Karl, read your history. Iran (fka Persia) is an ancient and great civilization that, like most of West and South Asia was randomly carved up by the British, who made a total mess of things by inventing countries.

After WWII, when the cold war was starting up, the CIA decided the legitimate government of Iran was not to its liking, and decided to replace it with a puppet in the form of the late and not lamented Shah of Iran. While he was a fierce anti communist, and did our bidding at all times, he was also a brutal dictator who tortured, jailed and killed his own people. He stole from the country and basically kept all freedom down during the years he was in power. The people of Iran, who suffered under him knew that but for the US, he would have never assumed nor stayed in power. When they finally had their uprising in the seventies, and they got rid of the Shah, extremists took over the revolution, leading to the ascendency of Khomeni, a religious fanatic, who moved the seat of real power from Teheran, a truly international city to Qum, a religious stronghold, from where the religious fanatics who really run the country still rule. By all accounts I have heard from Americans who have traveled in Iran, the people there do not hate us at all. Quite the contrary. They are still bitter about what we did, and with good reason, but most of them do not hate us. The religious fanatics do, and this is reflected in their propoganda.
In my opinion all this nuclear nonsense and all this talk of a war with Iran is coming from our side for the most part...and at the urging of the Idraeli lobby and Netanyahu. We make no friends there with people like John "I Never Saw A War I Did Not Like" McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb bom Iran" as a joke.

It is a terrible situation, and we are paying the price of a radical backlash to our mistaken policies of the late forties and early fifties.