“Iran is the greatest threat to American security in the Middle East.”  “Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terror in the world.” “We must maintain a military presence in Syria and help the Saudis fight a war in Yemen because we have to check the influence of Iran in the region.”  These are a few of the general sentiments and talking points regarding Iran that are parroted constantly by members of the political establishment, corporate media, and those who support American imperial foreign policy.  Iran is the primary bogeyman in the Middle East and its supposed threat to America is one of the main justifications for ongoing U.S. intervention in the region. But is there any real truth to these claims and how did Iran become such an avowed enemy of the American empire?

When asked the question of when America’s relationship with Iran became so contentious, many will point to 1979 and the Iranian Revolution.  The Iranian Revolution was a popular uprising that led to a series of events, including the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah (a name historically given to Persian kings and emperors), the taking of 52 American diplomats as hostages by a group of Islamist revolutionaries, and the rise of a Shi’a theocratic regime led by the Ayatollah Khomeni.  Iran’s Islamic theocracy still rules in Tehran to this day.  However, the full context of U.S.-Iranian relations is incomplete without tracing back an additional 26 years to 1953. In August, 1953, the U.S. launched “Operation Ajax”, led by the CIA and aided by the UK, to stage a coup d’état intended to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.  The reason for the coup had to do primarily with Iran’s decision to nationalize its oil supply, as well as America’s fear that Iran would fall into the Soviet-communist axis under Mosaddegh.  Several hundred were killed during the uprising and the newly installed Shah took over and proceeded to reign as a widely unpopular military dictator supported strongly by the U.S.  The coup represented one of the earliest in a now vast list of CIA-led regime change operations and the beginning of combative relations between Iran and America.

The Revolution of 1979 was undoubtedly an act of blowback from the years Iran spent living under a brutal American-supported and American-imposed dictator, The Shah.  However, the U.S. role in agitating the conflict between the two nations has been widely dismissed. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter referred to the 1953 coup as “ancient history” and said “I don’t think it’s appropriate or helpful for me to go into the propriety of something that happened 30 years ago,” when asked if he thought it was proper for the U.S. to have overthrown Mosaddegh and installed the Shah against the popular will of the people of Iran.  While the CIA coup may have seemed like ancient history to Americans, it certainly was not to the Iranians who had been forced to live with the consequences of it, namely, an oppressive dictatorship that was a sock puppet of a foreign power. Certainly, if the U.S. President had been overthrown by a foreign power in 1993 and replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist dictator backed by that foreign power, the American people in 2019 would not consider 26 years in the past to be ancient history and would not be quick to forget the suffering brought upon them and those who imposed it.

Since 1979, the U.S. has been at odds with Iran and its Islamic Republic.  Saddam Hussein, fearing the revolution in Iran, a country made up almost entirely of Shi’a Muslims, would spread into his Shi’a-majority Iraq, fought a war against the Iranians throughout much of the 1980s, supported by the U.S., as well as many of the other Arab states.  In 2003, America invaded Iraq and accidentally empowered Iran by helping their Shi’a allies ethnically cleanse the Sunnis from Baghdad and take control of the government.  Ever since, the U.S. has intervened throughout the region to try and reverse the errors of its own mistakes in Iraq that strengthened Iran, by redirecting and supporting Sunni-led insurgencies in Iran, Lebanon, and more prominently in Syria against Iran’s ally there, President Bashar al-Assad.  

Along with fighting proxy wars against Iranian allies throughout the region, the U.S. has maintained hostilities with Iran by peddling fear and propaganda in regards to Iran’s nuclear program.  The Iranians maintain a civilian nuclear energy program and are members of the non-proliferation treaty, which means they have agreed to the non-diversion of nuclear energy to the purpose of creating weapons and are regularly inspected by members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  While there is no evidence that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, their so-called “breakout capability” to potentially attempt to build them in the future is regularly used as a casus belli to justify perpetual animosity. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal orchestrated by Barack Obama was a favorable step towards decreasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and removing one of the major excuses for antagonism and potential justifications for military conflict.  However, Donald Trump, backed by his advisors, pulled out of the treaty and has consistently taken hawkish positions towards Iran and reversed much of the progress towards peace that was made following the enactment of the deal.

In addition, the Trump administration has maintained and increased its support for Saudi Arabia, a predominantly Sunni nation, in large part because they are the primary enemy of Iran in the Middle East.  America has supported and enabled Saudi Arabia’s brutal genocidal war in Yemen, mainly on the pretext that the war is supposedly helping to combat Iran’s influence.  The Houthi government in Yemen that Saudi and the U.S. are bombing is friendly to Iran, although there is little to no evidence that Iran actively supports them militarily.  America admittedly engaged in the war in 2015 as a way to “placate” the Saudis, who feared that the Iran nuclear deal was a step towards Iran supplanting Saudi Arabia’s position in America’s regional order.

The claim that “Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terror” is almost laughable when considering the specifics of America’s conflicts with Iran throughout the region.  In Syria, the U.S. backs the Sunni rebels, dominated by al-Qaeda, the very terrorists who knocked over the twin towers on 9/11. In Yemen, U.S. support for the Saudis against the Iranian-friendly Houthis has directly emboldened the al-Qaeda affiliate there, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).  Meanwhile, the Americans support the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) in Iran, a militant organization opposed to the Iranian regime that was officially listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. itself until as recently as 2012.  The Iranians on the other hand, primarily support Hezbollah, a militant group and political party based in Lebanon, as well as the Syrian and Iraqi states, and various Shi’a militias throughout the region.  While Hezbollah and Iran’s other allies in the region certainly should not be considered good guys by any stretch, they are not international terrorists and pose no threat whatsoever to the American people, unlike many of the Sunni jihadists the U.S. has continually backed.  The only threat these groups pose is to American regional dominance and to soldiers American politicians have decided to send halfway around the world to fight in counterproductive, undeclared, unconstitutional, misguided wars.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the hostage crisis, and the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iran has been independent of U.S. hegemony.  They do not take orders from Washington D.C. and they don’t participate in the so-called Post World War-II order, by which the U.S. maintains a position of leadership around the world and all other nations act as subservient states whose interests are ultimately secondary to those of America.  Although the Iranians have never attacked the U.S. and pose no threat whatsoever to the American people, their independence and influence in the region do pose a threat to the American empire and its interests of maintaining ultimate power and control in the Middle East, as well as the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia, America’s two main allies and Iran’s two main adversaries in the region.  This distinction is worth stressing, as often those who are proclaimed to be enemies by our political and media classes are not in fact enemies of the American population in any real sense and do not pose any threat to the things most Americans consider important, like freedom, liberty, security, and national sovereignty.  Instead, these supposed monsters who must be confronted are enemies only of the state itself, in that they in some way challenge or undermine the legitimacy of America’s position as the global superpower.