The Bush Administration says it wants to make Iraq a model of democracy for the Middle East. Of course, that wasn't the original justification for war, and the bloody insurgency and the seemingly endless difficulties in creating a functional government raise serious questions about whether democracy will be the outcome, but let's take Washington at its word: democracy is now the goal in Iraq.

The sad irony is that Washington might not have to promote democracy in the Middle East today if it had taken a different path years ago. We had a chance once before to make a major country in that region a beacon of freedom, and we blew it.

Mohammed Mossadeq

Back in 1953, during the Eisenhower Administration, America and Britain engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iraq's bigger neighbor, Iran. Like most foreign interventions in the Middle East, this one was all about oil and alliances.

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, whose name now means nothing to most Americans, had been named Time Magazine's man of the year in 1951. A popular leader who was riding a wave of nationalist patriotism, he refused to take sides in the Cold War. He also nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which was then a British monopoly. That was his downfall. The British government imposed a worldwide embargo on Iranian oil, and the American government did the political dirty work.

It took the United States government almost half a century to admit publicly its role in the CIA coup that overthrew Mossadeq and reinstalled the autocratic Shah of Iran on his throne.

Former Shah and his wife

In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a landmark speech: “The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

That was an understatement. Iranians of almost all political persuasions, except die-hard monarchists, have never forgiven the United States for crushing their budding democracy. The memory of the 1953 coup greatly intensified the anti-American character of the Islamic Revolution that finally overthrew the unpopular Shah in 1979. As a young correspondent who was there at the time, I was constantly asked by the young activists who took over the American Embassy why my government had engineered the 1953 coup. I heard the name Mossadeq over and over again.

American hostage in Iran 1979

It is a sad fact that governments rarely learn the lessons of the past, and ours is no exception. The United States is now faced with another popularly and democratically elected Middle Eastern government that is not to its liking – this time in the Palestinian territories.

There were several ways that President Bush could have responded to the recent election victory by Hamas, a terrorist organization that came in from the cold via the ballot box.

Washington could have publicly engaged the Hamas government and encouraged it to build a peaceful and prosperous Palestinian state, one that would offer the Palestinians something better than the corruption and inequality of the previous PLO administration. The responsibilities of government might possibly have made Hamas a party that America and Israel could do business with, just as years of talks and international mediation had transformed the PLO from an avowedly terrorist organization to a fledgling – albeit flawed – government.

Hamas Rally

We will never know if it might have worked. Hamas refused to explicitly recognize Israel's right to exist and offered instead a 50-year truce. That was not good enough for the Bush administration, which has chosen instead to crush the democratically elected Hamas government by starving it of funds and trying to keep anyone else from supporting it.

The result is now anarchy, misery and near civil war in the Palestinian territories, and the collapse of the truce that Hamas promised Israel. Moreover, the United States is once again seen throughout the Middle East to be applying a double standard by preaching democracy but practicing it very selectively.

Would it have been better for the United States to take a chance and try to do business with a government popularly elected by the Palestinian people?

History tells me we may have once again chosen the wrong path.