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Getting Iran Wrong, to the Nth Power

Trump’s unhinged war in Iran is but an escalation of our willful misapprehension of the country’s history and makeup.

People clear rubble away from a Tehran apartment bombed in the US/Israel war on Iran.

President Donald Trump has plunged the United States, and the global economy, into turmoil with his impulsive, reckless, and illegal decapitation of Iran’s senior leadership and the ensuing, indefinite military “excursion.” Contrary to the surreal press conference hallucinations of self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the war increasingly looks like a bewildering strategic blunder whose costs will only escalate the longer it staggers on.

Trump is hardly the first American president to misunderstand the capacities, motivations, fears, and grievances of Tehran’s theocratic regime—but he is the first one stupid enough to start an actual shooting war on the basis of those delusions. The reasons past presidents had been reluctant to take this fateful step should now be painfully obvious. (And yes, I’m aware of Trump’s desperate effort to conjure a plainly imaginary past commander in chief to approve of his demented lurch into Iran.)

Still, the long history of basic misapprehension of Iran in American policy and military circles bears fresh scrutiny—as not merely the broader context for Trump’s unhinged invasion but also a way to take stock of the grim options now before the United States. In the midst of a volatile, unpredictable military action upsetting the Middle East’s balance of power, it is more important than ever for our leaders to understand the sources of Iran’s behavior—especially how the regime’s seemingly self-defeating decision-making is driven primarily by a very well-justified fear of the United States of America.

The Iranian government is undeniably one of the worst on the planet, a clique of amoral, self-dealing, repressive fanatics who have done incalculable damage to their own society. Iran’s fundamentalist regime has accomplished very little of substance in close to 50 years other than its own entrenchment. But American commentators truly seem to relish spoon-feeding their readers the same litany of Iranian aggression, in a historical timeline that always magically begins in 1979. This fable of outraged American innocence kicks off with that year’s hostage crisis at the American embassy, then duly proceeds along a tidy neoconservative timeline: the 1982 Hezbollah Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon, the attacks on US troops during the first Iraq War, the 2002 revelations of secret nuclear facilities, and the support for malign terrorist proxy militias across the region, including Hamas.

As Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department hand for George W. Bush, wrote in The Atlantic after reciting more or less this exact laundry list, “from its inception, the Islamic Republic has been irrevocably hostile to the United States and dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel. It is a rabid regime.” For neocon hawks like Cohen, Iran’s deep-seated hostility to America is innate and pathological—and the need for a more-or-less permanent American military garrison to protect the region’s natural resource wealth from Iran is almost self-evident.

The problem with all of the absurdly one-sided history bouncing around the US media ecosystem is not merely that it willfully disregards the American horrors and policy errors that helped stoke the fundamentalist seizure of power in Iran. The far more damaging weakness of this school of analysis—long dominant among serious policy intellectuals—is its basic failure to account for broader structural forces shaping the regime’s paranoid behavior, which would influence how any conceivable successor regime interacts with the United States as well.

Anyone who has seen Argo surely knows that the CIA overthrew the country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 and replaced him with an authoritarian monarch who spent the next 26 years brutalizing dissidents with our blessing and backing. But do they also know that when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched a completely unprovoked war of conquest in 1980 against Iran, the United States eagerly supplied arms and intelligence to Baghdad for years, even when we knew that Saddam was deploying chemical weapons, including horrific nerve agents, against both Iranian civilians and combatants? This was, of course, before the United States decided that........

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