On May 18, 2010, Newsweek produced an infomercial thinly cloaked as serious news. Among other insults to the intelligence of its viewers, Newsweek includes a very selective reading of history designed to convince the uninformed that Iran=Evil and the United States=Good. Unfortunately, real history is more complex.

Newsweek claims that antagonisms between the United States and Iran began with the 1973 Iran Hostage Crisis, ignoring the far more terrible events beginning in 1953 with the US-sponsored coup against Mossadeq, the elected president of Iran. These crimes of state terrorism resulted in the imposition of the Shah (flown in by the CIA), and the institution of one of the bloodiest dictatorships in history. It is the eventual failure of this policy that brought the internal CIA term, "blowback" into popular usage.