Hacker News Reader

It's one of the craziest self defeating decision that the US and to a lesser extinct Europe decided to pick a side between the two horrible oil financed theocracies - Iran and Saudi Arabia - instead of simply playing one against the other depending on our self interests. That makes us complicit for no good reason in things like the Yemen war.

View on HN

I'm sure the US and Britain were trying to do something like that, what with the 1953 coupe and all. It just didn't go as planned when the Iranians overthrew the Shah 26 years later and installed their own theocracy.

To be fair, Iran was a very close American and British ally, until the chosen dictator (installed by a CIA/MI6 sponsored coup) went too far, a bunch of other things happened and it all went up in flames of a leftwing/islamic revolution. Both were extremely anti-West, naturally. So the West didn't "choose", Iran chose for them.

You're right but Iran doesn't need to be pro West for a balance of terror strategy to be workable. Iran needs only to hate the US and Europe less than it hates Saudi Arabia, which I believe is the case .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com