taking hostages, let's be clear. But the reason those students raided the American Embassy was because of this. The 53 coup in Iran, it became the playbook for future coups. And in fact, the next year in 54, they went to Guatemala and overthrew Jacobo, Arbenz. And of course, Piner shared the Allende in 73 in Chile. One of the few U.S. leaders who understood the idea of blowback was Ron Paul, who underscored the long-term damage of the 1953 coup in his famous back and forth with Rudy Giuliani in 2007 during a Republican presidential debate. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback. Another is Senator Bernie Sanders. What would Iran look like today if their Democratic government had not been overthrown? With less than two months before the presidential election, Donald Trump, who just last year said he was not seeking regime change in Iran, is rattling sabers. Citing unspecified intelligence reports, the president has threatened that any attack by Iran in any form against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be a thousand times greater in magnitude. American presidents really are the product of the military industrial complex and who cause the shots in those things. The more American foreign policy machine ratchets up the rhetoric and talks war and regime change and the more they do that, the more it backfires back in Iran. You know, extremists love extremists in a way they're made for each other. The more they crank it up, the other side will crank it up.