What does Iran want?
Tensions between the US and Iran have
escalated ever since Trump became president,
sparking a media frenzy
and...Tik Tok videos about World War 3.
The memes may be new,
but the tensions aren’t.
Iran
Iran
Iran
If you watch the news or listen to the U.S.
government’s rhetoric
it may seem like the only thing Iran wants...
is war.
We’re going to look at some of the crucial
events
that have shaped Iran to what it is today,
and what the world looks like from Iran's
point of view.
We want Iran to simply behave like a normal
nation.
When Mike Pompeo comes out and says
that Iran needs to act like a normal country
these sorts of things are taken as showing
the hypocrisy of the American administration.
This is Narges Bajoghli and she's a professor
of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University.
As an Iranian researcher, Bajoghli
has a pretty good understanding of
what the Iranian state and ordinary Iranians
want -
which, to be clear, can be different things.
But more importantly, she understands
the context around what Iran wants
Iranians want to be seen as a country of people
that have aspirations.
Any other society that's sort of under this
much
international pressure,
economic pressure,
military pressure... they sort of want the
space to be able to breathe.
They're trying to live their lives like folks
in other parts of the world.
In order to understand why it seems like Iran
and the U.S
have been in opposition for so long,
one needs to sort of go back in history a
little bit.
Some of the main events that have
shaped Iran’s modern politics,
are the 1953 coup,
the revolution of 1979,
the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s,
the downing of the Iran air passenger
plane by US forces over the Persian Gulf
The 1953 coup is very significant
In 1950 Iran’s prime minister at the
time Mohammad Mosaddegh
was the first third world leader to
nationalize his country's natural resources,
which in the case of Iran was oil.
And at that time it was really controlled
by the British
He ended up basically kicking out the British.
The CIA with the help of the MI6 ended up
conducting
the CIA's first coup in 1953 against the Iranian
prime minister.
The Shah was brought back into power by the
United States.
It really shifted what a lot of folks in Iran
thought as far as who actually ends up holding
power in Iran.
Under the Shah, Iran was an authoritarian
autocracy,
which survived because of US backing.
There was this belief that because of the
way in which
the Shah had aligned himself with the United
States,
that they really had no chance
at determining sovereignty over their own
country.
So once the revolution happens,
and it takes this very anti-imperialist stance,
American policymakers begin to feel that they
lost Iran.
They lost the biggest ally that they had in
the Middle East.
It really was this, this massive revolution
from below
that ended up completely toppling
the existing political and social structure.
So from that moment forward,
the way in which Iranians had viewed the U.S.
is really through the lens of 1953,
and the 1979 revolution needs to sort
of be seen as a continuation
of that national liberation struggle
to get away from being under the
auspices of the United States.
These two events were a signal that Iranians
wouldn’t accept their fate being influenced
by outside powers
and that they were demanding sovereignty over
their own country.
The revolution was initially supported
by many leftists and liberals.
But the power struggle that followed saw the triumph
of forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini,
the Supreme Leader who was both the religious authority and commander-in-chief,
and they set about eliminating their rivals.
A few months after the revolution in November
of 1979,
students who had aligned themselves
with Ayatollah Khomeini
went into the American embassy and
took American hostages
because they were afraid that the U.S.
would stage another coup in Iran
or to sort of do away with this new revolutionary
government.
The U.S. imposed its first set of sections
on Iran that November.
And then in 1980, something profound happened
to Iran
that not just plays a pivotal role in how
the country views itself,
but also how politics has played out in
the region til today.
The Iran-Iraq war.
It was the longest conventional war of the
20th century,
and it ended up significantly realigning the
geopolitics of the region.
The Iran-Iraq war was their first really for
foray
into understanding how the United States fights
proxy wars.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq was heavily supplied
by the United States as well as other Western
powers.
It’s important to mention another player
in that war.
Saudi Arabia.
You see, the Islamic Revolution of '79
established theocracy in Iran,
that directly challenged Saudi Arabia's influence
in the region.
Unsurprisingly, the Saudis weren’t too happy
about that,
so they bankrolled Iraq in the 8 year long
war.
The aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war left a
very,
very large veteran population.
Many of those veterans end up sort of
coming into positions of political power.
And since then, the relationship between the
U.S. and Iran has been... complicated
In 1988, the U.S. military shot down an
Iranian commercial jet,
killing all 290 people onboard, including
66 children.
And we’re still feeling the impact of this
2002 speech by George W. Bush.
States like these, and their terrorist allies,
constitute an axis of evil.
That pushed Iran deeper into not only feeling
isolated,
but also betrayed since it had actually cooperated
with the US
during the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.
And in 2005, the election of hardline nationalist
and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn’t help either.
During his presidency, he pursued a
more confrontational path
on Iran developing nuclear energy,
leading the U.S. to hit Iran with more sanctions.
What ends up happening is that it hurts the
general population in very significant numbers,
but it does not really do anything to the
political elite of the country.
There's a lot of economic corruption and mismanagement
from within the system itself.
Everything that Iran has gone through in the
past
- from the coup to the sanctions -
to the massive public protests against the
Iranian state,
has directly influenced the country’s strategy
on how it behaves in the region.
One of the biggest breakthroughs by
Obama presidency was this:
The United States, together with our international
partners,
has achieved something that decades of animosity
has not.
A comprehensive long-term deal with Iran
that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear
weapon.
And in Iran, it was seen as a way out of isolation:
The nuclear energy program among the general
population
is also an extremely popular program.
Many Iranians wanted an agreement to come
about between Iran and the Europeans
and the Americans in order to begin to ease
relationships.
Iran has allowed inspectors to come in and
inspect
all of these different nuclear facilities.
It has insisted that its nuclear facilities
are for peaceful purposes
and not for building a bomb.
And that has been sort of approved over and over
again by international watchdogs.
But then on May 8th 2018,
despite the fact that Iran had been found
to be completely compliant with the deal's requirements:
I am announcing today that the United States
will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
Once Trump ends up pulling out of the deal,
the hardliners in the country are really vindicated
and say,
well, aha! we told you so that you can't trust
the United States
and it's not going to want Iran to actually
be
a part of the international community.
And this is not on us.
This is on them.
Iran’s experience with American interventionism
and sanctions,
as well being locked in a fierce hostile rivalry
with Saudi Arabia and Israel over influence
in the region,
means it partakes in proxy wars.
It supports and creates alliances
with state and non-state actors,
either through diplomacy, funding or weapons.
The objective of this strategy is for Iran
to establish some economic alliances
and to project power across the region by
supporting local militias.
Iran sees its relationship with Hezbollah
as a legitimate one
and that was effectively able to fight against
Israeli occupation in the country.
Hezbollah is labeled as a terrorist organization
from the United States’ perspective.
From within a Lebanese society and then especially
from
within the perspective of the Islamic Republic,
these organizations,
and Hezbollah in particular is seen as a resistance
organization against
an occupying force.
The forces that Iran has supported in Iraq
for example,
include what's known in English as the Popular
Mobilization Units,
which is sort of an umbrella for many of
the different militant groups in Iraq.
When people ask,
why does Iran support these groups around
the region,
from the perspective of the Iranian government,
it's their insurance policy.
To ensure that it would be too costly
for the U.S. to invade Iran.
It's the way that they can ensure that they
are not next on the list of being attacked.
Other than supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon,
Iran also supports the Houthi rebellion
against the Saudi-backed
internationally-recognized government in Yemen,
a country that has been ravaged by war and
famine.
And in Syria, Iran props up President Assad.
You have to understand that during the Iran-Iraq
war,
every single Arab country in the region,
except for Syria, backed Iraq.
Another reason is that the ways
from the perspective of the Islamic Republic,
the ways in which they see what's happening
in the region
is that they believe that Israel, but the
United States as well,
they want these areas to become failed States.
Because then they would not pose as direct
of a challenge to Israel.
They sort of saw that if Syria would not be
in
the control of Assad anymore,
or turn into sort of a  failed State,
it would make Iran even lonelier in the region.
So.. what does this all mean?
What the Islamic Republic wants, as far as
its relations
with other countries in the Middle East as
well as
the international community as a whole,
differs from time to time depending on
what's going on geopolitically
and sort of in international politics.
In the aftermath once the JCPOA began to fall
apart,
their line consistently has been that
they are willing to negotiate
with the international community,
but as long as it has done so in a respectful
manner.
But perhaps the answer to what Iran wants
can be found when figuring what Iran definitely
doesn’t want.
What Iran does not want is it does not want
to be seen
as a country that will capitulate to the
demands of the United States,
especially and Israel in the region.
It is looking to be treated with respect as
an equal partner
and as an equal partner in the Middle East
as a whole,
and not to be be made to feel that it has
to subjugate to
the wishes of what the United States
and Israel are looking for
as far as the balance of power in the
Middle East is concerned.
