Comments Elsewhere

“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history . . .” I predict that this will have exactly no effect at all on how anyone in mainstream political commentary talks about the motives, or the moral status, or the likely outcomes, of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. The very worst offenses of the U.S. government are largely openly-admitted matters of public record, and public-affairs commentary mostly proceeds on the assumption that there is nothing at all to say about that, except to wave it off with a quick segue of “Yes, yes, of course there were certain excesses; but . . . .”