With much of the turmoil in the Middle East centered around Iran, it is worth reviewing Stephen Kinzer’s 2008 book “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror” to help understand the nation of Iran as well as find some possible answers.Iran has become number one on terrorist lists and are principal backers of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. With recent drone attacks on American servicemen from Iranian-backed terrorists and the fighting in Israel, there have been calls for retaliation against Iran with some even calling for direct military action.Kinzer wrote during a similar time when George W. Bush labeled Iran part of the “Axis of Evil.” Back then, there were calls for military action. But Kinzer’s argument against military action in 2008 may apply just as easily to the present. In “All the Shah’s Men,” Kinzer gives a brief but thorough history of modern Iran while focusing the crux of his book and America’s biggest foreign policy blunder in the 20th century — the coup that overturned Iran’s democratic government in 1952.In his preface, The Folly of Attacking Iran, Kinzer argues against attacking Iran in 2008 and presumably also at the present. Kinzer writes, “It would turn that country’s oppressive leaders, who are now highly unpopular at home, into heroes of Islamic resistance; give them a strong incentive to launch a violent counter-campaign against American interests around the world; greatly strengthen Iranian nationalism, Shiite irredentism, and Muslim extremism, thereby attracting countless new recruits to the cause of terror; undermine the democratic movement in Iran and destroy the prospects for political change there for at least another generation; turn the people of Iran, who are now among the most pro-American in the Middle East, into enemies of the United States; require the United States to remain deeply involved in the Persian Gulf indefinitely, forcing it to take sides in all manner of regional conflicts and thereby make a host of new enemies; enrage the Shiite-dominated government of neighboring Iraq, on which the United States is relying to calm the violence there; and quite possibly disrupt the flow of Middle East petroleum in ways that could wreak havoc on Western economies.”While Kinzer claims average Iranians admire America, he also recognizes that every Iranian knows a part of American/ Iranian history in which most Americans are unaware: the 1952 Democratic Revolution ...