There’s no question where the rhetoric began.
“Death to Carter, Death to Shah” as the American flag was and continues to be
burned, stomped on and shredded since the February 11, 1979 Iranian Revolution
that toppled the American-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The hatred that exploded
from the new fundamentalist Shiite theocracy was beyond vitriolic. The first two pictures are how most Americans
view Iran. The bottom two are how Iranians view America. The United States is
viewed as a nation that has declared war on all factions of Islam. Iranians
view their leaders as defenders of the faith.
Later that year, tensions with the U.S. went
to “much, much worse.” “On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the
U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The immediate
cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s
deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country
some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However,
the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a
dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s
past and an end to American interference in its affairs. It was also a way to
raise the intra- and international 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.” History.com.
As the Iran has preserved its constant attacks on the United States and
Israel, through most of recent history, it was considered political suicide for
American politicians to suggest détente, de-escalation or direct negotiations
with Iran. Our vitriol began to match what we were hearing and seeing from
Iran. Even as Iran began developing a program that would inevitably lead to the
deployment of nuclear weapons, the U.S. steered clear. Iran’s leaders
constantly opposed all things “Western,’ slowly purging Western culture,
political belief and practices from every segment of life.
It was not until 2013 that President Obama realized that our assumptions
and policies had completely failed, that the theocracy was firmly entrenched,
that while the sanctions may have made locals angry, whatever distrust and
disdain they may have had for their repressive religious leaders for pursuing
such a provocative international policy, their hatred for the United States was
reaching new heights even among a population who were too young to remember the
Revolution. Patriotism actually rallied most of those opposed to the ayatollahs
to champion their incumbent leadership.
Slowly, through this hostile haze, a possibility for de-escalation began
to seep into Western consciousness. Past polices clearly accomplished nothing.
“The Iran
nuclear deal framework was a preliminary framework agreement reached
in 2015 between the Islamic Republic
of Iran and a group of world powers: the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United
States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China—plus Germany) and the
European Union.” Wikipedia. The treaty that followed, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),
put a freeze on or reduction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program to be applied and
sustained over a period of 10 to 15 years in exchange for a lifting of economic
sanctions. In 2018, Donald Trump signed an
executive order (pictured above), withdrawing the United States from the JCPOA
and reinstating U.S.-directed sanctions.
U.S. policy immediately returned to the failed assumptions that had
dominated virtually all of its Iran-directed policies for almost the entire
period post-1979.
Ignorance assumptions were restored. In a White House twitter feed on February
11th, National Security Advisor, John Bolton, issued a flurry of
old-world vitriol against Iran’s leadership, ending with this: “For all your boasts, for all
your threats to the life of the American President, you are
responsible for terrorizing your own people and terrorizing the world as a
whole. I don’t think you’ll have many more anniversaries to enjoy.” The odds of
this new “old” U.S. policy bringing down the Iranian theocracy? Zero. All we
have done is to move moderates and those Iranians openly hostile to the
theocracy to back their nation against the United States. Iranian hardliners
boosted their credibility. What is this religious fever and how did it get so
bad?
Shia Islam is mystical, based on an assumption that God clarifies his
message in the Qur’an only through the holiest of clerics. An ordinary Shiite
Muslim cannot read and understand God’s words; they must be explained and
applied only these senior clerics. Once it was a pope-like Imam; today it is
the word of the most senior ayatollah. What’s more, God is believed to have
ordained such holy leaders with political power to act as the supreme rulers of
the land. While Shiites represent no more than 20% of all of Islam, their power
is particularly focused in the 95% Shiite population in Iran, the 60% Shiite
grouping in Iraq, the ruling parties in Lebanon (Hezbollah, Iran’s
international surrogate) and the 10% of Shiites that rule Syria (Assad’s Alawites).
Sunnis, around 80% of practicing Muslims, believe that Muslims need to
read the Qur’an, preferably in its original classical Arabic script, and
establish a direct, one-on-one relationship with God. Government is not
religion to Sunnis, only a protector of the faith. Theocracy is not part of
Sunni doctrine. Sunnis generally find Shia teachings to be apostacy, and
military tensions between the two religious groups have endured throughout the
ages. Recently, by way of example, Shiite Houthis in Yemen, supported by Iran,
continue to try and destroy the Sunni, and Saudi-backed, incumbent Sunni government.
It’s a bloodbath.
For most of the 40 years of the Iranian theocracy, American policy has
always rested on the assumption that the Shiite-led government was
unsustainable. Experts predicted it would topple in months. When it didn’t,
they predicted that the United States could foment regime change via a popular
revolt. Add harsh economic sanctions, and the people would hate their theocracy
so much that they would revolt and seek American help in toppling the
Revolutionary Guard and their religious masters. That has never gotten close.
Life inside Iran is anything but comfortable for most. The environment
is a mess. Shortages of every conceivable commodity, sky-high prices and daily
repression by religious police are just part of the unpleasantness. The
government has accelerated its crackdown on dissidents. While hope has left
building, once Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, Iranians have flocked to support
their country against the U.S. in numbers not seen in decades. But Iran will continue
to lumber against unsolved and worsening realities.
“Iran’s population is aging. Today, there are
far fewer young people than before the revolution. That’s because economic
instability and high unemployment rates have led to many young people holding
off on starting families… A rapidly aging population threatens to strain Iran’s
welfare system. As a result, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been
urging women to have more children and says he wants the population to grow
from 82 million to 150 million people… Without a change, Iran’s median age is
expected to rise from 27 to 40 by 2030, according to the United Nations…
“The policy that led to a quick drop in
fertility coupled with the strained economy makes the future look grim: As
Iran’s working-class population continues to grow older, the country’s outdated
public pension programs could face increasing strains.” Los Angeles Times, February
12th. We just helped extend and reinforce the theocracy, even after
our experts confirmed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program actually was
contained by JCPOA. Stupid us. Here we go again.
I’m Peter Dekom, and you’d think Americans
just might not want to see Iran push back so hard to prove their anti-Western
mettle… and reinstate a nuclear program that does not bode well for anyone… but
then again, they elected Donald Trump who hates to read history.
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