US-Iran tensions: Soleimani’s death was decades in the making

The assassination by the United States of Iran’s Major-General Qassem Soleimani this week took two seemingly ideologically opposed countries to the brink of war.Yet it was not so long ago that the two countries were allies – democratic ones at that. Indeed, one strand of thought has it that it is America’s strategic mistakes in the history of the Middle East that have created the very problem it now faces.In the early 1950s, Iran was ruled by a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad…