AUGUST 19

For those of you who might think the United States and Iran have been at odds only recently with the Iranian Navy playing games in the Straits of Hormuz, I'll remind you that they want to build nuclear weapons and they have vowed to annihilate Israel and, in 1980, they took our people hostage for no reason and, well, here is the background very briefly.   It ties in with this date.

Iran was known as the Persian Empire until 330 BC - some still call it Persia.  The Iranian Dynasty, with several families governing, followed for 1500 years.  The dynastic Iran included vast lands to it's north which it lost due to wars with Russia and it's other neighbors.

In the 7th century it became a Sunni Muslim state.  In the 16th century, it forced a conversion on its people away from the Sunni into the Shia Muslim sect.  It is the largest and only one of two countries in the world with the national religion of Shia Muslim (Azerbaijan, just to their north, is the other).  This puts it at odds with other Muslim states.

Iran became a constitutional monarchy in 1906.  The king, they called him the Shah, was of the family Pahlavi.  In 1941, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became Shah.  In 1951, when the Shah's policies of westernization angered the citizenry, they named a Prime Minister to govern with the intent of nationalizing the oil industries (that means the government takes them over).

On this very date in 1953, two years later, with the Cold War engulfing us, the United States and United Kingdom had enough of that and fomented a coup d'etat to depose the Prime Minister and let the Shah continue to govern.  Reza Shah went on governing until 1979 when the Iranian people threw him out and ended the monarchy.  Jimmy Carter was our President at the time. 

Yes, we go back to at least 1953 with sticking our noses in Iranian business.