Iran is often in the news and there's
been a lot of discussion about tensions
between Iran in the United States, but
most people in America don't know the
first thing about Iran. Iran is a
medium-sized country in Southwest Asia
it's bordered by Afghanistan and
Pakistan on one side and Iraq on the
other side. It has an ancient culture
going back thousands of years, ancient
monuments, beautiful poetry, and a very
diverse population that includes Persian
speakers,Turks, and Arabs. Relations
between Iran in the United States go
back more than a century to the Iranian
Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when
Iranians demanded democracy and look to
the United States for support. One of the
heroes of the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution was Howard Baskerville, an
American teacher, who joined the
revolution and died in battle. And
there's a monument to him that I was
able to see in Tabriz in Northwest Iran.
Another American hero of the Iranian
Constitutional Revolution was Morgan
Shuster, an accountant, who was sent by
the US government at the request of the
Iranians to help them set up their
Treasury Department. So, there were pretty
good relations between Iran and the
United States the first part of the 20th
century. That changed though when the
United States and Great Britain helped
to organize a coup d'etat against a
popularly elected prime minister in 1953.
His name was Mohammad Mossadegh and he
objected to the British having taken
Iranians oil fields, so he took them back.
The British didn't like this and they
called on the Americans to help
overthrow Mossadegh along with elements
from the Iranian army. That coup in
1953 is one of the most important
moments in Iranian political history.
Every Iranian today knows about the
American coup of 1953. The coup supported
the king of Iran called the Shah.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was still a young
man at that point and had very little
power but, after the coup he gained more
and more power with American help he
built his military, he built his
intelligence services, and he built a
brutal repressive apparatus. The Shah's
government denied human rights, tortured
political prisoners, and refused to allow
democratic control. During the Cold War,
the United States supported the Shah in
the fight against communism. In the early
1970s, the Shah joined with leaders of
other oil-producing countries to triple
the price of oil making the Shah and his
government fabulously wealthy and
allowing him to repress the Iranian
people even further. The United States
government despite the economic turmoil
caused by the oil price hike stuck by
the Shah. Even President Jimmy Carter who
campaigned on a platform of human rights
visited the Shah and praised him as an
island of stability in a turbulent part
of the world. One year later, in early
1979 the Shah was
driven from power by a massive peaceful
revolution. The revolution replaced the
monarchy with an Islamic Republic that put
all power in the hands of a single
religious leader, Khomeini. Millions of
Iranians had gone out into the streets
to protest against the Shah's human
rights abuses. A massive general strike
shut down the country for more than two
months. Meanwhile, the United States
government stood by the Shah. President
Carter sent a General to Tehran to help
the Shah and his chief of staff organize
a response to these massive protest. In
February 1979, Iran's military bases were
overrun by unarmed protesters. When the
Shah flew into exile he was replaced by
the leader of the revolutionary
movement Ruhollah Khomeini.
Khomeini was an elderly religious
scholar who'd spent the last sixteen
years in exile. Khomeini was the symbolic
leader of the revolution demanding that
the Shah and his monarchy be ousted and
replaced with an Islamic Republic. When
Khomeini returned from exile he was
greeted by crowds in the millions. The
American government knew that it had a
challenge on its hands at this point
with a hostile government coming into
power. The Carter administration began
negotiations with the provisional
government in Iran. In order to undermine
these negotiation and to protest the
United States letting the Shah into
America for cancer treatment a small
group of militants climbed over the wall
of the United States Embassy in Tehran
it took more than 50 diplomats and other
Americans hostage. The occupation was
only going to last for a few days as a
symbolic gesture, but it ended up lasting
for 444 days. Khomeini endorsed the
embassy occupation and the hostages were
interrogated for months on end. I knew
one of the hostages who spoke Persian and he
heard the militants talking amongst
themselves. They were certain that the
Americans were trying to overthrow their
revolution the way the US had helped to
overthrow Mossadegh a quarter century
earlier. They called the U.S. Embassy the
nest of spies. As the hostage crisis
dragged on for months it's damaged
President Carter's re-election campaign.
The militants in Iran were so hostile to
President Carter that they refused to
release the hostages until President
Ronald Reagan's first day in office.
Tensions between the Islamic Republic of
Iran and the United States have
continued ever since. Both Iran and the
United States have made plays for
influence around the Middle East. In 1982,
Iran's allies in Lebanon attacked the U.S.
Marines that the Lebanese government had
called in. The U.S. helped arm Saddam
Hussein's Iraq which had invaded Iran.
Iran started a nuclear program to
counter what it saw as the
United States hostility. The United States
saw this nuclear program as a threat to
world peace. Still, when I was in Iran
some years ago, I found the Iranian
people to be quite favorable towards
Americans. Many of them objected to U.S.
foreign policy, but they watched
Hollywood movies and wanted better
relations with the United States. During
the Obama administration however these
tensions were eased with a nuclear deal
that was signed in 2015. In the months
and years after the agreement there are
still plenty of opponents to the deal
both in the United States and in Iran.
However, many Americans and many Iranians
are hoping that this deal leads to a new
chapter in U.S - Iranian relations, one
that's based more in goodwill and
cooperation than tensions.
