How U.S. Strikes May Have Inadvertently Helped the Iranian Regime
Governments are not nations, especially in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but governments wage the wars that can define a nation.
Until 2:00 a.m. Iran Standard Time on Sunday, the conflict between America and Iran had remained on a low boil for a solid 45 years, flaring into actual military encounters only on the territory of others, notably Iraq. There, every sixth U.S. fatality perished by the efforts of Iran. President Donald Trump alluded to this history in announcing the U.S. air strikes on three nuclear facilities inside Iran—bringing the conflict to a regime that, even when it attacked the U.S., invariably arranged for someone else to do it.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In Iraq, the U.S. was an army of occupation, and its soldiers obliged to patrol the roads. They did so in Humvees heavily armored against the roadside bombs insurgents planted along the route. Iran, which wanted U.S. troops off its doorstep, organized its own insurgents, and gave them a new kind of roadside bomb, a shaped charge that could send a slug of copper through any armor, including an M1 Abrams tank. The soldiers who survived often lost limbs. The U.S. Army history of the Iraq War takes note of the U.S. unit intercepting crates of the copper plates fitted atop the explosive: “All were turned on the same lathe in Iran.”
Israeli officials had been warning the Americans about those bombs. Their own troops had encountered them while occupying Lebanon, where the diabolically lethal innovations had been planted by Hezbollah, the militia Iran helped establish and subsequently armed. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Tehran directed them to be used against an enemy it had been fighting, in one way or another, since 1979.
That was the year everyday Iranians rose up against the King (or Shah) who had been put in place a quarter century earlier by the U.S. and British, in a CIA-directed coup bringing down a democratically-elected government (one that had kicked a British oil company out of the country). A half century later, Iranian citizens could be relied upon to bring up the coup to American reporters doing in-person interviews on Tehran streets decorated with wartime propaganda. The entire side of a tall building in Tehran shows the American flag with the stars replaced by skulls and the stripes formed by descending bombs. The mural, which had faded over the decades, was redone with fresh paint a few months ago.
The famous “Death to America” slogan is still on the wall of the park-like compound that once held the U.S. Embassy. The place was officially dubbed “the Den of Spies” when it was overrun by supporters of the regime that replaced the Shah—a revolutionary movement led by a charismatic Shi’ite cleric named Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. (TIME’s Person of the Year in 1979 is not to be confused with his similarly named successor, 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, who finally has reportedly nominated his own candidates as successor.) The former embassy is now a museum and, as TripAdvisor makes clear, an effective one. When Iranians were coming over the gates, American diplomats and spies scrambled to feed secrets into paper shredders, reducing their secret documents to strips of paper maybe an eighth-of-an-inch wide. The zeal of the 1979 revolution is still visible on the tables of the Den of Spies, in the papers true believers re-assembled strand-by-strand.
Over 50 U.S. diplomats remained in the embassy as hostages for 444 days. The humiliation the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran inflicted on the United States may have been on par with the humiliation the regime is experiencing now.
The hitch, for both the U.S. and Israel, is that bringing the attack to Iran, as a country, risks stirring the nationalist response of a nation that goes back 2,500 years. Most Iranians loathe their government, and may have looked on with a certain interest on June 13, when the Israeli warplanes and drones descended, both from abroad and from a base Mossad set up near Tehran. (A joke making the rounds in Tehran had one of Iran’s retaliatory strikes hitting the headquarters of Mossad, but it was empty: All the agents were inside Iran.)
At the time its secret nuclear program was revealed in 2002, people still held out hope that they could alter their government at the ballot box. But the political reform movement failed, and the stiffening, increasingly unpopular regime understood that it could no longer count on its population. Instead, it placed its hopes for survival in thugs beating protesters in the streets, and acquiring a nuclear weapon.
A large majority of Iranians have no love for the regime. In small towns and cities alike, they have been rising up against their oppressive government at irregular intervals, for decades.
But any kind of bomb is terrifying, and after the first night of attacks, Israel’s warplanes moved beyond military targets and assassinations. An oil refinery was bombed. The casualties of a strike on Tajrish Square, a bustling bazaar in Tehran’s north, included a water main and a well-known graphic designer, who was waiting at a red light. The specter of Gaza now looms over every Israeli military operation. After Iran’s retaliatory missiles claimed Israeli lives, Israel’s defense minister threatened that “Tehran will burn.”
Inside Iran, opposing the government does not extend to supporting attacks by foreign militaries. A group of human rights, civil society, and political activists who, as they put it, “have always been critical and opposed to the current wrong way of governing,” posted a statement on Telegram saying: “At this critical juncture in our country’s history, when we are confronted with the aggression and arrogance of the racist Israeli government, which has a long history of warmongering, genocide and breaking the fundamental principles of morality and international law, we firmly condemn this attack. We emphasize our serious opposition to any foreign interference. We consider it to be detrimental to the human rights and democracy-seeking efforts of Iranian civil society, and we stand united and steadfast in defending the territorial integrity, independence, national defense capability of our homeland, defending the lives and dignity of human beings, and peace in the region and the world.”
Dread swelled in the neighborhoods around the Tehran atomic research reactor, with the distribution of iodide potassium pills to protect the thyroid against radiation in the air. Experts say the risk of radiation exposure is fairly small around the atomic facilities that the U.S. and Israel have bombed to date, because the ones in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan all deal with enriching uranium, rather than sparking nuclear reactions. But though small, the Tehran reactor (set up by the U.S. in 1967, when the Shah still ruled), operates as Chernobyl or Three Mile Island once did, and in the center of a city of more than nine million people. Those living closest to the reactor were told the pills should be taken by those over the age of 60 and under 40, but only when instructed by state TV, which Israel has also bombed.
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So, where do things go from here?
To a large extent, that depends on the actions of an Iranian regime that was already unpopular at the start of this assault. But any government bringing its own military inside Iran’s borders should understand the nature of the country. Among Iranians, opposition to the government is grounded in a bedrock pride in their nation, which predates not only the Islamic Republic, but Islam itself. Some on the Iranian plateau still practice Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic faith, and the foundation for an ancient empire that still informs Iranians’ sense of themselves. That identity can be glimpsed in first names like Darius and Cyrus—the names of Persian emperors—and actually visible in the ruins of Persepolis. There, in the friezes depicting supplicants from nations lining up to pay fealty to the ruler of an ancient empire, some Iranians find themselves seeing the nuclear program exactly as the modern regime has cast it—as the “inalienable right” of any signatory to Non Proliferation Treaty to pursue a nuclear program, so long as it’s peaceful.
Back in Tehran, there was evidence the regime was gaining ground with a public it had largely lost. In a private chat, a university professor told a friend: “Even if Khamenei had packed up the whole nuclear program, Israel would have attacked. Their whole plan was to weaken Iran’s military.”