In 1953 Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was toppled in a coup planned by MI 6 and the CIA and carried out by Iranian army units and hoodlums supportive of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s British-run oil industry and allowed Iranians more freedom than they had ever known; the constitutional monarchy he favored was a path between the extremes of royal tyranny and popular radicalism that had beset the country for the previous three quarters of a century. In the years after Mossadegh’s overthrow, as the Shah built a dictatorship backed uncritically by the United States, Iranian democrats and liberals sank into a despondency that was expressed in works of art, perhaps the most lasting of which, the poem “Winter” by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, describes the insidious effect of political failure on the spirit of the individual and the cohesion of society: They do not wish to return your greeting, their heads are buried in their collars, No one dares raise their head to greet, to…