Moral Miscalculation: America’s Misunderstanding of Iran Is Leading to Catastrophe

When he began his massive assault on Iran, the president was confident in its ultimate success. He had been advised that the Iranian people were deeply dissatisfied with their government and were groaning under the weight of an unwanted clerical autocracy. Furthermore, the country was in political disarray, racked by internal conflict, and would easily capitulate to its attackers, even welcoming them as liberators. Regime change was on the way. Iran would soon be neutralized as a threat.

The year was 1980, and the president was President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. His ear-tickling advisers as well as the family dictatorships of the Persian Gulf, had fed him a narrative that quite simply didn’t jibe with the facts. No matter the fantasies swimming around in the heads of its international critics, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 wasn’t the result of some random outburst of Islamist fanaticism. It was a deeply-rooted nationalist and anti-colonialist revolt against the foreign powers that had dominated the country through puppet shahs for more than a century, extracting the country’s resources while enriching a domestic oligarchy bent on forcibly westernizing the population. Confronting Russia and... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing.

In a way, Hussein’s miscalculation was understandable. The depth of the Iranian Revolution, although it had already expressed itself in two national referenda that established the country’s unique Islamic constitution by overwhelming majorities, was not adequately perceived even by the leaders of the revolution itself. Some were concerned that the country’s armed forces, as well-equipped as they were, were likely to fold under the brutality of Hussein’s carefully-planned onslaught. Iran had repeatedly capitulated to foreign invaders under the shahs, the last time less than 40 years earlier—in 1941. Even the government and the armed forces could not predict what was to come.

The outcome should be familiar to any American citizen interested in the foreign affairs of his country; but nonetheless, it seems to have been completely forgotten by both policymakers and the public. Instead of overthrowing their own government or surrendering to the invaders, the Iranian people rose up in a massive and largely spontaneous civil movement to defend the nation against its attackers. Many of them, by their own testimony, were not primarily motivated by religious belief but by patriotism (although the two are not so easily distinguished in Iran). They would soon surprise the world by overwhelming Saddam Hussein’s well-trained professional army with massive civilian “human wave attacks” unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

Many civilians joined the Basij, a paramilitary outfit supportive of the revolution that now headed to the front to confront Hussein’s forces, and others joined the new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to supplement the regular army. Others simply showed up at the front armed with nothing but ancient rifles, Molotov cocktails, or even sticks and clubs. Ethnically Arab and Sunni Muslim Iranians, who were expected to welcome Hussein’s Arab Sunni regime, joined the national struggle. Even teenagers sought the martyr’s reward of an Islamic paradise by charging into minefields to blow them up with their bodies. This combined effort by the whole of the government and civil society turned back Hussein’s forces, expelling them from the country within two years, and then took the fight into Iraq itself.

Nothing could save Hussein’s ill-calculated invasion, not even the United States and its European allies seeking to “contain” Iran. In 1982, as Hussein’s Iraq went on the defensive, the United States took Iraq off its list of certified terrorist states, established diplomatic relations in 1984, and began clandestinely selling them weapons technology, while prohibiting such exports to Iran.

The United States, along with Germany, even began to send chemical precursor agents that would enable Hussein to make poison gas with U.S.-designed munitions in violation of international law and even sold the regime biological materials capable of weaponization, although it’s still not known if they were ever used. The U.S. government went so far as to clandestinely help Hussein target Iranians with chemical weapons attacks. Hussein also used his chemical weapons to massacre tens of thousands of Kurds perceived as rebellious during the war. All of it was to no avail.

Finally, with both sides exhausted and at least half a million dead, the two countries agreed to a ceasefire in 1988. What had begun as an exercise in “containment” had resulted in a moral and humanitarian catastrophe of horrendous proportions. The United States and its allies had intimately involved themselves in war crimes, the very same sorts of crimes that would be used to justify the U.S.’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite immense losses, the Islamic Republic of Iran was stronger than ever, hardened and inspired by the struggle. Lobbying for Zionism o... Pappe, Ilan Check Amazon for Pricing.

Fantastic Narratives Drive the Current Conflict

U.S. President Donald Trump’s current attack on Iran has been supported by similar narratives and fantasies that exploit the perpetual amnesia and historical ignorance of Americans. Iranians are variously portrayed as hapless victims of a fanatical theocratic regime that somehow imposed itself on an unwilling majority or as a nation of “terrorists” maniacally bent on wreaking destruction on Americans with nuclear weapons —a claim similar to the arguments used to justify the now-discredited Iraq War in 2003. The White House is using these narratives to justify an arguably illegal war of aggression that is increasingly being waged against civilian targets, a criminal act under the Geneva Conventions signed by the United States itself.

To form a proper moral judgment on such a conflict, Catholics—and Christians in general—need to know the real history of America’s troubled relations with Iran and the source of its conflict with this ancient civilization with which it once shared a high degree of mutual admiration and respect. One does not have to be uncritically supportive of Iran or blind to its defects to recognize that its people have reasons for their hatred and mistrust of the United States and that both sides share in the guilt of their broken relationship.

Sadly, Americans are blissfully unaware of what every Iranian knows well, that America’s troubled relationship with the Iranian people dates not from the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage crisis but from 1953, when the United States and Britain clandestinely overthrew the country’s fledgling democracy and instituted the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s latest (and, as it would turn out, last) foreign puppet-ruler. A review of the history of this affair is of great relevance to American Catholics wanting to assess the moral legitimacy of the U.S.’s current war with Iran and our nation’s ongoing conflict with the country.

Iran’s democratic reforms in the early ’50s had grown out of a long period of resistance to domestic tyranny. Since the mid-19th century, Iranians had been growing disillusioned with their ruling class and particularly their ancient shahs, who had increasingly become the tools of European imperial powers. Massive economic concessions were given by the shahs to foreign countries, allowing the shahs, their dependents, and their foreign patrons to profit by extracting Iran’s resources or engaging in business on very generous terms at the expense of average Iranians. Outraged by this state of affairs and inspired by the example of European forms of parliamentary democracy, the Iranian people, supported by the country’s Shia Islamic clergy, forced the shahs to accept a democratically-elected parliament and a written constitution supporting it in 1906.

Contrary to impressions in the modern West, the Shia clergy of Iran were natural supporters of these democratic reforms. Shia Islam had been adopted by Iran in the 16th century as a form of resistance against the perceived tyranny of the Ottoman empire, whose caliphs claimed the right to rule the whole Muslim world as the successors of Muhammad and sought to encroach on Iranian sovereignty. In contrast with the Sunni variety of Islam, the Shia religion was founded on the ritual celebration of martyrs who had died as victims of injustice and tyranny, particularly Husayn ibn Ali, who died resisting the abusive rule of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. By the 1950s, Iran’s Shia clergy had developed modern social justice doctrines and had created a sophisticated critique of the shahs’ dictatorial rule, very much in line with their theological worldview. BioEmblem Triple Magne... Check Amazon for Pricing.

It might also surprise modern Americans to know that the 18th-century American British colonists were fascinated by Iran’s Shia resistance to the Ottoman empire and saw it as a fulfillment of Persia’s long tradition of civilized refinement and benign rule stretching back to Cyrus the Great. In fact, colonial Americans developed a sort of love affair and even obsession with Iran in the early 18th century. Their newspapers were constantly taken up with news from Persia and its resistance to the Ottomans, including positive commentary on Shia doctrines. Some scholars in the colonies even learned the Persian language in order to read their literature. In turn, Iranians, at the time of their parliamentary democratic reforms in the early 20th century, looked to the United States as an example of a benign, freedom-loving and anti-colonialist power that had thrown off the rule of the British.

Parliamentary Democracy Suppressed by Imperial Britain and Russia

Iran’s 1906 constitution represented a significant step toward a modern democracy—but in a particularly Iranian way. The whole male adult population was eligible to vote for representatives to the parliament, which had to approve any proposed laws. The prime minister and his cabinet were still selected by the shah, who could remove them at will. The constitution was dedicated to the implementation of Islamic law, and a committee of clerics would exist to ensure that the country didn’t deviate from Shia Islamic principles. Monarchy and democracy existed in a tension mediated by the Shia religion.

However, Britain and Russia, two imperialist powers with major economic interests in Iran, soon found a way to thwart Iran’s movement for parliamentary independence. Russia invaded in 1911 and temporarily shut down the parliament. Then, exercising its influence over the shah, Britain seized partial control of Iran’s armed forces and other institutions in 1919 by way of a shady agreement with the shah that was ultimately rejected by the Iranian people and never ratified by their legislature. Britain then used its powers to place Reza Pahlavi, an obscure Iranian officer with whom it had friendly relations, in effective control of Iran’s armed forces. Pahlavi used his power to oust the existing shah and have himself crowned shah in his place.

Ancient Nutrition Coll... Check Amazon for Pricing. Pahlavi established himself as a military dictator and suppressed the independence of the parliament. He rewarded his British patrons by maintaining their oil monopoly in Iran, allowing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to extract the nation’s petroleum resources and keep all but 16 percent of the earnings. (He later attempted to wrest control of the country’s petroleum resources from the British, but he failed.) He also began to forcibly secularize the country, mandating secularized education and forbidding women to wear the traditional hijab. Iran was back under European imperialist influence, at the expense of the Iranian people and their cultural and religious traditions.

When Pahlavi showed too much favor to Germany during World War II, Britain and Russia invaded Iran and removed him from office, replacing him with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1941. After the end of the war, he would prove himself to be particularly slavish not only to Britain but also to the ascendant United States and its ally the State of Israel.

However, the new shah faced strongly democratic forces in Iran that were backed by much of the Shia clergy, who were seeking the country’s independence from foreign economic and political control. By 1951, the parliament had forced the shah to accept the strongly reformist Mohammad Mosaddegh as the country’s prime minister. Mosaddegh immediately began to curtail the power of the shah and to nationalize the country’s oil industry.

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