A Fax to Arms Revisited

Sometimes, a news item causes me to search through the VP archives because the news doesn’t really sound all that new. Less often, what I wrote then, fails to embarrass me today.

Here’s today’s item, from Nick Kristof:

On my first day in Tehran, I dropped by the “Den of Spies,” as the old U.S. Embassy is now called. It’s covered with ferocious murals denouncing America as the “Great Satan” and the “archvillain of nations” and showing the Statue of Liberty as a skull (tour the “Den of Spies” here). [JavaScript link in original.]

Then I stopped to chat with one of the Revolutionary Guards now based in the complex. He was a young man who quickly confessed that his favorite movie is “Titanic.” “If I could manage it, I’d go to America tomorrow,” he said wistfully.

He paused and added, “To hell with the mullahs.”

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah