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The situation with Mossadegh was more complicated than you present. Mossadegh went off on the deep end and deserved what happened to him.

Agreed, the Shah's excesses brought about much of the backlash. However, what ticked off the religious nuts was that he was trying to westernize the country. He may have gone a bit too fast for many Iranians. However, the Shah's regime was not beyond repair.

I disagree that we deserve what we got from Iran. It was during the Cold War and the Soviets had occupied part of Iran after WWII. The left loves to bash the CIA for overturning Allende in Chile and putting Pinochet in power. Pinochet also had excesses, but in retrospect, Allende was a milder form of Hugo Chavez and Pinochet led the country into a free market economy that is the best in Latin America.

Mossadegh went off on the deep end and deserved what happened to him.

I don't dispute that, but that doesn't necessarily mean the U.S. had to be involved. There was a good chance that he would have been toppled by opposition elements in Iran anyway -- which would have allowed the U.S. to operate at arm's length with Iran as far as their internal conflicts were concerned.

If nothing else, the U.S. involvement in Iran over the last 50 years has made it very difficult for us to establish any credibility in the Middle East whenever some moron from Washington stand up and makes silly, utopian statements about "establishing freedom and democracy" as part of U.S. foreign policy.