What They’re Not Telling You About Iran
Opinion: For decades, we have been sold a curated story on Iran. In this article, you'll learn the full history which raises an uncomfortable question: How would we react if this were done to us?
Opinion: The views expressed in this article are the author’s and are published as commentary and analysis by The Aggie Standard. Responses and fruitful dialogue are welcome.
For decades, Americans have been sold a propaganda version of foreign policy that relies on fear, selective history, and blind trust in the so-called “experts” in Washington. The relationship between the U.S. and Iran is one of the clearest examples, where people are conditioned to think in slogans and caricatures instead of asking how this decades long conflict actually began.
Most Americans are told the story starts with the “Death to America” chants, a bunch of irrational genocidal mullahs, or some ancient religious feud. But the real history starts much earlier than just this century, with U.S. intervention in Iran and the decades of threats and pressure that followed. So, let’s take a look at the actual history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, and I will leave it to you to decide whether the foreign policy “experts” are telling the truth, or whether Iran has acted as any country would under similar pressure.
The 1953 Coup That Started It All
This is where the story of U.S. intervention really begins. In 1953, the CIA and their counterparts in British MI-6 helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whom they had previously supported in his rise to power, after he threatened British oil interests there, and restored the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as a pro-Western ruler.
The Shah’s rule became a brutal police state, enforced in part through their secret gestapo, SAVAK, which crushed dissent and used torture methods, while pushing a top-down Westernization many Iranians saw as foreign-backed and humiliating. For the 26 year rule of the Shah, Iranians learned 2 lasting lessons that shape their actions towards the West:
If the West backs a brutal dictatorship in your country, the people will start to associate Western ideals and influence with repression and subjugation, not freedom and national sovereignty
If you try to control your own resources and self-determination, the West will put an end to that through force
By the late 1970s, Iran was a country shaped by repression, social engineering, and the memory of a stolen sovereignty, which is exactly the kind of history that makes long-term stability impossible.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Blowback
The 1979 Iranian Revolution, led by Shiite Islamists under Ayatollah Khomeini, marked the decisive break from the United States and the Shah’s Western-backed order. The Carter administration, taking advice from the CIA and the State Department, gave the French the green light to allow the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini to return and effectively inherit the revolution. U.S. officials saw him as someone they could work with, and he was not new to the political scene either. Back in 1953, he had been part of the conservative clerical opposition to Mossadegh, helping build pressure against Mossadegh’s government before the coup that restored the Shah in 1953.
The Shah left on January 16, 1979 and the Ayatollah returned on February 1. It is important to note that this was not the cause of the infamous Iranian Hostage Crisis later that year in November. The nuance to that event is that President Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the United States for secret cancer treatment, despite the warnings from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Many Iranians took that as a sign that Washington might be preparing for another coup or counter-revolution move to bring him back. In that atmosphere, revolutionaries and student activists seized the U.S. Embassy, took hostages, and demanded the Shah be returned to Iran. That is what caused the Iran Hostage Crisis, not the revolution itself.
That crisis became the foundation of the hostility between Iran and the United States that has defined the relationship ever since, and many Americans still struggle to move past the Iranian overthrow of the dictator our government had no right to install in their country 47 years ago.
This is a prime example of what CIA analyst Donald Wilber called “blowback,” the unintended consequences of foreign intervention coming back later in a more violent and destabilizing form, from the U.S.-led intervention in 1953.
American Involvement in the Iran-Iraq War and the 1980s
The Shiite revolution in Iran was viewed as a threat by Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni-ruled Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980. The United States tilted heavily toward Iraq to prevent Iran’s revolution from spreading. Washington backed Saddam diplomatically and strategically during the war, even as Saddam used chemical weapons, and approved western companies to help build a rudimentary 1980s-era nuclear weapons program in Iraq. For many Iranians, that was not a neutral policy, it was the United States helping arm and protect a regime that used horrific weapons against Iranians and later its own Iraqi Shiite population, killing 500,000.
American hawks demonizing Iran today still have to reach back to 1983 and the Marine barracks bombing by Iran-backed Hezbollah in Beirut to claim that Iran “attacked the United States.” But what they want you to forget about is that just two years later, the Reagan administration was secretly selling missiles to Iran through Israeli channels in the Iran-Contra Affair. So even U.S. officials at the time did not treat the attack as some permanently unforgivable act that made diplomacy impossible. And while the barracks bombing is always cited in isolation, it actually came as retaliation for the Israeli-instigated shelling of Beirut neighborhoods by the USS New Jersey that did nothing but kill innocent people.
But that is how this history gets used: one event is stripped of context and repeated by hawks for decades, and turned into a permanent excuse for more hostility, threats, and escalation against Iran.
The Post-9/11 Era and the Long Push Toward Iran
This takes us to the modern times of U.S.-Iranian relations. After 9/11, the focus among the neoconservatives in Washington, who recently hijacked American foreign policy, and the Israeli Likud Party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, shifted from diplomacy to regime-change across the region, and Iran was always near the end of that road. You can see the outline in General Wesley Clark’s account of the post-9/11 plan to take out “7 countries in 5 years,” and also in the broader mindset in the Clean Break strategy that describes a break from the Oslo peace process framework to reshape the region through force and pressure to further Israeli interests and the United States’ constant influence in the region.
That is also the period where Iran was folded into the “Axis of Evil” narrative during George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2002, even though the public was being sold a single moral story about terrorism while the real policy was a much wider regional project. Bush’s 2002 speech made that framing official, and from there, the long-term goal was not coexistence, but isolation, pressure, and eventually, regime change–its no coincidence Iran was the last country on the list of 7 countries after Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, all of which have met a similar fate of a U.S.-backed regime change.
And this is the time where sanctions become a central strategy. At their core, sanctions are economic warfare: they do not punish “a regime” in the abstract, they crush ordinary people first by wrecking currency, prices, jobs, banking, and access to basic national stability. Even U.S. officials have admitted the point of the policy was to break Iran’s economy, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bragging earlier this month that U.S. pressure created a dollar shortage, sent the currency into free fall, and helped drive the protests earlier this month. This matters because the Iranian people are not the same as the Iranian government, and American and Western rhetoric constantly blurs that line. In fact, directly after 9/11, ordinary Iranians held candlelight vigils and public memorials in Tehran for Americans killed in the attacks, which is the exact opposite of the cartoon image most people in the U.S. are given.
From here, the logic becomes a feedback loop: Iran is framed as the main obstacle to U.S. and Israeli regional dominance, so Iran builds deterrence through allies, proxies and defense, then the U.S and its allies hit those networks militarily and economically, and Iran then doubles down because it believes it is next–which it almost certainly is! Every step is then used to justify the next step, and the history that created the cycle gets erased while the latest reaction is treated as the beginning of the story.
The Question We Should Be Asking
None of this is meant to defend the actions taken by the Iranian government or their proxies, nor as an attack on American citizens who support intervention because they have been given a narrow version of history. It is a call to step back, look at the full chain of events and decisions that have brought us yet again to the very brink of a wider war with Iran here in 2026, and ask the question Washington never asks: How would Americans react if Russia or China had overthrown our government, installed their own dictator over us, backed our enemies, strangled our economy, and then called our response “irrational?” If we cannot honestly ask that question, then we are not doing foreign policy analysis at all, we are just repeating propaganda and destined to repeat the very mistakes that have seen entire countries devastated, millions killed and displaced, trillions of dollars printed, and tens of thousands of our bravest men killed and injured, which is a price that is simply not worth paying.
Main Citation: Horton, Scott. Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. Libertarian Institute, 2021.