As noted in today’s Talking Points, former (and briefly, at that) Obama administration official and current Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ray Takeyh has an interesting op-ed in today’s Washington Post. The piece centers an unusual take on history: that the famous intervention of the CIA to bring down Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 — and re-install the U.S.-friendly authoritarian Shah — was actually a bungled attempt, and the real culprits of the coup d’etat were Iran’s clerics. Therefore, asserts Takeyh, the true enemies of democracy in Iran are the always-amorphous “mullahs.”

(For an opposite — and vastly overwrought — view of this history from the left, check out this post from Matthew Taylor at Mondoweiss.)

This reading of history may or may not be true — I can’t say I have the personal documentation to prove it either way. (Certainly, some of Iran’s clerics — but not all; some opposition figures are mullahs, too — have culpability in last summer’s repression of democracy, as Takeyh rightly adds at the end of his piece.) But I can say that all I have read on the subject presents the CIA efforts — “Operation Ajax” — as a major part of the coup. Stephen Kinzer’s excellent book, “All the Shah’s Men,” is one such source, as is the memoir of CIA operative who organized the covert actions, Kim Roosevelt (Takeyh mentions the latter, and dismisses it as a self-serving inflation of the U.S. role).

But another question about this op-ed is, why now?

It is fair enough to ask the historical question at the anniversary of the event — if the clerical structure did play such a role, it should cop to it, of course — but it seems out of place, amid the heated rhetoric of bombing runs on Iran, to blame the “mullahs” for sins that the last two Democratic administrations have admitted to. In 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright confirmed a U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow and in his Cairo speech in June of 2009, Obama admitted it as well (“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.”).

As noted before here at LobeLog, Takeyh wrote another Post op-ed last month that seemed to be enabling the hawks who call for a strike — a step-by-step of how to prepare the diplomatic and military logistics of such a bombing run. The fact that Takeyh is a liberal-leaning centrist, and a Democratic adviser casts his positions on Iran in a different light.

If this article were to be accepted as policy, as the ideas of think-tank scholars are meant to be, the roll-back of previous U.S. admissions would certainly feed into the paranoia of both the clerics currently in charge as well as ordinary Iranians. The U.S. administration of Barack Obama, so far as they would be concerned, would obviously not be trustworthy, immediately quashing any potential further negotiations.

It may be that the trust deficit between the United States and Iran is already too great. But why, at this late stage, push the sides further apart?