Much adieu lately about how we can trust the Iranian nuclear agreement when they hate Americans.

Do the Iranians hate us? If they don’t they should.

Much of Iranian hatred is based on our CIA involvement in deposing their democratically elected prime minister in 1953 and supporting the brutal dictator (“the Shah”) who gave the U.S. and Britain unlimited access to oil.

In the year 2000 the New York Times obtained a copy of the CIA’s secret history of the Iranian coup, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East’s most powerful countries.

The history of our relationship with Saddam Hussein is like that, too. The sordid tale of how we tried to use him to overthrow the Iranian government, which followed the Shah is, for the most part, still under wraps. Many Americans still believe that he had “WMDs” before our invasion, but few of them realize that we (Reagan administration) provided weapons (“Dual Use Technology”) so he could do our dirty work. We subsequently shamed him for gassing the Kurds, but at the time they were just “collateral damage” in his attempt to kill Iranian agents he thought were among the Kurds. This was OK with our government at the time.

I am always perplexed at American’s lack of knowledge about the evil mischief our government is doing in the world.

What frightens me, as 2016 rolls around, is the new crop of presidential and congressional hopefuls who readily exploit American ignorance for their own enrichment and power.

— Lawrence Dean