What happened under Reagan?

It all started in 1953, under President Eisenhower, when the CIA and British intelligence led a coup against elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. The shah, modern reformer Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was installed as head of state and restored British and U.S. access to oil. The shah created a secret police force, SAVAK, to keep various leftist and religious opposition groups in check, but its authoritarian abuses further embittered Iranians who considered the shah a puppet of the West. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fundamentalist cleric who had been banished to France, inspired massive protests that forced the shah to flee, enabling the ayatollah to return and set up a theocratic government. When President Jimmy Carter allowed the ailing shah to come to America for medical treatment, enraged Iranian students broke into the U.S. Embassy, taking

52 American diplomats hostage for a gut-wrenching 444 days.

The U.S. and the Iranian theocracy struggled, often violently, for influence in the region. In 1983, a Hezbollah truck bomb killed 241 Americans, mostly Marines, who were on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon to support the Christian-led government. President Reagan then withdrew U.S. soldiers from Lebanon. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, launched a war against Iran that cost 500,000 lives, with the U.S. providing support to Iraq as the lesser of two evils. Amid heightened tensions, the U.S. Navy mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing all 290 people on board. It was during this period that Iran decided to develop nuclear weapons.

Several times over the past two decades, Iran’s long-suffering people have risen up against their repressive regime, only to meet with brutality. In 2009, Iranian voters who believed the re-election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president was rigged poured into the streets by the millions, chanting “Where is my vote?” After months of protest, the Iranian Green Movement was squelched by mass arrests, with the regime jailing and torturing the ringleaders. Some made false confessions that they were working for the U.S. Smaller protests followed in 2018, and then, last November, new mass protests broke out over a rise in gas prices, and the regime responded by firing on unarmed protesters, killing hundreds and arresting some 7,000. Once Soleimani was killed, though, pro-regime Iranians poured into the streets to mourn him. They’ve now been supplanted by democracy protesters enraged by Iran’s shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial jet.