There are a number of countries at the top of America's list of foreign policy concerns. Iraq is obviously one of them. Another one is Iraq's next-door neighbor, Iran. Right now the United States is worried about the possibility that Iran might develop nuclear weapons. But President Bush is just the latest US president to worry about Iran. On November 4, 1979, during the Carter administration, Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took dozens of US diplomats and marines captive. They held them for more than a year. Relations between the two countries were destroyed. To many Americans it seemed as if the confrontation came out of nowhere. That's not the way Iranians saw it. They remembered 1953, the year the CIA organized a coup in their country. It resulted in the overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Iran has never forgotten that injustice, just as the United States has never forgiven Iran for taking Americans hostage. In our four-part series The World's Jeb Sharp takes an in depth look at the history of US policy towards Iran.
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