Known as Persia until 1935, Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979 after the ruling monarchy was overthrown and Shah Mohammad Reza PAHLAVI was forced into exile.
Conservative clerical forces led by Ayatollah Ruhollah KHOMEINI established a theocratic system of government with ultimate political authority vested in a religious scholar referred to commonly as the Supreme Leader who, according to the constitution, is accountable only to the Assembly of Experts (AOE) – a popularly elected 88-member body of clerics.
As we all know, US-Iranian relations fell apart when a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held embassy personnel hostages until mid-January 1981.
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages.
The trigger for this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western Iranian leader, who had been expelled from his country several months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment.
However, the real cause of the situation was that it provided a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s past and to put an end to American interference in its affairs.
It was also a way to raise the worldwide profile of the revolution’s leader, the anti-American cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The students set their hostages free on January 21, 1981, 444 days after the crisis began and just hours after President Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address. Many historians believe that hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter a second term as president.
The Iran hostage crisis started with a series of events that took place nearly 50 years before it began.
The source of tension between Iran and the U.S. came from the conflict over oil.
British and American corporations had controlled the bulk of Iran’s oil reserves almost since their discovery following WWI.
This ties back to the mandate system set up as a result of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI that allowed Great Britain to occupy Iraq and Iran following the war.
This was a very profitable arrangement that they had no desire to change.
However, in 1951 Iran’s newly elected prime minister, a European-educated nationalist named Muhammad Mossadegh (moo sa day), announced a plan to retake control of the country’s oil industry.
In response to these policies, the American C.I.A. and the British intelligence service devised a secret plan to overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with a leader who would be more receptive to Western interests.
Sure enough, Mossadegh was overthrown and a new government was installed in August 1953.
The new leader was a member of Iran’s royal family named Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi.
The Shah’s government was nonreligious, anti-communist and pro-Western. In exchange for tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid, he returned 80 percent of Iran’s oil reserves to the Americans and the British.
For the C.I.A. and oil interests, the 1953 coup was a success.
However, many Iranians bitterly resented what they saw as American intervention in their affairs.
The Shah turned out to be a brutal dictator whose secret police tortured and murdered thousands of people.
Meanwhile, the Iranian government spent billions of dollars on American-made weapons while the Iranian economy suffered.
By the 1970s, many Iranians were fed up with the Shah’s government.
In protest, they turned to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical cleric whose revolutionary Islamist movement promised a break from the past and a turn toward independence for the Iranian people.
In July 1979, the revolutionaries forced the Shah to disband his government and flee to Egypt. The Ayatollah installed a militant Islamist government in its place.
The United States, afraid of stirring up hostilities in the Middle East, did not come to the defense of its old ally.
President Jimmy Carter, aware of the Shah’s brutality to his people, refused to defend him.
However, in October 1979 President Carter agreed to allow the Shah to enter the U.S. for treatment of an advanced malignant cancer.
His decision was said to be humanitarian, not political.
However, it was like throwing “a burning branch into a bucket of kerosene.” Anti-American sentiment in Iran exploded.
This triggered the storming of our Embassy and the seizing of the American hostages.
Diplomatic maneuvers had no effect on the Ayatollah’s anti-American stance.
President Carter’s efforts to bring an end to the hostage crisis soon became one of his greatest priorities. In April 1980, frustrated with the slow pace of diplomacy (and over the objections of several of his advisers), Carter decided to launch a risky military rescue mission known as Operation Eagle Claw. The operation was supposed to send an elite rescue team into the embassy compound.
However, a severe desert sandstorm on the day of the mission caused several helicopters to malfunction, including one that veered into a large transport plane during takeoff. Eight American servicemen were killed in the accident, and Operation Eagle Claw was aborted.
The constant media coverage of the hostage crisis in the U.S. served as the backdrop for the 1980 presidential race. President Carter’s inability to resolve the problem made him look like a weak and ineffectual leader.
The Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, took advantage of Carter’s difficulties.
On Election Day, one year and two days after the hostage crisis began, Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide.
On January 21, 1981, just a few hours after Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address, the remaining hostages were released. They had been in captivity for 444 days.
Now during the period 1980-88, Iran fought a bloody, indecisive war with Iraq that eventually expanded into the Persian Gulf and led to clashes between US Navy and Iranian military forces.
Iran has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism for its activities in Lebanon and elsewhere in the world and remains subject to US, UN, and EU economic sanctions and export controls because of its continued involvement in terrorism and concerns over expanded military development of its nuclear program.
Now to the current situation:
The US is sending hundreds of additional troops and a dozen fighter jets to the Middle East in the coming weeks to counter what the Pentagon has said is an escalating campaign by Iran to plan attacks against the US and its interests in the region.
And for the first time, Pentagon officials on Friday publicly blamed Iran and its proxies for recent oil tanker bombings near the United Arab Emirates and a rocket attack in Iraq.
President Trump told reporters Friday that the 1,500 troops would have a “mostly protective” role as part of a build-up that began this month in response to what the US said was a threat from Iran.
The announcement tops three weeks of elevated tensions with Iran, as the administration hurled accusations of an imminent attack and abruptly deployed navy warships to the region.
The moves alarmed members of Congress, who demanded proof and details, amid fears the US was lurching toward open conflict.
Adding to the uncertainty, President Trump alternated between tough talk and a more conciliatory message, insisting he is open to negotiations with the Islamic Republic.
Last Friday he stated, “Right now, I don’t think Iran wants to fight and I certainly don’t think they want to fight with us.”
In response, a senior Iranian military commander has said he hoped “rational Americans” would rein in Washington’s “radical elements” and prevent a war.
“We believe rational Americans and their experienced commanders will not let their radical elements lead them into a situation from which it would be very difficult to get out, and that is why they will not enter a war,” Brig Gen Hassan Seifi, an assistant to Iran’s army chief, told the country’s semi-official news agency Mehr on Saturday.
Australia also weighed in, saying it was deeply concerned by Iran’s recent comments, but backed the Iran nuclear deal – officially called the joint comprehensive plan of action – which Trump has heavily criticized.
Tension had been rising with Iran for more than a year. The Trump administration withdrew last year from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers and reinstated American sanctions that have badly damaged the Iranian economy.
The president has argued that the deal failed to sufficiently curb Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons or halt its support for militias throughout the Middle East that the US argues destabilize the region.
In a related move, the Trump administration on Friday used an emergency legal loophole to move ahead with the sale of $7billionn in precision-guided munitions and other military support to Saudi Arabia, citing threats the kingdom faces from Iran.
Vice-Admiral Michael Gilday told Pentagon reporters that the US had “very high confidence” that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were responsible for the explosions on four oil tankers, and that Iranian proxies in Iraq fired rockets into Baghdad. He said Iran also tried to deploy modified small boats that were capable of launching cruise missiles.
The deployments announced Friday include a squadron of 12 fighter jets, manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft, and a number of military engineers to beef up protection for forces.
“We are going to be sending a relatively small number of troops, mostly protective,” the president said at the White House, before setting off on a trip to Japan. “Some very talented people are going to the Middle East right now and we’ll see what happens.”
Briefing reporters at the Pentagon, Gilday, the joint staff director, did not provide direct evidence to back up claims tying Iran to the attacks. He told reporters the conclusions were based on intelligence and evidence gathered in the region, and officials said they were trying to declassify some of the information so that it could be made public.
The announcement of additional forces was met with mixed reviews.
The chairman of the House armed services committee, Democrat Adam Smith of Washington, called the build-up “unsettling”.
“Leaders from both sides of the aisle have called for de-escalation. At first blush, this move does not fit the bill,” Smith said in a statement Friday. “Without a clearly articulated strategy, adding more personnel and mission systems seems unwise, and appears to be a blatant and heavy-handed move to further escalate tensions with Iran.”
Earlier this week, officials said military planners had outlined options that could have sent up to 10,000 military reinforcements to the region. The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, later said planners hadn’t settled on a figure. The US currently has about 70,000 troops across the Middle East.
Now according to British news sources, the US military went on alert after Iran released a disturbing video revealing a secret underground base which has a huge stockpile of missiles – amid fears of an attack on American troops.
The footage of the secret military base in Iran shows the Islamic Republic testing a Qiam-1 missile – a weapon based on a North Korean scud missile.
This may explain why the US administration recently accused Iran of preparing to launch an attack on the American forces in the Middle East.
A leading American lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul, who is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, revealed the intelligence pointing to an imminent attack late last week.
He said: “One of the Hezbollah cells is known for its kidnapping and killing operations, and their directive was to go in and kill and kidnap American soldiers.”
Amid all the tension, a senior Iranian military official claimed on Saturday that Iran could sink US warships sent to the Gulf region using missiles and “secret weapons”.
General Morteza Qorbani, an adviser to Iran’s military command, told semi-official news agency Mizan: “America.. is sending two warships to the region. If they commit the slightest stupidity, we will send these ships to the bottom of the sea along with their crew and planes using two missiles or two new secret weapons.”
The State Department has since ordered all “non-emergency” personnel to immediately leave Iraq.
President Trump responded by warning the Iranian leaders that, if they threatened the US, Tehran would meet its “official end.”
Earlier this month, General Qassem Soleimani, the head of an elite branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militias to “prepare for proxy war.”
So let’s not forget, Russia, China and North Korea, all have ties to Iran.
The outbreak of a full scale conflict would not be limited to US and Iranian forces alone.
Tehran has also said that its Navy is prepared to target the American ships should a conflict break out at any moment.
Despite this, President Trump insisted he was not looking for regime change during his trip to Japan this week.
He said: “I do believe that Iran would like to talk, and if they’d like to talk, we’d like to talk also.”
Now the latest development is Iraq offered to mediate in the crisis between its two key allies, the United States and Iran.
Iraqi foreign minister, Mohammed al-Hakim, made the offer Sunday during a joint news conference in Baghdad with visiting Iranian counterpart Mohammad Zarif.
“We are trying to help and to be mediators,” said al-Hakim, adding that Baghdad “will work to reach a satisfactory solution” while stressing that Iraq stands against unilateral steps taken by Washington.
Al Hakim is referring to President Trump’s withdrawal last year of the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers that capped Iran’s uranium enrichment activities in return to lifting sanctions. Washington subsequently re-imposed sanctions on Iran, sending its economy into freefall.
So what you are seeing here is the sanctions are indeed affecting not only Iran, but Iraq as well.
Trump has argued that the deal failed to sufficiently curb Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons or halt its support for militias throughout the Middle East that the U.S. says destabilize the region.
Healso said the deal fails to address the issue of Tehran’s missiles, which can reach both U.S. regional bases and Israel.
Zarif, who was been on a whirlwind diplomatic offensive to preserve the rest of the accord, insisted that Iran “did not violate the nuclear deal” and urged European nations to exert efforts to preserve the deal following the U.S. pullout.
Speaking about the rising tensions with the U.S., Zarif said Iran will be able to “face the war, whether it is economic or military through steadfastness and its forces.” He also urged for a non-aggression agreement between Iran and Arab countries in the Gulf.
The Shiite-majority Iraq has been trying to maintain a fine line as allies Tehran and Washington square off.
The country also lies on the line between Shiite Iran and the mostly Sunni Arab world, led by powerhouse Saudi Arabia, and has long been a battlefield in which the Saudi-Iran rivalry for regional supremacy played out.
Iranians make up the bulk of millions of Shiites from around the world who come to Iraq every year to visit its many Shiite shrines and holy places and their purchasing power has slumped after Trump re-imposed the sanctions.
“The sanctions against sisterly Iran are ineffective and we stand by its side,” al-Hakim said.
Folks, what should we do?
Skip to content
