It may seem that the US and the Middle East are currently embarking on yet another forever war. But the truth is that this is just the latest instalment of an undeclared military conflict between the two nations that has been ongoing since the 1980s.

For Americans, the war began in 1979, when Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. For Iranians, it began with US support for the Shah and its subsequent backing of Iraq throughout the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

The conflict has claimed many civilian lives. On July 3 1988, the US warship Vincennes downed Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian flight bound for Dubai. The USS Vincennes misidentified the Airbus as a military aircraft and shot it down, killing all 290 people on board. More recently, on 28 February 2026, a US-Israeli missile hit a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing over 150 civilians, most of them children.

Read more: Does international law still matter? The strike on the girls’ school in Iran shows why we need it

Iran also shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on January 8, 2020. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps mistook the civilian plane for a US military flight, and fired two surface-to-air missiles that killed all 176 passengers, mostly Iranian civilians.

Each side has, at different moments, made catastrophic errors under conditions of escalation. But these tragic incidents are not just history. For Iranians and Americans alike, they have deeply reinforced the popular and institutional view that peace can never really be achieved between the two nations.

The 1980s: tanker war

In 1984, Iraq initiated the “tanker war” with Iran when its air force attacked oil tankers bound for Iranian ports. The tanker war continued for years, and eventually involved the US Navy when, on May 17 1987, an Iraqi plane accidentally struck the American frigate The........

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