The leadership in Iran has, among other things, requested that the US apologize for its past crimes in Iran. While I do not think we should ever apologize because of pressure / force, I do think we should apologize when history shows that our behavior was deplorable.
Our decision to overthrow a democratic (possibly socialist but unlikely to be communist) government lead by Mohammed Mossadegh and install the Shah in 1953 is one of a series of similar and disgusting acts we committed during the Cold War. In too many cases, we chose to support undemocratic, repressive governments instead of allowing democratic socialist or communist governments. I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but cannot quite get my ideas structured right. Basically though, we had a policy that supported economic liberty (at least in the form of unrestrained capitalism) over political liberty. In fact, in some cases, Iran being one of them, we supported repressive capitalist governments over potentially free socialist governments.
So how could Obama apologize without empowering Iran too much? One way would be to apologize for all examples where we did this at once - Iran, Cuba, Chile, Congo, etc. Obama could also ask that the Iranian government issue an apology for taking over the US embassy and holding hostages.
The bottom line is that our foreign policy was bankrupt, and an apology would signal that we are ready to move away from that hypocritical policy and actually promote our ideals of political and economic liberty.
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