The Blowback Chronicles, Part 1: The Iranian Misadventure

How US meddling in the Middle East has brought about the present shadow war with Iran

Aug 21, 2024

Maintaining an empire is no easy endeavor.

Since the United States became a superpower after the dust settled from World War II, it has enthusiastically embraced meddling across the the globe.

That means maintaining a military footprint in virtually every continent, patrolling shipping lanes, tapping into intelligence assets worldwide, and even bribing nations with foreign aid to ensure their compliance with Washington’s agenda. All of this is designed to maintain the “rules-based” international order the US is promoting.

There are no free lunches in any imperial venture though. While the US’s capitalist model bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it came with several costs.

In its quest to demonstrate the “exceptional nature” of its system, the US opened the floodgates to migrants of the Global South in an effort to integrate them into the liberal capitalist order. US elites also promoted racial integration through the passage of the Civil Rights Act to demonstrate to the Soviets during the Cold War that the US is an exceptional civilization that transcends racial divisions. The US similarly dialed up the use of free trade to win new international allies and prevent them from falling into the Soviet’s orbit.

In the short- to medium-term, the US’s rapid embrace of radical liberal policies at the height of the Cold War earned it brownie points among liberal intelligentsia and other elites in Western capitals. But in the long-term, it sowed the seeds for the US’s descent into multi-racial chaos, as alien racial groups began displacing European Americans, while the country’s industrial base withered away over time.

The same dynamic of long-term unintended consequences took place in the realm of foreign policy. The litany of coups and military interventions the US prosecuted to maintain its power played a major role in containing Communist influence at first glance. Initially, the US’s relatively pristine image and the lavish benefits that trade with it conferred upon its partners had enormous appeal for many nations. However, this appeal gradually diminished as the US grew more heavy-handed internationally .

This was most apparent during the final stages of the Cold War, when political Islam had a resurgence in the Middle East. Iran’s Islamic Revolution (1979) was not only a political upheaval that sought to restore political Islam in Iran, but it represented a rejection of both the American and Soviet models of governance. Iran’s checkered history with Imperial Russia and its Soviet successor invading it during World War II made it averse to fully embracing the Russian Bear.

The Persian civilization state’s decline during the 19th century up to the middle of the 20th century was not too dissimilar from that of China, who was notorious for experiencing its own “century of humiliation” during this time period. Iran became a geopolitical plaything for the likes of Russia and Great Britain, who jointly invaded it in 1941 out of fear that Iran was falling into the geopolitical orbit of National Socialist Germany. The United Kingdom was already securing lucrative mineral extraction concessions from Qajar Persia in the late 19th century and continued to hold outsized influence in Persian domestic affairs well into the 20th century.

As Persia transitioned into the modern nation-state of Iran, nationalist sentiment among its population grew with each passing year. Throughout Iran’s tumultuous transition towards modernity, Member of Parliament Mohammad Mosaddegh deftly maneuvered through the political scene and established himself as a prominent reformist figure from the 1920s up until the 1950s. Eventually, the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) elected Mosaddegh by a vote of 79–12 to serve as the country’s prime minister in 1951.

Mossadegh was dead-set on modernizing Iran. His administration was marked by efforts to set up a social security system, implement land reforms, and impose taxes on land rents in order to modernize the Iranian state. Of the reforms he shepherded, the most controversial was his decision to nationalize Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. in 1951.

The populist nature of Mossadegh’s reforms raised eyebrows in both London and Washington. There was growing suspicion that Iran’s pursuit of populist economic reforms was a sign that it was on the verge of aligning itself with the Soviet Union. As a result, American (CIA) and the British (MI6) intelligence agencies teamed up with the Iranian Army to topple the Mossadegh government in 1953. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would then replace Mossadegh as the country’s leader.

Although the Shah was committed to modernizing Iran, his regime was perceived as repressive and beholden to external actors such as the US. In light of this dynamic, the Iranian populace grew weary of great powers interfering in its internal affairs. When the charismatic religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came back into the Iranian political scene in 1979 from a lengthy exile, he found a disillusioned populace that he could rile up. From there, he was able to spearhead the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with relative ease and depose the Shah.

The Islamic Revolution was not without its international controversies. Iranian students who were members of the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line seized the US Embassy in Tehran, kicking off the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. 53 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 until their release on January 20, 1981. From that point forward, Iranian-American relations took a nosedive.

The US’s involvement in the 1953 coup combined with its strong support of the Shah’s regime made it the devil incarnate among a large segment of Iranians. It didn’t help that the US was subsequently providing significant amounts of military aid to Iran’s main rival in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Iraq’s invasion of Iran created a rally around the flag effect for the Islamic Republic, thereby consolidating its political power. In time, the Iranian regime was firmly in control and ready to show the world that a “third way” could be forged in the latter stage of the Cold War.

Confronting American influence was the first order of business in Iran’s ambitious plans to re-assert itself in the Middle East. Iranian strategists knew that they could not take the US head-on in a conventional military conflict. So they had to find creative ways of poking the US in the eye without risking major escalation. The good news for Iran was that multiple years of intervention and an overstretched military presence abroad earned the US a larger pool of enemies that the Iranians could potentially form pacts with.

In the 1980s, the US experienced firsthand the dangers of overextending across the globe, as it got ensnared in a military quagmire in Lebanon. The US was part of the Multinational Force in Lebanon, a military peacekeeping operation that sought to mitigate tensions of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) at the request of the Lebanese government. Additionally, the US insinuated itself in this conflict at Israel’s behest, as it became clear that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was using Lebanon as a staging ground for cross-border attacks into Israel.

Eventually, the US got burned for sticking its nose where it did not belong. The Shia Lebanese military group Hezbollah put itself on the map in 1983 after it carried out the Beirut Marine Corps Barracks Bombing that resulted in the deaths of 241 US military personnel.

International security experts generally regard Hezbollah as a proxy force of Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran looked to expand its influence across the Middle East. Lebanon, mired in a chaotic sectarian civil war that saw the state itself on the verge of collapse, was seen as a fertile ground for Iran to grow its influence operations. Lebanon’s disillusioned Shia community was a natural demographic that Iran could tap into from the jump.

Moreover, Iran was already in a grueling war with Iraq in the previously mentioned Iran-Iraq war, in which the US was supporting Iraq through financial and military aid while the US stopped shipping weapons to Iran — its former ally when the Shah was under control. What better way for Iran to deal the US a body blow for its interventions in the Middle East by racking up the highest kill count of US Marines since Iwo Jima?

Despite calls by hawks to dish out revenge against the Shia militants who orchestrated the barracks bombing, then-President Ronald Reagan sagely withdrew all troops from Lebanon in February 1984. Neoconservative luminaires such as Norman Podhoretz accused Reagan of “having cut and run” from Lebanon. American geopolitical humility was on display here. However, such a move proved to be fleeting in the grand scheme of things.

Iran would continue to serve as a bête noire of neoconservatives and Israel First types who viewed it as an existential threat to Zionist interests in the region. After all, Ayatollah Khomeini himself labeled the US as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” The US responded in kind with a host of heavy-handed sanctions against Iran in addition to cementing strategic partnerships with Gulf Arab states to contain it.

As a once mighty empire, Iran was naturally not going to sit idly as the Judeo-American axis labored to envelope it. Iran would soon begin strengthening ties with Syria — another regime that was on bad terms with Israel — while also arming Shia militias across the Levant. The Iranian regime also championed the cause of the Palestinians and proceeded to supply arms and training to militant groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The goal here was to gradually surround the Jewish state on multiple fronts with militant groups ready to give it headaches.

To the present, the “Axis of Resistance” Iran has cobbled together continues to keep decision-makers in Israel and the US up at night. Sadly, the myopic minds calling the shots in Washington don’t understand that the current predicament the US finds itself with Iran and its proxies is a result of the US’s constant interventions in the Middle East and entangling alliance with Israel.

Worse yet, these same leaders have not learned the lessons about the dangers of interventionism abroad and have replicated the same strategies in other geopolitical theaters which will soon be touched upon in future installments of the Blowback Chronicles.

So stay tuned….

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