The Coup That Failed In The Long Run

Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran waves as he leaves Union Station for the Iranian Embassy in Washington D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm talking about the 1953 overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh by England and the U.S.A.  In the view of Christopher de Bellaigue, this was a major error on our part.  De Bellaigue contends that:

Mossadegh’s Iran would have tilted to the West in foreign affairs, bound by oil to the free world and by wary friendship to the US, but remaining polite to the big neighbor to the north.
In home affairs, it would have been democratic to a degree unthinkable in any Middle Eastern country of the time except Israel—a constitutional monarchy in a world of dictatorships, dependencies and uniformed neo-democracies. 

The reason for the coup was Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1951.  This riled England no end.

The coup benefited no one:

It embedded a fathomless Iranian suspicion that would find expression in the seizure of US diplomats after the 1979 revolution.
It did nothing to halt British decline.
It thrust the United States into support for Middle Eastern tyrants able, they claimed, to deliver oil and stability—a strategic position at odds with American values. 
It set Iran on a self-defeating zigzag between embrace of the West (the Shah) and embrace of the Prophet (the postrevolutionary theocracy), a path that has led to isolation and the alienation of most Iranians from their repressive polity.

Almost sixty years later we're threatening Iran again.  Granted it is a different Iran, but is there not another way but war to resolve the issue?