British former foreign secretary Jack Straw acknowledged that the United Kingdom and the United States have had “malign” influences on Iran.
British former foreign secretary Jack Straw acknowledged that the United Kingdom and the United States have had “malign” influences on Iran.
Straw and three other British members of parliament visited Iran this week amid a thawing of relations between Britain and the Islamic Republic, afte
r ties were severed in 2011 when the British embassy compound in Tehran was stormed.
In an interview with BBC radio, Straw, who is now a Parliament member, said his group had been well received by the government of President Sheikh Hassan Rouhani and reported "considerable optimism there" about a rapprochement with the West.
"There is a very, very long history to this, to poor relations between Iran on the one hand and US and UK on the other," Straw said.
"If you were an Iranian, just an ordinary Iranian, you could be forgiven for thinking that over the decades the US and the UK have been a very malign force -- and indeed we have been.
"We organised together a coup d'etat to remove a democratically elected president in my lifetime in Iran, we played a very, very bad and undermining hand as popular support for the Shah flowed away in the late 1970s," he said, referring to the coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, who was in fact prime minister.
Straw continued: "And then for example the West supported Saddam Hussein in a war which he provoked and for which Iran was the victim."
The CIA orchestrated the August 1953 coup that toppled Mossadegh.
