Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
More broadly, Dilip Hiro notes that “The history of the past six decades shows that whenever there has been conflict between furthering democracy in the region and advancing American national interests,
(For some reason he omits the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s republic in favor of reinstalling the Shah, when the prime minister planned to nationalize Iran’s oil.)
