The New York Times was so dazzled by Abbas Milani's ridiculously misleading article The Great Satan Myth, they featured a short excerpt in their widely read Sunday magazine [12/12/09], in addition to their "Idea of the Day" blog online.

Ironically, it was the New York Times' 2000 article Secrets of History: The CIA in Iran that famously detailed the major U.S. role in toppling Iran's democratic government, a role which Abbas Milani goes to great pains to minimize in his New Republic piece. Former Times reporter Kennett Love has spoken out often about the American (and his own) role in the coup, and veteran Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer authored the celebrated book All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.

Is the New York Times disputing the accuracy of their own reporting?

Luckily, not everyone has bought into the Milani narrative. Comments on the NY Times web site overwhelmingly rejected the so-called "myth", and New York's own Patricia "Lou" Matthews was moved to write a trenchant letter to the editor. The NY Times didn't publish it, so we have.

Mr. Milani's assertions in "The Great Satan Myth" deserve a long, hard look.

Having done research for an upcoming film about Mossadegh and the U.S.-sponsored plot to overthrow him, I would say Mr. Milani presents an incomplete picture of the situation.

While Mossadegh did distance himself from the clergy, and did encounter misgivings from his constituents, it seems a stretch to assume he would have fallen from power without major interference from the C.I.A. acting in concert with the State Department.

The C.I.A. bribed Iranian newspapers to print lies about Mossadegh, hired gangs to violently protest "for" him to turn the populace against him, and enlisted the aid of Kashani and others whom they paid to speak out against him and spread yet more misinformation. All the while, the State Department was assuring Mossadegh that the United States was on his side, the side of democracy, and sometimes intentionally distracting him from the C.I.A.-created problems at hand.

That our country so willfully acted to tear apart a true democracy in the developing world at the behest of Britain's oil interests, conveniently cloaked in fabricated threats of communism taking over Iran, is a sad chapter in our history.

While Mr. Milani correctly notes the irony that the legacy of the clerics the U.S. funded to overthrow Mossadegh has gone on to haunt us, it seems the true, and much more resonant, moral of the story is that by interfering so deeply in the affairs of Iran, we will never know whether that fledgling democracy would have survived if left alone; let alone whether we would now have a powerful ally in Iran if we had in deed, not paltering words, truly been on the side of democracy back in the early 1950's in Iran.

Sincerely,

Patricia L. Matthews