It's hard to have a conversation about potential democracy in the Middle East these days without someone chiming in something along the lines of "those people just aren't capable of democracy". Now, doubting that a foreign power can install a democracy in a country they barely understand, and which is as ethnically unstable as Iraq is one thing, and I agree that the chances would be slim to none even if our administration wasn't incompetent. But I'll bet many Americans would be shocked to find out that prior to 1953 Iran was a democracy. In fact, a little over a month ago they "celebrated" the 50 year anniversary of their democracy being toppled by guess who? Yep, us. Dan De Luce gives some background:

[Iran's democratically elected leader, Mohammad] Mossadegh incurred the wrath of Britain by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and then argued his case successfully at the UN Security Council.

After considering military action, Britain opted for a coup d'état. President Harry Truman rejected the idea, but when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House, he ordered the CIA to embark on one of its first covert operations against a foreign government.

"If there had not been a military coup, there would not have been 25 years of the Shah's brutal regime, there would not have been a revolution in 1979 and a government of clerics," says [Ibrahim] Yazdi, who served briefly as foreign minister in the first cabinet after the fall of the Shah. "What we have now is a result of the coup."

I guess you can't blame the average American for not knowing things like this... it's not like the government or media has worked overtime to dispel the notion of our neatly wrapped "good versus evil" situation in the region. On the contrary we are fed heaping spoonfuls of the idea that our nation's top priority is the spreading of "American Values". As New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer says in his book All The Shah's Men:

Imagine today what it must sound like to Iranians to hear American leaders tell them -- ‘We want you to have a democracy in Iran, we disapprove of your present government, we wish to help you bring democracy to your country.' Naturally, they roll their eyes and say -- 'We had a democracy once, but you crushed it.' This shows how differently other people perceive us from the way we perceive ourselves. We think of ourselves as paladins of democracy. But actually, in Iran, we destroyed the last democratic regime the country ever had and set them on a road to what has been half a century of dictatorship.

So the plot thickens...