I watched Argo last night. Within 3 minutes it was easy to see why the press and Hollywood loved this movie. Hollywood has never been too fond of facts or the truth, especially if it gets in the way of a good story (or their political agenda). In Argo, the entire backdrop of the Iranian hostage situation was framed as the typical left-wing "we deserved it" propaganda. The movie starts off with a completely distorted "history" of Iranian politics in which the reign of Persian kings (shahs) ends in 1950 when a prime minister (Mohammad Mosaddegh) is "democratically elected" only to be overthrown in a CIA/MI6 backed coup in 1953. According to the movie, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was then installed as Shah, a puppet ruler with the U.S. pulling his strings. There is only one problem with this "history." The Iranian parliament had been in existence since 1906. And Mohammad Reza Pahlavi reigned alongside of parliament from 1941 until his exile in 1979. He was the Shah of Iran throughout the tenure of Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister. The whole premise of the movie is utterly false. The U.S. and U.K. wanted Mohammad Mosaddegh out of power because he was backed by the communist, was seizing privately owned companies (like Hugo Chavez later did in Venezuela) and there was fear he would turn Iran into a full-blown Soviet-style communist country, or worse, a puppet nation of the USSR. Given the strategic importance of the Middle East, it's easy to see the concern of the U.S. and British leaders at the time.