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The most pro-American Muslims in the Middle East

By Jeff Jacoby

Published June 25, 2025

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When I argued in a column last week that Israel's war against Iran is America's war too, I didn't know that US B-2 bombers were just days away from attacking Iran's key uranium-enrichment sites. But I had no doubt I'd be hearing from readers who would rehash the tedious argument, long popular on the left and the isolationist right, that Tehran's hostility to the United States didn't begin in 1979 with the Islamic revolution but with American involvement in the overthrow of an Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953.

I wasn't disappointed.

"The Iran problem didn't start with the embassy occupation but with the US involvement years earlier in removing a legitimately elected president [sic] we didn't like and installing the shah in his place," wrote one correspondent.

From another: "What righteous rage would Americans feel if a Muslim nation overthrew our own elected government and supported a police state for decades?"

It's an allegation that critics have been making for years.

Barack Obama voiced it in a widely touted speech in Cairo early in his presidency. "In the middle of the Cold War," he declared, "the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." Other prominent Democrats, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former secretaries of state John Kerry and Madeleine Albright, and Senator Bernie Sanders, have made similar assertions. Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas known for his isolationist foreign policy views (and the father of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky), told an interviewer in 2007: "I see the Iranians as acting logically and defensively…. We overthrew their government through the CIA in 1953."

But the historical record isn't nearly so cut-and-dried, as Peter Theroux, a longtime US intelligence officer, wrote in Tablet recently:

"First, the CIA did not mount or execute a coup. Second, Mossadegh was not democratically elected. Third, the shah was not yet corrupt. Fourth, he was not brought back to power, because he had never left it."

For those whose instinct is always to find fault with US policy, the narrative that the CIA ran roughshod over Iranian democracy to overthrow Mossadegh — who had incurred Western displeasure by nationalizing the country's oil industry — may be irresistible. But it rests on myths. As Ray Takeyh, a leading scholar of Iran and a former senior adviser in the Obama State Department, wrote in Foreign Affairs, it was never the case that "machinations by the CIA were the most important factor in Mosaddegh's downfall." Nor was it true that "Iran's brief democratic interlude was spoiled primarily by American and British meddling."

Mossadegh's fall was driven mostly by deep domestic opposition from Shia clergy, middle class professionals, and the military, which resented the growing authoritarianism of the prime minister. When the shah, acting within his constitutional authority, dismissed Mossadegh, the prime minister reacted by arresting the man who brought him the news. It's true that the American and British governments assisted the anti-Mossadegh forces, but they didn't conjure them into existence. Mossadegh's downfall in 1953 was chiefly the result of his own mismanagement and the mobilization of powerful Iranian factions — not a nefarious CIA-engineered plot.

But even if you disregard all that, even if you regard Mossadegh as a liberal Iranian hero undermined by Anglo-American perfidy, there is a much bigger problem with the "But Mossadegh!" argument. It's illogical.

The goal of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution of 1979 was to transform Iran into a nation governed by strict sharia law under a Supreme Leader — himself — and to impose a radical Islamist dictatorship throughout society. The new regime suppressed liberal nationalists, including many who had admired Mossadegh, and dismantled the country's remaining democratic institutions. Khomeini's theocracy didn't come to vindicate Mossadegh; it came to crush every liberal value he embraced.

Moreover, the new Islamic republic's hatred for America had nothing to do with 1953 and everything to do with its own revolutionary ideology. The mullahs who seized power saw American liberalism, secularism, and friendship toward Israel as a cultural and religious threat. That is why it encouraged throngs to chant "Death to America!" and why it has repeatedly facilitated deadly attacks on Americans.

But the most compelling refutation of the claim that the Tehran government's implacable anti-Americanism is rooted in the 1953 ouster of Mossadegh is that Iranian grassroots public opinion is notably pro-American.

If 1953 had sown the deep cultural resentment that leftist critics imagine, the Iranian street ought to be a hotbed of hatred for Americans. Instead, numerous indicators of public opinion within Iran, formal and informal, show the opposite: Ordinary Iranians admire American society and people, even if they sometimes resent US policy.

"A 2009 World Public Opinion poll found that 51 percent of Iranians hold a favorable opinion of Americans, a number consistent with other polls, meaning that Americans are more widely liked in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East," Christopher Thornton wrote in The Atlantic in 2012. Added Thornton, a professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates who has published extensively on Iranian affairs: "The same survey found that almost two-thirds of Iranians support restoring diplomatic ties with the US."

Two years later, a systematic review of opinion in the United States and Iran found that "Iranians have generally more positive perceptions of Americans" than vice versa and that "negative attitudes toward Americans are significantly low among the Iranian respondents."

Iranians active on social media have made a point of expressing warmth toward Americans, especially in recent years. A notable example occurred in 2017, when protests against the travel ban imposed during the first Trump administration prompted Iranian users to launch an online #LoveBeyondFlags campaign. Tens of thousands of Iranian social media accounts shared posters, slogans, and tweets thanking American protesters and calling for peace between peoples. One popular meme exhorted Iranians not to burn the American flag, admonishing in Persian: "Burning a flag is an offense to the people of that country, not the government."

There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence — including videotaped scenes in which people have refused to walk on American and Israeli flags painted on the street — suggesting that many Iranians consciously reject the regime's anti-American theatrics. In a video posted in 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian woman who was arrested when she refused to wear the hijab, Iranian students can be heard chanting: "Our enemy is not America; the enemy is right here in Iran."

For more than 40 years, the Iranian government has denounced the United States as "the Great Satan" and Israel as "the little Satan" and vowed to "cleanse the planet of their filth." Iran's proxies have killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization except Al-Qaeda. Yet because the regime is so detested by ordinary Iranians, its constant demonizing of the United States has had the paradoxical effect of boosting America's appeal — so much so that Iranians are considered the most pro-American population in the region after Israel's.

The toppling of Mossadegh in 1953 may have been a significant chapter in modern Iranian history, but it has little do with how ordinary Iranians today regard the nation that its Islamist oppressors have been cursing for more than four decades. Like the people of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the people of Iran see America — where there are more than half a million citizens of Iranian descent — as a land of hope, freedom, and democracy.

If the current US-Israeli strikes on Iran succeed in destroying the mullahs' nuclear weapons infrastructure that will be a good thing. But it will be a great thing if the attacks pave the way to ending the evil regime that has ruled Iran since 1979, and at long last open the door to a brighter, freer, happier future for the long-suffering people of Iran.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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