Last of a series
THE presidency of Barack Obama was supposed to improve relations by signaling American willingness to engage Iran. Ahmadinejad, however, took advantage of the opportunity to air a laundry list of grievances against the United States. According to an NPR (National Public Radio) news report in 2009:
“The list includes events that occurred more than 50 years ago, beginning with the CIA-backed coup in 1953 that put the Shah of Iran on the throne and kept him in power for 25 years. Ahmadinejad also complained that the US-backed Saddam Hussein in the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and recalled an incident from 1988 in which a US warship in the Persian Gulf shot down a civilian airliner, killing nearly 300 people.”
The same NPR news report stated that Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had earlier apologized for the Mossadegh coup (in 1953) and called the American support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War “regrettable”; compensation was also awarded to the relatives of the 1988 airline incident. However, Ahmadinejad and conservative Iranians were not satisfied with these American gestures.
Apologies from the United States are hollow because they do not show true remorse in the form of rectification for their actions. The most sincere sign of remorse was for the US to keep out of Iranian affairs, particularly in their domestic politics, which did not end in the 1980s. According to Daniel Byman:
“In 1995, the United States Congress proposed $20 million to overthrow Iran’s government. This attempt at rather overt covert action, however, does not appear to have made any significant progress.”
Iran also wanted the US to stay out of the affairs of the Gulf region, which is wishful thinking. Still according to Byman:
“Following the 1991 war with Iraq, the United States continued to maintain a large military presence in the (Persian) Gulf. The US troop presence in the Gulf varied between 8,000 and 25,000. The United States also established a series of basing and pre-positioning arrangements with several of the Gulf monarchies. This presence was in large part intended to deter Iraqi aggression and contain the regime in Baghdad. However, implicitly — and at times explicitly — the United States also sought to use this presence to deter any Iranian adventurism and weaken Iran’s regional influence.”
Moreover, the United States likewise did not ease up on economic sanctions against Iran.
Understandably, Tehran’s support of radical organizations Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as well as local Shiite militias in Iraq against the US after the latter’s invasion of Baghdad is practically a tit-for-tat response to American interference in Iranian affairs, particularly concerning efforts targeting regime change. Iran was also doggedly pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities beginning in 1989, and the US had to resort to an operation (i.e., Operation Merlin) that sought to delay the Iranian nuclear weapons program by covertly providing them with flawed design schematics in the 1990s. Later, the US and Israel allegedly joined forces to deploy the Stuxnet malware in the Natanz nuclear facility to destroy nuclear centrifuges in 2009 as part of continuing efforts to derail the nuclearization of Iran.
Mutual distrust prevailed between Iran and the US as Tehran continued to actively pursue its nuclear program aimed presumably at developing weapons of mass destruction, explaining American wariness toward Iran. However, the efforts to develop nuclear capability could equally be viewed as the ultimate deterrent against regular and unceasing US activities to effect regime change in the country.
Even now with the recent assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and “dozens of... clerics and commanders” (according to the British Broadcasting Corp.), the exiled son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, is positioning himself as a potential transitional leader for Iran if the current regime collapses as his father did before him after Mossadegh’s ouster in 1953. Unfortunately for Pahlavi, President Donald Trump has already expressed doubts whether after 49 years of exile, the former Shah’s son has the requisite support from his countrymen to take over from the conservative Islamic regime in Iran. Nevertheless, the United States is ardently interested in regime change in Iran.
There was some glimmer of hope when Hassan Rouhani became the seventh president of Iran vice Ahmadinejad in 2013. Rouhani went to New York to speak before the United Nations General Assembly, followed by high-level talks between American and Iranian top diplomats, as well as a telephone conversation between the two presidents Rouhani and Obama, and a groundbreaking handshake between Obama and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at the UN General Assembly. Obama also announced that a deal had been forged with Iran — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — whereby US-led economic sanctions would be lifted in exchange for a halt in Iranian nuclear weapons development and facilities checks from the UN to make sure that Iran lived up to its end of the agreement.
Donald Trump, however, put an end to the promise of JCPOA and imposed intensified sanctions against Iran. Tensions rapidly escalated between the two countries culminating in a rocket strike on the K-1 Air Base in Iraq and an attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019 followed by US retaliation that resulted in the death of influential Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
Iran-backed proxy attacks against US assets in the Gulf region were more pronounced during Trump’s first term but continued into the administration of President Joe Biden, albeit after a brief respite during the Covid-19 pandemic. The conflict received an additional push from the outbreak of the recent Gaza war. Moreover, the high-level assassination of Soleimani continued to be a major rallying point for Iranians in offensives against the Americans.
The US responded to the proxy attacks with numerous strikes of their own against Iran-backed forces in Syria and Iraq in 2023.
US-Iran relations post-Covid were very tense, teetering on the brink of open war. Now Ayatollah Khamenei has been assassinated as a result of a series of American strikes.