Transcription
Whenever you open X or Tik Tok, you're guaranteed to be subjected to the most backward, historically illiterate takes imaginable. A lot of things these days, a lot of those takes involve Iran. Hacks will tell you that the United States is the aggressor in the region. They'll tell you that if we just played nice, if we just apologized to Iran for our history, then peace would break out everywhere. Yeah.
So that's So, as the war in Iran continues, let's look at exactly how we got here from the beginnings of the conflict right up until the current day.
"Essentially, I did what no other president was willing to do."
If you've ever argued with a college sophomore who just took an intro to Middle Eastern studies class, they will immediately shout Operation Ajax at you. That of course is the operation the CIA initiated in 1953 to remove Muhammad Masedet was the prime minister of Iran. They will tell you that Iran was a beautiful flourishing utopian democracy until the evil nefarious CIA swooped in, overthrew Maseda, and installed a brutal dictator in the Sha. Therefore, everything bad Iran does today is simply understandable blowback for American imperialism.
Now, what's weird about this is a few things. First of all, let's point out the sha was removed by the Ayatollah. So why the Ayatollas would be upset with the United States for removing Mosed who was a Marxist secularist in 1953 is confusing.
But let's go all the way back to 1950, the height of the Cold War. Iran was essentially aligned with the West at that time. We of course had developed their oil resources. So had Britain. Meanwhile, Stalin and the Soviet Union were looking directly at Iran. They saw Iran as an asset. Back in 1946, Stalin had actually attempted to set up a puppet regime in Iran and he failed.
Well, 1950 ends, it's now 1951 and a man named Muhammad Masa is elected by the so-called Majis, that is the parliament. Now, the reason I say elected is because the sha actually is the one who had the power under the Iranian constitution to both appoint and remove prime minister. Sort of like the president names a Supreme Court justice and then the Senate confirms. In fact, the Sha did this a lot. As Peter throw pointed out at Tablet magazine between 1953 and 79, the Sha would appoint and dismiss 10 more prime ministers, including Moseda twice.
So, what went wrong? Well, Mosed tried to essentially centralize all power. He tried to break the constitution. He dissolved the parliament unconstitutionally. He was ruling by decree. He nationalized the oil industry, essentially seizing Western assets. And he was aggressively cozying up to the Soviet Union. The United States and the British looked at this and decided that it was a bad idea to have a Soviet puppet state sitting on top of some of the largest oil reserves on planet Earth. That handing the keys to the Middle East to the Soviet Union was actually kind of stupid.
So the CIA helped support the Sha in removing Mosedet. The Sha issued what was called a farmen. That was a royal edict terminating Moseda as prime minister. Moseda refused to leave. The entire military infrastructure backed the sha. Some demonstrations broke out and eventually Moseda acknowledged disaster. That's the whole story. We didn't overthrow a regime. The Sha was in charge the whole time. We weren't even against the military infrastructure. They were on the Sha's side. We didn't send arms to the insurgents. We helped the Sha do the thing that he had the constitutional ability to do.
Well, under the sha, for the next two and a half decades, Iran was a staunch US ally. The sha pushed through the so-called white revolution. He modernized the country. He expanded women's rights. He secularized the education system. He built up the economy. Again, if you look at pictures of Tehran in the 1970s, it looks a lot like LA in the 1970s. People are wearing Western clothing. They're going to the movies. They're living relatively normal lives.
But rapid modernization bred heavy resentment among radical traditionalists. And the Sha was an autocratic leader. He did use secret police to crush political disscent. And of course, because he was an autocrat, this also created corruption issues. And so you ended up with this bizarre coalition of weird bedfellows, Marxist college students, and radical Islamist clerics, all united by sheer hatred of the Sha.
Which brings us to 1979, the year everything went completely off the cliff. The Sha fell ill with cancer, and he grew isolated from the people. Mass protests, strikes, religious processions swelled in the streets. The state's will to repress collapsed. The Sha ran from Iran, ostensibly for medical treatment. The revolution then took off from there having recorded sermons and smuggling tapes in Iran from exile in Paris. Ayat ni returned to Iran triumphant and prepared to leverage the cast to create an Islamic revolution. He stepped into the power vacuum and his return was welcomed by moronic westerners who perceived him as a sort of anti-imperialist. French intellectual and complete piece of human dre Michelle Fuko called Kumeni a saint.
Now, he wasn't really a saint since he began executing thousands of political opponents, purging the army, subjugating women with compulsory hijab laws, and establishing a medieval theocracy. He knew Mullo's regime made its central organizing principle abundantly clear. They didn't say, "We don't like America's foreign policy." They didn't say, "We'd like to renegotiate our trade deals." They chanted death to America. They burned American flags. And they officially branded the United States as the great Satan and Israel as the little Satan.
To prove they meant it, in November of 1979, radical Iranian students with the blessing of the new regime stormed the US embassy in Tehran and seized 52 American diplomats and staff as hostages. This would become the first great test of American will in the Middle East with regard to the new Iranian regime. And President Jimmy Carter completely failed. He rang his hands, he botched a rescue mission, and then he spent the rest of his term begging the Ayatollas for mercy. For 444 days, a year and 79 days, the Iranian regime humiliated the United States on live television. Jimmy Carter tried asking nicely for our citizens back. He sat in the Oval Office looking impotent. The Ayatollas learned a very crucial lesson. Having a weak American president was useful and you could take hostages and basically do what you wanted. The Iranian hostage crisis was American weakness embodied on the global stage.
Well, how do we know? Well, literally the very moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as president, they released the hostages. Weird how that works. The Ayatollas looked at Ronald Reagan who projected strength and realized that they had a problem. So they backed down. Papers were signed. The hostages were put on a plane. Our fellow Americans finally came back home. This is a basic tenant of reality based foreign policy. Strength deters. Weakness invites aggression. While the West squable about the nicities of diplomacy, peace through strength has always been the iron law when it comes to foreign policy.
At this point, the Middle Eastern study sophomores are on the edge of their seats with their next objection. They point to the Iran Iraq war of8s and they complain that the United States armed both sides, which is sort of half true. In the real world, foreign policy is a game of picking among the best of bad options. Foreign policy isn't a Marvel movie. You don't always get to choose between Captain America and Thanos.
In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, kicking off an 8-year industrial scale slaughter along the Iran Iraq border. Saddam was a secular blood soaked dictator. But Ayatollah Kumeni was something even more destabilizing. An expansionist apocalyptic Islamist whose explicit goal was to export his revolution across Iraq, the Gulf, and beyond and cement a fundamentalist caliphate. So the United States made a cold strategic calculation. We provided limited support to Iraq to contain Iran.
At the same time, the Reagan administration was engaging in the Iran Contra affair. Iran Contra was essentially a desperate back channel effort to free seven American hostages being held by Iranian terror proxies in Lebanon by selling anti-tank missiles to Iran and then taking the money from that and sending it to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua to keep it off the books. Their resistance to the Marxist Sandinista government would eventually result in 1990 elections where the Sandinistas were blown out of office.
All this sounds complicated because it was. But none of it speaks to the idea that America was the bad guy here. Iran was a theoccratic Islamist tyranny promoting an apocalyptic vision. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship. Nicaragua was a communist authoritarian state. We had to choose among a bunch of bad options. So the decision was contain Iran. Don't allow Iraq enough support to actually win. try to free hostages and support the anti-communists in Nicaragua. At the same time, again, none of this makes America the bad guy with any of these players here.
Iran spent the Iran Iraq war sending literal children into minefields to clear the minefields, and they put plastic keys to heaven around their necks to incentivize them. That's not some sort of bizarre Hunger Games ripoff. That's reality.
In 1983, a suicide car bomber killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, at the US embassy in Beirut. That bomber belonged to an early iteration of a terrorist group in Lebanon that would come to be known asah. A few months later, terrorists drove a truck packed with explosives into the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members in a single morning. It was the deadliest single day death toll for the Marine Corps since Ewoima. The attack was planned and executed with Iranian money, training, and direction.
In March 1984, Iranian sponsored terrorists kidnapped and killed CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut. In December 1984, Iranianbacked terrorists hijacked a Kuwaiti airplane and killed two USD workers. In June of 1985, Kisbah terrorists hijacked a TWWA flight. In July 1989, Kisbah terrorists killed a US Marine colonel.
During the Iran war, both of those countries were attacking commercial tankers in the Persian Gulf. Sound familiar? The US Navy began escorting reflaged Kuwaiti oil tankers to protect them from Iranian attacks. An Iranian mine struck the USS Samuel B. Roberts in 1988. It did heavy damage to the ship. So in operation praying mantis, the United States sank virtually the entire Iranian navy in one day.
That did not stop Iran. They kept building their global terror network. They bombed the Kobar towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 US airmen in 1998 with the assistance ofah al-Qaeda suicide bombers simultaneously blew up US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, wounding thousands. US courts found Iran responsible for indirect support for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Again, American blood, Iranian fingerprints. Most of the time when you see a major attack on US or Western interests in the region, you will find the same pattern. Training camps, money trails, ideological indoctrination leading back to the Ayatollas.
After 9/11, things got worse. President George W. Bush correctly labeled Iran part of the axis of evil. But while the United States was sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran saw a vacuum. While American officials conducted counterinsurgency across the region and tasked our troops with a near impossible mission to promote democracy, the Islamic Republic moved weapons, operatives, and cash into Shiite militias in Iraq, whose sole focus was to kill more Americans. Iran's elite military wing, the Kuds force, led by the now deceased Kasm Solmani, engineered a higherend IED designed to pierce through American armored Humvees. Hundreds of American troops, at least 600 actually, were murdered having their limbs blown off because of Iranian weapons.
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Meanwhile, Iran had been pursuing nukes since the 1980s with the help of Russia and China. By the late '90s, they developed something they called the Ahmad Plan. It was a plan to covertly develop and test nukes by 2004. In 2002, Iranian dissident revealed that Iran had built two nuclear sites. A uranium enrichment facility at Natans and a heavy water production facility at Iraq. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 put the Iranians off that plan temporarily. They soon started speeding to Obama again when Mahmadab, the president of Iran, decided to race toward a bomb along with the Ayatollah. This ended with significant sanctions on the Iranian government.
Then things got worse. We elected Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Obama's grand foreign policy vision was if we just hugged the Ayatollah and engaged with the regime showed goodwill, you know, flexibility, the Ayatollah would somehow magically moderate. Meanwhile, Iran was still racing toward a nuclear weapon. Even under the supervision of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Iran began developing secret nuclear infrastructure. Through ties with Pakistani nuclear scientists, Iran acquired designs for a centrifuge and component parts. North Korea and Russia helped out the technicians. The regime's nuclear strategy was simple. distribute the program across multiple hidden sites and bury it literally under mountains.
Needless to say, Barack Obama's hugaron strategy did not actually draw a clear red line. Instead, the Obama administration sent John Kerry shutling across Geneva and Vienna chasing a signature on a god-forsaken piece of paper, the JCPOA, or joint comprehensive plan of action. This was objectively the most disastrous, cowardly foreign policy agreement of my lifetime. The deal did not stop Iran from getting the bomb. In fact, it just told Iran that they could have a bomb in 10 years. The terms of the agreement allowed key restrictions to sunset or expire, leaving Iran with infrastructure and knowhow to sprint toward the bomb in a set period of time. With the world's go-ahad, what did we get in exchange? Nothing. Obama unfroze sanctions and billions of dollars of Iranian assets, including a $1.7 billion payment tied to an old arms dispute delivered literally as pallets of cash on unmarked cargo planes into Tehran in the dead of night.
Well, it doesn't take a super genius to predict what Iran would do next. Instead of building hospitals, reforming its economy, moderating, the Islamic Republic poured cash into Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and a gigantic ballistic missile program, all of which are currently threatening millions of people across the Middle East today.
And then, President Donald Trump was elected. President Trump took one look at the JCPOA and called it what it was, the worst deal in the history of deals. He withdrew from the agreement. He immediately rectified American foreign policy in the Middle East with a maximum pressure campaign of sanctions on Iran's oil exports, crippling their economy.
In early 2020, President Trump did what no previous president was willing to do. He ordered a drone strike at Baghdad airport and killed IRGC General Kasm Solmani. Remember, Solmani was the architect of Iran's external terror machine and was personally responsible for countless Americans named and murdered. Iran's response was penetellent. They launched a small missile barrage at US forces in Iraq. But they gave us warning because they didn't actually want to hit anybody because if they did, then we might have to end the regime. Once again, when faced with a tough president with the will to use force, the regime rattles its sabers and then it retreats. Deterrence works. Peace through strength works.
The Biden administration was next. They immediately reverted to the Obama administration type. Biden literally brought back the exact same officials who did the JCPOA, relaxed oil sanctions, unfreezed billions as part of hostage swaps just week before October 7th, 2023. And what followed is exactly what you would expect. Hell, we've been living through the result of Obama and Biden weakness over the last few years. Iran saw an American government terrified of the word escalation, completely unwilling to enforce red lines, and giving the green light to all of their homicidal terrorist proxies. We all saw the October 7th massacre, the Houthis choking off global shipping in the Red Sea, American troops killed in Jordan, and according to the IAEA, Iran accelerating its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
In response, Israel heavily damaged or destroyed many of Iran's terrorist proxies, including Hamas and it was really with the commencement of President Trump's second term last year that maximum pressure came back into play. This time, the Ayatollas made a series of fatal miscalculations. They assumed that they could just slowplay or bluff President Trump. wrong.
Well, first they were wrong in 2025. They refused to complete negotiation with President Trump. Israel, which was not willing to allow the further development of Iranian ballistic missile buildup or nuclear development, launched the 12-day war, achieving complete air superiority over Iran. That was an operation that culminated in President Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer, the B2 bombing of the Ford nuclear facility. And then Iran was wrong again in 2026. Again, they kept slowplaying or lying in negotiations. They were murdering their protesters by the tens of thousands at home. They continued to pursue nukes and ballistic missile activity. President Trump is not just going to sit there. He saw a historic opportunity to cut off Iran at its knees and acted to take down the greatest menace to the Middle East, America, and the West with Operation Epic Fury.
Right now, the United States is systematically dismantling Iran's military and economic power. The Iranian regime is on its last legs or last leg depending on if you're talking about Moshtaba Kamei, the son of the Ayatollah that we killed at the very beginning of the war. Mashtaba is in a coma and may be missing a leg. Pretty much everybody at the top ranks of the IRGC has been killed, replaced, and killed again. Their ballistic missile launcher capacity has been radically diminished. Their nuclear facilities are literally under rock at this point. A siege forces have been hit with specific drone strikes. Major infrastructure is gone. The Iranian people are waiting a signal to go out into the streets. Secretary of War Pete Hexath said it best. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.
Here's the bottom line. The history of Iran and America over the last half ccentury since 1979 is not a story of a tragic misunderstanding between equals. It is certainly not a story of America as the evil aggressor and Iran as the innocent. It is the story of a radical apocalyptic theocratic regime that defines itself in opposition to Western civilization. The West honors life. Iran celebrates death. The West wants to spread prosperity. Iran has only ever spread suffering and sure terror under the current regime. The Islamic regime has told us who they are time and again with hostages, with car bombs, with IEDs, with missiles, not handshakes and wishful opeds. They built a regime whose foundational slogan is death to America. And then they've spent their entire existence trying to put that into practice by arming every jihad psychopath they could find. Our face off with Iran has for a long time oscillated between cleareyed deterrence and cowardly appeasement. But you can't bribe a snake. You can't reason with a snake. You have to cut off its head. And that's what President Trump is doing right now.