Moral Miscalculation: America’s Misunderstanding of Iran Is Leading to Catastrophe

When he began his massive assault on Iran, the president was confident in its ultimate success. He had been advised that the Iranian people were deeply dissatisfied with their government and were groaning under the weight of an unwanted clerical autocracy. Furthermore, the country was in political disarray, racked by internal conflict, and would easily capitulate to its attackers, even welcoming them as liberators. Regime change was on the way. Iran would soon be neutralized as a threat.

The year was 1980, and the president was President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. His ear-tickling advisers as well as the family dictatorships of the Persian Gulf, had fed him a narrative that quite simply didn’t jibe with the facts. No matter the fantasies swimming around in the heads of its international critics, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 wasn’t the result of some random outburst of Islamist fanaticism. It was a deeply-rooted nationalist and anti-colonialist revolt against the foreign powers that had dominated the country through puppet shahs for more than a century, extracting the country’s resources while enriching a domestic oligarchy bent on forcibly westernizing the population.

In a way, Hussein’s miscalculation was understandable. The depth of the Iranian Revolution, although it had already expressed itself in two national referenda that established the country’s unique Islamic constitution by overwhelming majorities, was not adequately perceived even by the leaders of the revolution itself. Some were concerned that the country’s armed forces, as well-equipped as they were, were likely to fold under the brutality of Hussein’s carefully-planned onslaught. Iran had repeatedly capitulated to foreign invaders under the shahs, the last time less than 40 years earlier—in 1941. Even the government and the armed forces could not predict what was to come.

The outcome should be familiar to any American citizen interested in the foreign affairs of his country; but nonetheless, it seems to have been completely forgotten by both policymakers and the public. Instead of overthrowing their own government or surrendering to the invaders, the Iranian people rose up in a massive and largely spontaneous civil movement to defend the nation against its attackers. Many of them, by their own testimony, were not primarily motivated by religious belief but by patriotism (although the two are not so easily distinguished in Iran). They would soon surprise the world by overwhelming Saddam Hussein’s well-trained professional army with massive civilian “human wave attacks” unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

Many civilians joined the Basij, a paramilitary outfit supportive of the revolution that now headed to the front to confront Hussein’s forces, and others joined the new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to supplement the regular army. Others simply showed up at the front armed with nothing but ancient rifles, Molotov cocktails, or even sticks and clubs. Ethnically Arab and Sunni Muslim Iranians, who were expected to welcome Hussein’s Arab Sunni regime, joined the national struggle. Even teenagers sought the martyr’s reward of an Islamic paradise by charging into minefields to blow them up with their bodies. This combined effort by the whole of the government and civil society turned back Hussein’s forces, expelling them from the country within two years, and then took the fight into Iraq itself.

Nothing could save Hussein’s ill-calculated invasion, not even the United States and its European allies seeking to “contain” Iran. In 1982, as Hussein’s Iraq went on the defensive, the United States took Iraq off its list of certified terrorist states, established diplomatic relations in 1984, and began clandestinely selling them weapons technology, while prohibiting such exports to Iran.

The United States, along with Germany, even began to send chemical precursor agents that would enable Hussein to make poison gas with U.S.-designed munitions in violation of international law and even sold the regime biological materials capable of weaponization, although it’s still not known if they were ever used. The U.S. government went so far as to clandestinely help Hussein target Iranians with chemical weapons attacks. Hussein also used his chemical weapons to massacre tens of thousands of Kurds perceived as rebellious during the war. All of it was to no avail.

Finally, with both sides exhausted and at least half a million dead, the two countries agreed to a ceasefire in 1988. What had begun as an exercise in “containment” had resulted in a moral and humanitarian catastrophe of horrendous proportions. The United States and its allies had intimately involved themselves in war crimes, the very same sorts of crimes that would be used to justify the U.S.’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite immense losses, the Islamic Republic of Iran was stronger than ever, hardened and inspired by the struggle.

Fantastic Narratives Drive the Current Conflict

U.S. President Donald Trump’s current attack on Iran has been supported by similar narratives and fantasies that exploit the perpetual amnesia and historical ignorance of Americans. Iranians are variously portrayed as hapless victims of a fanatical theocratic regime that somehow imposed itself on an unwilling majority or as a nation of “terrorists” maniacally bent on wreaking destruction on Americans with nuclear weapons —a claim similar to the arguments used to justify the now-discredited Iraq War in 2003. The White House is using these narratives to justify an arguably illegal war of aggression that is increasingly being waged against civilian targets, a criminal act under the Geneva Conventions signed by the United States itself.

To form a proper moral judgment on such a conflict, Catholics—and Christians in general—need to know the real history of America’s troubled relations with Iran and the source of its conflict with this ancient civilization with which it once shared a high degree of mutual admiration and respect. One does not have to be uncritically supportive of Iran or blind to its defects to recognize that its people have reasons for their hatred and mistrust of the United States and that both sides share in the guilt of their broken relationship.

Sadly, Americans are blissfully unaware of what every Iranian knows well, that America’s troubled relationship with the Iranian people dates not from the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage crisis but from 1953, when the United States and Britain clandestinely overthrew the country’s fledgling democracy and instituted the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s latest (and, as it would turn out, last) foreign puppet-ruler. A review of the history of this affair is of great relevance to American Catholics wanting to assess the moral legitimacy of the U.S.’s current war with Iran and our nation’s ongoing conflict with the country.

Iran’s democratic reforms in the early ’50s had grown out of a long period of resistance to domestic tyranny. Since the mid-19th century, Iranians had been growing disillusioned with their ruling class and particularly their ancient shahs, who had increasingly become the tools of European imperial powers. Massive economic concessions were given by the shahs to foreign countries, allowing the shahs, their dependents, and their foreign patrons to profit by extracting Iran’s resources or engaging in business on very generous terms at the expense of average Iranians. Outraged by this state of affairs and inspired by the example of European forms of parliamentary democracy, the Iranian people, supported by the country’s Shia Islamic clergy, forced the shahs to accept a democratically-elected parliament and a written constitution supporting it in 1906.

Contrary to impressions in the modern West, the Shia clergy of Iran were natural supporters of these democratic reforms. Shia Islam had been adopted by Iran in the 16th century as a form of resistance against the perceived tyranny of the Ottoman empire, whose caliphs claimed the right to rule the whole Muslim world as the successors of Muhammad and sought to encroach on Iranian sovereignty. In contrast with the Sunni variety of Islam, the Shia religion was founded on the ritual celebration of martyrs who had died as victims of injustice and tyranny, particularly Husayn ibn Ali, who died resisting the abusive rule of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. By the 1950s, Iran’s Shia clergy had developed modern social justice doctrines and had created a sophisticated critique of the shahs’ dictatorial rule, very much in line with their theological worldview.

It might also surprise modern Americans to know that the 18th-century American British colonists were fascinated by Iran’s Shia resistance to the Ottoman empire and saw it as a fulfillment of Persia’s long tradition of civilized refinement and benign rule stretching back to Cyrus the Great. In fact, colonial Americans developed a sort of love affair and even obsession with Iran in the early 18th century. Their newspapers were constantly taken up with news from Persia and its resistance to the Ottomans, including positive commentary on Shia doctrines. Some scholars in the colonies even learned the Persian language in order to read their literature. In turn, Iranians, at the time of their parliamentary democratic reforms in the early 20th century, looked to the United States as an example of a benign, freedom-loving and anti-colonialist power that had thrown off the rule of the British.

Parliamentary Democracy Suppressed by Imperial Britain and Russia

Iran’s 1906 constitution represented a significant step toward a modern democracy—but in a particularly Iranian way. The whole male adult population was eligible to vote for representatives to the parliament, which had to approve any proposed laws. The prime minister and his cabinet were still selected by the shah, who could remove them at will. The constitution was dedicated to the implementation of Islamic law, and a committee of clerics would exist to ensure that the country didn’t deviate from Shia Islamic principles. Monarchy and democracy existed in a tension mediated by the Shia religion.

However, Britain and Russia, two imperialist powers with major economic interests in Iran, soon found a way to thwart Iran’s movement for parliamentary independence. Russia invaded in 1911 and temporarily shut down the parliament. Then, exercising its influence over the shah, Britain seized partial control of Iran’s armed forces and other institutions in 1919 by way of a shady agreement with the shah that was ultimately rejected by the Iranian people and never ratified by their legislature. Britain then used its powers to place Reza Pahlavi, an obscure Iranian officer with whom it had friendly relations, in effective control of Iran’s armed forces. Pahlavi used his power to oust the existing shah and have himself crowned shah in his place.

Pahlavi established himself as a military dictator and suppressed the independence of the parliament. He rewarded his British patrons by maintaining their oil monopoly in Iran, allowing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to extract the nation’s petroleum resources and keep all but 16 percent of the earnings. (He later attempted to wrest control of the country’s petroleum resources from the British, but he failed.) He also began to forcibly secularize the country, mandating secularized education and forbidding women to wear the traditional hijab. Iran was back under European imperialist influence, at the expense of the Iranian people and their cultural and religious traditions.

When Pahlavi showed too much favor to Germany during World War II, Britain and Russia invaded Iran and removed him from office, replacing him with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1941. After the end of the war, he would prove himself to be particularly slavish not only to Britain but also to the ascendant United States and its ally the State of Israel.

However, the new shah faced strongly democratic forces in Iran that were backed by much of the Shia clergy, who were seeking the country’s independence from foreign economic and political control. By 1951, the parliament had forced the shah to accept the strongly reformist Mohammad Mosaddegh as the country’s prime minister. Mosaddegh immediately began to curtail the power of the shah and to nationalize the country’s oil industry.

Operation Ajax: Democracy Quashed by the United States

By 1953, the British had had enough of Mosaddegh and his attacks on their oil interests. They persuaded the Eisenhower administration that Mosaddegh was going to turn Iran over to the Russians, and both the CIA and MI6 plotted to overthrow the prime minister through Operation Ajax, whose machinations were finally revealed to the public in detail in 2013. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was now firmly in power again, and he would make himself into an increasingly absolute dictator, just as his father had been, now principally at the service of the United States. The democratic aspirations of the Iranian people had been quashed a third time.

The United States and the State of Israel began to work with the shah to ensure that nothing would threaten his rule in the future. With the help of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, Mohammad Reza established SAVAK, a secret police force that would arrest political dissidents and systematically torture them in hidden prisons. Thousands of Iranians suffered this fate, including intellectuals who had been able to freely publish and speak only a few years earlier.

The shah abolished all political parties in the parliament, restricting who could run and permitting only a single, pro-shah party that acted as a rubber stamp and a defender of his absolute rule. He dutifully invited the United States to send its major oil companies, including Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco, to manage the country’s oil resources and take 50 percent of the profits along with British Petroleum. The United States built up the shah’s armed forces with massive arms sales paid for with the shah’s portion of the oil revenues. It also ensured that Iran maintained friendly relations with Israel while the latter freely persecuted the Palestinians.

The country’s capital, Tehran, soon became the home of numerous foreigners representing various economic interests who were profiting from the regime. At its height, the American colony in Tehran boasted 50,000 residents, working mostly in the defense and oil industries.

By the 1960s, the country was importing the increasingly degenerate culture of the United States and other Western democracies, including movies and advertising with women in miniskirts and other immodest clothing. Religious and family values were being discarded for Western secularism. Even Planned Parenthood had branches in Tehran and other Iranian cities. The clergy, who had long sought to free Iran from foreign domination, were becoming more and more troubled and critical of the shah’s compromised regime. Some, like the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, would be expelled from the country by the wary shah.

By the late 1960s, the shah was so isolated from his people and drunk on power that he scheduled a coronation ceremony to have himself crowned as “Emperor” (literally, “King of Kings”) of Iran, a vanity title from Iran’s ancient past that only had meaning in the narcissistic dream world in which he was living. In the style of Napoleon Bonaparte, he absurdly placed the crown on his own head, and then one on his wife’s head, in a lavish and ridiculous ceremony in 1967. In 1971, he held an even more lavish international celebration of the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire, to which he invited hundreds of foreign leaders and other international dignitaries while excluding average Iranians.

The Iranian people, viewing these extravaganzas at a distance, didn’t share in the shah’s delusions. They had watched while he and his oligarchic allies enriched themselves with lucrative business relationships with foreign countries, while the nation’s mineral and oil wealth were extracted for the benefit of others. The bazaar merchants, an important class in society, were being pushed out of their stalls in favor of big corporate interests tied to the shah. The clergy saw the whole thing as obscenely impious and contrary to the national interests of the Iranian people, and Iranians increasingly agreed. What’s more, they saw the U.S. government as the shah’s principal protector and enabler, and they saw the U.S. embassy in Tehran as the real base from which the country was being ruled.

“Death to America’s Shah”

In 1977, the lid began to come off the pressure cooker of resentment against America and its Iranian proxy ruler. Encouraged by the election of Jimmy Carter, who claimed to be concerned about human rights in Iran, students and civil society groups began to express their dissent against the regime’s systematic human rights violations. In 1978, protesters began to hit the streets, encouraged by the Ayatollah Khomeini still in exile, and they were consequently joined by the nation’s Shia clergy and clerical students. The shah’s U.S.-backed military began to massacre street protesters, but each wave of killings brought even more protesters into the streets month after month. Graffiti written on the walls read, “Death to America’s Shah.”

The American embassy in Tehran was seen as a “den of espionage” by which the United States had run the country; in fact, the shah even visited the U.S. embassy during this time to ask his American patrons what he should do. The turning point came in late 1978, when Jimmy Carter made a personal phone call to the shah—after a particularly bloody massacre that used helicopter gunships against protesters—in which Carter “reaffirmed the close and friendly relationship between Iran and the United States,” as the White House summarized the call.

The United States had clearly thrown the Iranian dissidents under the bus. The population became more enraged and protests continued to grow. Finally, the shah fled the country, and in February of 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in a plane filled with Western journalists, now received by colossal mobs of literally millions of joyful supporters, and by almost the whole range of political opinion, as the de facto leader of the Iranian Revolution.

Khomeini soon agreed to a new interim prime minister and organized a national referendum on the creation of a new constitution, an Islamic Republic without a shah, which passed overwhelmingly with massive public participation. Even left-wing and liberal parties generally supported the idea of the new constitution, which had yet to be formulated in detail. However, Iranians were terrified that their overthrow of the shah, which was the third attempt in the last hundred years, would again be hijacked by the United States as it had been in 1953. Militant students briefly occupied the U.S. embassy in February, but Khomeini called them off.

American Embassy Staff Taken Hostage

As Khomeini’s coalition of liberals and clericalists wrangled over the creation of the new constitution and argued over the powers to be given to Khomeini and the clergy, Jimmy Carter dropped the last political bomb that insured Iran would emerge as a clergy-dominated state. In October of 1979, against the advice of U.S. embassy personnel, he allowed the shah to enter the United States for medical treatment. A few days later, the interim government met with Carter administration officials in Algeria. Iranians feared the United States intended to bring the shah back to power. Militant students soon stormed the embassy a second time and took hostages, and now Khomeini supported them.

As immoral and diplomatically counterproductive as the taking of the hostages was, and as wrong as it was for Khomeini to side with the students, it is telling to note that it proved to be the smartest political move the ayatollah could make in the political environment of his day. The sad reality was that the Iranian people so feared and hated the United States after decades of suffering under the shah that the taking of the hostages was an immensely popular act. Iranians took to the streets in massive demonstrations and overwhelmed the embassy phone banks day and night with calls expressing their support for the hostage-takers. A group of farmers walked dozens of miles barefoot on a pilgrimage-like journey to see the embassy and express their gratitude to the students. The average Iranian loved it.

When the embassy’s chargé d’affaires, Bruce Laingen, protested to the student militants, one responded, “You have no right to complain. You took our whole country hostage in 1953.” Laingen reportedly stated later that he had no argument in response.

Khomeini immediately recognized that by endorsing the militant students, he would make himself even more popular and easily overcome all of the more secular and liberal elements in Iranian politics, enabling him to consolidate support for his theocratic constitution with power concentrated in his person as the Supreme Leader. The takeover of the embassy had “united our people,” said Khomeini at the time. “Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty.” He was right. Although turnout was notably less for the final ratification vote for the Islamic Republic constitution, he won the vote easily.

Although the new constitution placed much power in the Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader, in many ways it made the country substantially more democratic than it had been under the shah. The office of shah was abolished, and in his place a Supreme Leader, a Shia ayatollah, was to be elected and supervised by an Assembly of Experts chosen by popular vote, which also had the power to remove the Supreme Leader. The office of president was also created to oversee the daily functioning of government; and unlike the previous office of prime minister, he would also be elected directly by popular vote. After decades of monoparty rule, the country’s parliament was opened again to a restricted multiparty electoral system that allowed for competing points of view—but within certain limits governed by the Shia clergy, who had the power of deciding who could run for office and who couldn’t.

It would take more than a year of wrangling within his own government for Khomeini to end the hostage crisis. But after 444 days of captivity, the hostages arrived home on the first day of Ronald Reagan’s term. Although I was only 10 years old at the time, I remember well watching them on TV deboarding from their return flight within hours of Reagan being sworn in. The delayed release was widely seen as a final jab against the president who had betrayed his supposed commitment to human rights in favor of the U.S.’s supposed “strategic” interests in the region.

Unending Conflict

Since then, the United States has been in almost constant conflict with Iran, relentlessly pushed by Israel which sees Iran as its principal rival for regional hegemony. In 1982, after unfreezing some Iranian assets and briefly allowing weapons transfers to the country to counteract Iraq, the Reagan administration reversed course and began to covertly aid Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians died as victims of Iraq’s conventional and chemical weapons, courtesy of the United States and its allies.

Iran soon began to ally itself with other countries and causes linked to anti-colonialism in the Middle East and worldwide, especially with fellow Shias. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and committed a massacre against thousands of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila under the protection of U.S. Marine “peacekeepers,” Iran began to aid Shia Muslim organizations in the area that eventually came together to form Hezbollah (the “Party of God”), a political party and militia created to resist the Israeli occupation. A proxy of the group was later suspected of being the author of the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed more than 250 Americans, although Hezbollah has always denied responsibility. The group eventually ran Israel out of Lebanon in the year 2000, after its occupation had claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Lebanese.

When American corporations tried to break the ice and begin doing business with Iran again in the mid-’90s, neoconservative pundits, AIPAC lobbyists, and the State of Israel went to work to shut them down. Finally, a multi-billion-dollar oil drilling deal with Conoco was nixed by Bill Clinton via a sweeping executive order in 1995, which prohibited virtually all commerce, either direct or indirect, with Iran. Now under the most oppressive sanctions imaginable, Iran began to pursue energy independence for its decades-old nuclear program (originally created for Iran by the United States under the shah) and achieved domestic uranium enrichment capacity in 2006.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iran gave arms to Shia militias there to help them run the United States out of the country. Meanwhile, the United States and Israel funded the Sunni-aligned terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda and ISIS, enabling them to wreak chaos in Syria and to finally install an Israel-friendly, Sunni regime. The United States also continued to support Israel in its own terrorist policies against the Palestinians and other Arab countries in the region. In turn, the Iranians built up Hezbollah to a massive fighting force and made an alliance with the Houthis in Yemen, while also supporting the Palestinian Sunni Muslim party Hamas, in Gaza.

An apparent breakthrough came when the Obama administration worked out a comprehensive deal with Iran and other countries in 2015 to reduce sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran subjecting itself to regular inspections on its uranium enrichment program, which at that time was being used only for the purpose of nuclear power and to create medical isotopes but could have eventually led to a nuclear weapon. However, with encouragement from Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018, reimposed sanctions, and pushed for conflict with Iran in 2019, which was averted when his advisers and base convinced him to back down.

In his second term, under Israeli pressure and after having received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from Zionist donors for his reelection, the Trump administration began again to pound the drums of war over Iran’s nuclear program. Under his leadership, the United States and Israel have attacked Iran twice in the middle of negotiations, even killing the negotiators, effectively shutting the door on a diplomatic solution of the conflict.

Marco Rubio has admitted publicly that the United States felt compelled to attack Iran by Israel’s unilateral decision to attack while negotiations were ongoing. All of this is in spite of repeated intelligence assessments indicating Iran isn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, “Christian Zionist” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is leading Trump’s armed forces with a theology that resembles a pagan death cult rather than the Gospel he claims to follow.

The real answer, and the authentically Catholic answer, to America’s broken relationship with Iran isn’t aggressive war on behalf of Israel, which is clearly unjust. It’s acknowledging our own failed and immoral Middle Eastern policy and coming back to the bargaining table with Iran, this time with a long-term and sincere commitment to a new relationship that respects the country’s sovereignty and no longer supports Israel’s expansionist agenda against its neighbors.

U.S. foreign policy over the past 45 years has left a wake of immense destruction across the Middle East and now is endangering the world with an escalating conflict that could end in a horrific global disaster.

It’s time to hit the reset button and return to principles of natural law and Christian ethics that the Catholic Church has long upheld. Let us seek peace and dialogue with Iran—as Pope Leo XIV rightly urges us to do—and pray for deliverance from the “dogs of war” being unleashed by the current U.S. administration.