The land of Autonomy

In 1951, a large majority of the Iranian parliament nominated Mohammad Mosaddegh as the nation’s new Prime Minister. His nomination was accepted by Iran’s king (referred to as a Shah), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As Prime Minister, Mosaddegh sought a progressive secular agenda within Iran’s democratic political system: he introduced workers’ protections, created new public services, advocated for further democratic reforms, and fought for the rights of women. Most controversially, though, he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the company through which the British controlled the nation’s oil resources, in order to prevent foreign domination and ensure that Iran had full control over its own wealth.

The UK was not a fan of this move. British intelligence convinced the CIA that the removal of Mosaddegh was an imperative both to secure Iranian oil for the West and to prevent Iran from turning to the Soviets- largely a false concern. In 1953, the CIA and British M16 launched Operation Ajax, which recently declassified documents from the CIA describe as a “military coup that overthrew [Mosaddegh] and his… cabinet… carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.” Iranian democracy collapsed, the Shah and his new appointees took full power, and the AIOC changed its name to what it’s known as today: BP.

Though Iran’s new government instituted a handful of progressive modernizing reforms, it was essentially a dictatorship seeking to suppress public frustration. It worked, until it didn’t. In 1979, a popular movement under the reactionary theocratic leadership of Ruhollah Khomeini successfully overthrew the government, along with holding Americans at the US embassy hostage in a tense standoff for over a year. Though the various groups constituting the movement, from leftist student groups to conservative Islamists, disagreed about what they wanted Iran to be and which parts of Western modernization were objectionable, all of them opposed the Shah, who was seen as a corrupt autocrat who served as a puppet to Western powers. Following a brief power struggle, Khomeini took control of Iran as Supreme Leader, launching the current Iranian government.

Western powers sought any way they could to take down this new anti-Western theocracy. In 1980, Iraq took advantage of the turbulence in Iran to invade the country, seeking to replace it as the dominant power in the Middle East. The US, the UK, France, West Germany, Saudi Arabia, and even the Soviet Union all lined up to support the brutal warfare of Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein. Hundreds of thousands died, if one includes the genocidal Al-Anfal campaign that Saddam undertook against Iraqi Kurds. Years later, in 2014, the New York Times would drop the bombshell story that there were indeed weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq- they were chemical weapons left over from the Iran-Iraq War, and were “designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.”

During the war, Iran began its strategy of providing support to ideologically sympathetic terrorist organizations in order to build support among regional proxy groups such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad Organization. In 1983, the latter group bombed the US embassy in Lebanon, killing 63 and wounding another 120.

In 1988, just a few months before the war would end, the US Navy would accidentally misidentify an Iranian passenger plane as a military fighter jet and shoot it down while it was still in Iranian territory. Iran Air Flight 655 was destroyed, killing 290 civilians, including 66 children.

Understandably, relations between the US and Iran remained unfriendly even after the war ended and Iran began to rebuild its power in the region. Iranian hostility towards the United States was not blind, however. After 9/11, many al Qaeda operatives fled across the border from Afghanistan to Iran. Rather than providing them protection or even celebrating them, Iran rounded them up, made copies of their passports, and detained or expelled them. Through the UN, Iran then gave the copies of the passports to the US in order to help them identify the terrorists, and also allowed US officials to interrogate some of the ones being detained. James Dobbins, Chief Negotiator on Afghanistan for the Bush administration at the time, said that the Iranians were “comprehensively helpful.”

While Iran cooperated with the US in their invasion of Afghanistan, post-9/11 efforts to thaw relations generally fizzled out with little success. The Iranians instead decided to go their own way, utilizing the vacuums in regional power produced by the Iraq War to extend their political reach into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and more. Indeed, the Iraq War provided such an opening for Iran to grow in influence that a recent report commissioned by the US Army itself stated that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the conflict.

While they were already foes for reasons I’ve described before, this set up the currently-ongoing cold war between Iran and the region’s other major player, Saudi Arabia. Because the Saudis are long-standing close allies of the US, this raised tensions further. The issue of an Iranian nuclear weapons program lingered heavily on the minds of every party involved. Indeed, it so worried America and Israel that they jointly launched one of the most successful cyberattacks ever conducted on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

But after years of such high tension under the reign of the hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian voters elected the more moderate Hassan Rouhani in 2013. Though the Iranian presidency is a position with limited power- the Supreme Leader makes the final decisions- this softening of Iran’s positions allowed for the negotiation of a highly successful nuclear deal with the Obama administration.

Despite Iran’s full compliance with the agreement, the Trump administration announced that it planned to cease compliance with the agreement. Breaking with European allies, the Trump administration has begun rapidly ratcheting up sanctions and pointing guns in Iran’s direction.

On May 21st, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo posted a Tweet accusing Iran of “40 years of unprovoked aggression.”…

The current US conflict with Iran can be essentially boiled down into two contentious issues- the Iranian nuclear program and Iran’s aggressive expansion of its influence across the region.

Iran first started its nuclear program with the goal of civilian energy production with the help of Western powers while the Shah was still in control of the nation. The program continued even after the 1979 revolution, however, with the new Iranian government recognizing not only the potential of nuclear energy, but also that developing a nuclear weapon could serve as a deterrent against any further aggression, giving the nation a uniquely powerful card to play in the region. Iran seeks development of a nuclear weapon for the same reason that North Korea does: to ensure against external attack through mutually-assured destruction.

This prospect terrified the West almost immediately. The authoritative US publication Jane’s Defense Weekly reported in 1984 that the Iranians were working on a nuclear bomb that was “likely to be ready within two years.” In the following three decades, US and Israeli intelligence officials have been almost constantly issuing warnings and raising alarms about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon that never seemed to actually come.

But though the fearmongering surrounding Iran’s nuclear program was highly exaggerated, it remained true that Iran was working on the development of a nuclear weapon alongside its nuclear energy program, however slowly. For this reason, Obama and Rouhani, along with the other world’s leading powers, came together for an agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) which effectively put a stop to Iran’s weapon program and provided unprecedented access to international inspectors to ensure compliance. In exchange, some of the strict sanctions against Iran would be relieved- a much-needed concession meant to help the struggling Iranian economy.

The point of the agreement was solely to deal with the nuclear weapons issue, and it was successful in that regard- the International Atomic Energy Agency responsible for enforcement has consistently found that Iran is following the deal. Once this plan was successful, the original negotiators hoped, it would open the door for more comprehensive agreements with Iran to address other issues- namely, Iran’s support for proxy forces around the Middle East in order to expand its power and regional hegemony.

This is the second issue: Iran maintains a network of paramilitary proxies like Hezbollah which they use to advance their interests, many of which are involved in terrorism, and these proxies do play a destabilizing role in the region. Less commented on, of course, is that the same also applies to our ally Saudi Arabia, who maintains its own expansionist strategy via a global network of propaganda institutions, support for terrorist and separatist groups in Iran, and recently support for rebel organizations in Syria (including militant jihadists like the al-Qaeda spin-off al-Nusra). In their bid for regional hegemony, both parties play a role in actively upsetting Middle Eastern politics.