The problem has likewise distressed all administrations since, and is emerging as the core conundrum of American policy in Iraq. In All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times suggests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago.

The Truman administration resisted the efforts of some British arch-colonialists to use gunboat diplomacy, but elections in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1951 and 1952 tipped the scales decisively toward intervention. After the loss of India, Britain’s new prime minster, Winston Churchill, was committed to stopping his country’s empire from unraveling further. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were dedicated to rolling back communism and defending democratic governments threatened by Moscow’s machinations. In Iran’s case, with diplomacy having failed and a military incursion infeasible (the Korean War was underway), they decided to take care of “that madman Mossadeq”5 through a covert action under the supervision of the secretary of state’s brother, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles