The U.S. Is Already at War with Iran

From Operation Ajax, to the Twilight War, to tearing up the JCPOA.

Hello,

The U.S. has been at war with Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, supporting Iraq in it’s nearly decade long war with Iran in the 1980s, and continuing through today.

Before that, in 1953, the U.S. and the U.K. implemented Operation Ajax culminating in the CIA supported coup d'état of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which aw a pliant Shah Pahlavi dismantle a buergoning democracy, whose authoritarian and brutal domestic politics both destroyed the left and chances for secular democracy in Iran while sowing the seeds of rightwing Islamic radicalism at the same time which culminated in his overthrow in 1979.

Immediately following the Islamic Revolution, President Jimmy Carter devised the Carter Doctrine, which ensured U.S. freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf - even going as far as authorizing the use of force if Iran ever tried to slow down oil exports or block safe travel. Importantly, in 1980, the U.S. supported Iraq’s dictactor Sadaam Hussein’s aggressive invasion and war against Iran, even giving them actionable intelligence, including helping Sadaam successfully use the chemical nerve agents mustard gas and sarin against Iranian troops. The result of the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war was largely a stalemate, or as they say in military textbooks, the result was the return of the status quo ante bellum.

The 1980s was when what David Crist calls the Twilight War really took off. In his excellently writen and meticously researched book, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (2012), the military historian painstakingly details the overt and covert ways this has been so. As already noted, this included U.S. support of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s; it’s own participation in the Tanker war; CIA operations; counter-terrorism operations; proxy warfare; and numerous primary and secondary sanctions, restricting investments, trade, financial transactions of not only U.S. persons and companies but also non-U.S. persons and companies doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During the Iraq War, U.S. President George Bush, in one of his most important State of the Union addresses in January 2002, leading up to the full invasion of Iraq, lised Iran as one of the states comprising the “Axis of Evil.”

During the Obama years, the U.S. and Israel launched Stuxnet, a weapons-grade computer virus on Iranian nuclear computers that And for the first time in history, the U.S. and the European Union actually sanctioned the Iranian central bank. But the fever was maybe going to break with the negotiation of what did actually amount to a very good agreement tying the hands of Iran regarding their nuclear weapons development capabilities: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA was severe in it’s monitoring provisions and Iran became the first state to voluntary agree to such an agreement. The future looked promising.

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In his first term Trump tore up the JCPOA, killed Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani, designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization which was the first time that a brance of a foreign government, and not simply non-state groups, received that designation, and Trump resumed the U.S. position that, under no circumstances, would Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

This hardline prevention policy has been consistent U.S. policy since at least the 1990s. This maximum pressure campaign has escalated and enhanced the possibility that we are now facing: U.S. dropping a bunker bomb on Fordo.

Whether or not Trump decides to drag the U.S. firmly into this escalatory chapter of this war, the U.S. has been at war with the Iranian regime since 1979. Prior to that, in 1953, the U.S. and the U.K. sponsored and carried out a coup, destroying the only chance at a modernizing, liberalizing, secularizing Iranian future all in the name of protecting British oil interests and a fear of Soviet take over of Iran which was never going to happen.

Now the lives of 90 million people in Iran, and their future, are once again tied up in the delusions of two corrupt leaders in the U.S. and Israel. A gerontocracy that has fewer years left on earth than they have lived so far are recklessly gambling with the future of the Middle East. But that’s always been the case. There are paths out but restablishing deterrence is not one of them; and regime change shatters pandora’s box to a million pieces.

Thanks,
Patrick M. Foran