Iran #2: Islamic Revolution to Present Day

While Khomeini had acquired power, he feared the US would betray him, try and reinstate the Shah, says the history-by-the-hour book on Iran. So Iran asked the US to extradite the Shah to stand trial in Iran; which the US refused. In response, Iranians stormed the US embassy and took Americans hostage:

“They figured that as long as they were holding American hostages, the US would have to think twice about regime change.”

The US had expected a Gandhi-like peacemaker; instead they got chants of “Death to America”.

 

After an aborted rescue attempt, the US turned to Saddam Hussein in Iraq to attack Iran. Hard though it is to imagine today, Saddam was a hero to the West, and to the Arab world! Iranians were furious and stuck behind Khomeini – their fury and thus willingness to die for the country meant that Saddam’s better trained troops couldn’t win quickly. This bought enough time for Iran’s trained forces to step in, and war would continue for a decade.

 

The long war with Iraq created a problem for Iran – they needed weapons, but the US had prevented most countries from selling to the Iranians. If a technique worked before, why not use it again, thought the Iranians. Iran used its proxy, Hezbollah, to take American hostages in Lebanon, and used them as a bargaining chip with the Americans. President Reagan yielded, but could not do so officially; and so the weapons were routed to Iran illegally (i.e., illegal by US law):

“The United States thus found itself in the ridiculous position of doing everything it could do to aid Saddam Hussein’s efforts to destroy the Islamic Republic – and at the same time selling weapons and other military aid directly to Iran.”

 

Looking back at that period, the US had gotten it all wrong with Iran – they were too obsessed with one risk only, of Iran going communist.

“(The US was) completely blindsided when it (Iran) rejected both capitalism and communism in favour of fundamentalist Islam.”

 

After the Iran-Iraq war, there have been periodic moves on both the US and Iranian sides to make up over the decades, but for various reasons, each attempt has fallen through. Iran, for example, supported the US with intelligence sharing in Afghanistan after 9/11; but George W Bush called Iran a part of his notorious phrase, “Axis of Evil”. Barrack Obama signed a nuclear deal with Iran, which Donald Trump then tore apart. And so today:

“No one knows where it (US – Iran relations) will lead next.”