The Path To War With Iran

tompaine: The uproar and controversy over purported U.S. plans to attack Iran show no sign of dying down. While President George W. Bush assures us that talk of impending war is little more than "wild speculation," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently threatened to assemble a "coalition of the willing" against Iran outside the U.N. if the security council fails to take action. All this has convinced many Iranians that "the nuclear issue is just the latest stage in a struggle between Washington and Tehran dating back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution," according to The Financial Times.

It does appear that Bush is carefully considering his legacy and the possibility that he may yet salvage it through a swift, "surgical" military solution . Most observers are focusing on the confrontation to come. But we first need to understand how we got here. In moments like this, history appears overdetermined. The present becomes a hostage to the past--and the future, of course, must follow suit. Mistakes were made over decades. Miscalculations accumulated.

We can go back as far as 1953 when the U.S. and Britain enabled the coup which effectively ended Iranian democracy and, in turn, brought us the unbridled autocracy of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Jimmy Carter memorably called the Shah's Iran "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." This is where the word "blowback" first gained its invaluable currency. Moreover, if one needs evidence that lack of democracy makes the rise of extremism more likely, then one can certainly find it in Iran and in the Islamic revolution of 1979.

All events, to a certain degree, flow out of 1953. Ayatollah Khomeini--as we know and remember him today--would not have existed if it wasn't for the sudden unfolding of events that year. But nuclear confrontation need not have ever been in the cards. Read more