United States Intervention in Iran and Iraq

albionmonitor.com

As we conclude our study of the Iranian Revolution, we also conclude the first revolution that our parents can remember, and one whose repercussions are still unfolding and impacting the world today. As we all know, contextualization is the key to understanding history, but when we study events that occurred relatively recently, I’m afraid we tend to fall into the trap of overlooking certain facts. The textbook, which we read about the Iranian Revolution, alludes to several occasions where the United States meddled with Iranian affairs and directed the course of the revolution there, but I get the sense that these fleeting references don’t fully describe the impact of the United States on Iran, and the entire Middle East during the 20th century.
When I first skimmed through The Iranian Revolution by Brendan January, I was fairly surprised to notice that the Iran-Contra affair wasn’t mentioned once. The book only mentions the United States’ sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in one, ambiguous sentence. Although Iran-Contra occurred several years after the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war is a somewhat separate topic from the actual revolution, I think it’s important to consider the effects of these two episodes. The image above depicts the former United States Secretary of Defense shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein. In the early 1980’s, the US provided Hussein with billions of dollars worth of aid, military training, and perhaps most sinister, chemical weapons to wage war with Iran. American companies shipped several different nerve agents into Iraq over the course of three years, including dozens of specimens of Bacillus Anthracis (Yes, that’s Anthrax). Saddam Hussein used these very weapons to gas the Kurds at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and when we realized our former business partner was killing his own people with our weapons, President Bush Sr. invaded Iraq during the Gulf War in the early 1990’s.
When asked about WMD’s in Iraq, I feel the vast majority of people would say that we found none. But, some people would disagree with this stance; The Fox News article from June 2006 entitled ‘Report: Hundreds of WMDs found in Iraq’ speaks for itself. When the United States returned to Iraq after the turn of the millennia we did find “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” but only ones, which we built and gave to Saddam Hussein to destroy Iran decades earlier.
While a war raged between Iran and Iraq during the 1980’s another conflict was being waged much closer to home. A group of rebels, known as the Contras, were fighting a war against the dictator in Nicaragua in a brutal civil war, which had lasted for over a decade. For several reasons, The United States government was determined to support these Contras at all costs (even though they were responsible for much of the cocaine flowing into the United States), but was not permitted to support them directly. The US government was also not permitted to sell weapons to Iran due to an embargo on Iran since the hostage crisis in 1979. Thus high-ranking officials of the Reagan administration plotted to sell arms to Israel, which would then sell them to Iran. The project would have served both as a way to release American hostages held in Lebanon and a method of funding the Contras in Nicaragua. Needless to say, the entire affair was highly complex, and I don’t fully understand it, but one should note that in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq war, the United States directly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran.
While Iran and Iraq were locked in a brutal struggle, the United States sold arms and chemical weapons to both sides of the conflict. As hundreds of Iranian Basij ran at their enemies, unarmed in suicide attacks, and while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to kill Kurds, the United States government could hold itself in large part responsible for these conflicts. I consider this fact not only notable, but also imperative during the task of contextualizing the Iranian Revolution along with the events in the Middle East, which continue to unfold. So why are these controversies overlooked? I honestly don’t have an answer. Perhaps authors like Brendan January feel that these situations are too complex to include in textbooks for students, or perhaps they feel that they are irrelevant. I’m no conspiracy theorist, nor am I blaming the United States alone for the destruction wrought during the Iran-Iraq war. I’m merely suggesting that we contributed to this havoc, and that fact should not be overlooked.