There’s a funny kind of generation gap when it comes to Americans’ views on Iran. Because Millennials and Gen-Z, the people who weren’t even alive during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and US Embassy seizure, are the ones more likely to know the pre-1979 history that explains why the Iranians would want to take US prisoners, and why they wanted the Shah to be extradited to them to face a trial.
I think a lot of us, Millennials in particular, discovered the US’s role in the Middle East when we were kids, during the “War on Terror”, because once you figure out that Saddam was once a US ally, and you try to figure out why, it leads you straight back to Iran and 1979. But once we had started questioning our own government’s intentions, considering these people were willing to back Saddam, we were opening to questioning why Iran was so angry at the US, leading us back to the Shah, to 1953, to Mossadegh, to BP.
For Boomers, who were all adults in 1979, the Iranian Revolution completely blindsided them, and many of them were completely given over to hating the Iranians for taking US prisoners (including CIA agents) before they were ever willing to ask why this was happening. And all too many of them have still, in 47 years of animosity between our countries, bothered to question the narrative that was created in the media during the standoff over the embassy prisoners, that somehow they had started it.
All the same information is there; they can use Google just as well as us (well, not just as well, but you know what I mean). They simply choose not to do this because it is too painful for them to admit to themselves that they’ve been doubling down on being the bad guys for almost half a century, and because most of them consume media that, in one way or another, lives in the same kind of denial. There’s a definite crypto-imperialist component to this.
Neo-Imperialism demands that the empire try to justify its actions on humanitarian and democratic grounds. The Eisenhower administration didn’t have to justify its coup against Mossadegh in 1953 because that was not public knowledge until decades later, and the US government and media generally kept quiet on the regime of the Shah, because they didn’t wanna air their dirty laundry. So for most American boomers, 1979 was the first time they ever really thought about Iran at all. That made it very easy for the media to push the repressive religious villain angle and suppress every other part of the story.
By backing Saddam and aligning more closely with the Gulf states, the US played right into the strengths of the Shiite clerics in Iran; they gave them a deepening Sunni-Shiite schism in the region to use to rally their base. I don’t really think the US had any good options in 1979, either way. Iran was one of the first, and remains one of the largest, examples of a Neo-Imperial regime collapsing, and the main factions on the ground were the anti-imperialist secular left and the anti-imperialist religious right.
There was no pulling a rabbit out of the hat on this one; the post-1979 Iran was gonna be governed by people who wanted to push back against the US regime as retribution for 25 years of being terrorized.
The Reagan administration, by selling arms to Iran in the infamous Iran-Contra Affair, was trying to find the soft spot in the Iranian government, a faction in the military they could use to launch a coup, but that clearly never materialized. I think if the US empire had been thinking clearly, the US would have joined Iraq by the late 80’s and invaded Iran to force regime change, but of course, only 20 years after Vietnam, there was absolutely no public support for something on that scale. The other move would have been to try a detente with Iran after their war with Iraq, or during the War on Terror, but no, we doubled down and pushed them further and further into a corner, and into the intractable situation we find ourselves in now.
Check out Elrond Hubbard on Youtube for new episodes of the Hastening about the Iran War coming soon.
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