Dick was not as enamored of the the Adam Garfinkle piece on foreign policy as I was.
Dick asks the question "what did they think would happen in 1953"? I suppose, obviously, they thought that Iran would not become a client state of the USSR, which was THE primary concern of US foreign policy in the early 1950s. They probably hoped it would develop along the lines of S. Korea or Spain. Not pretty, but acceptable in those times of global cold conflict with the USSR.
I suppose similarly, one could have asked about the Vietnamese people "what view of the US will the people have after this war"? Well, I would doubt too many would have said in 1974 that the biggest problem between the US and Viet Nam in 2003 would be that Vietnamese catfish farmers feel (rightly) they are getting a raw deal from the US.
As for the Mujahadeen, not all of them morphed into the Taliban. In fact, there were many different strands of the Mujahadeen and if the Taliban had not had help from Pakistan, it's doubtful they would have been able to establish their rule over much more than their stronghold in the southeast of Afghanistan.
