From the Shah to the Hostages, the Real History of America and Iran

Ninety seconds is all a certain kind of dinner-party historian needs to explain why every problem with Iran began in August 1953 and every solution begins with an apology. He is usually sincere. He is also working from half a book.

I want to give him the half he is using, because it is real, and then hand him the other half. The history of America and Iran is not a morality play with one villain. It includes a coup we should not be proud of, a revolution we did not predict, a hostage crisis that no amount of history excuses, and four decades of a regime that has killed Americans while saying, in its own founding vocabulary, that it intends to keep on being our enemy. Let's go in order.

The question, stated plainly

The claim worth testing is this: Iran's hostility toward the United States is a reaction to American actions, chiefly the 1953 coup, and an American change of heart would end it.

That is the strongest version of the argument from the left, and it deserves a straight answer. My answer has three parts.

1. The 1953 episode happened and was a serious American mistake in how it was done and what it taught.
2. The revolutionary regime that took power in 1979 built opposition to America into its own ideology, and its conduct has followed that script through administrations of both parties.
3. Whatever grievances Iranians have about 1953, the people who have paid for the regime's conduct since 1979 include Iranians themselves, and a long list of Americans, Lebanese, Iraqis, and others.

1953: Mossadegh, oil, and Operation Ajax

For decades the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British firm, had held the oil concession in Iran on terms most Iranians found humiliating. In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist who had come up through Iran's parliamentary politics, nationalized the company. The British retaliated with an embargo, and Britain turned to Washington for help in removing him.

The Truman administration had been reluctant. The Eisenhower administration, in the grip of Cold War worry that Iran could drift toward the Soviet orbit, agreed. In August 1953 the CIA, working with British intelligence, helped organize the operation that removed Mossadegh. He was out on August 19, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had briefly fled the country, was restored to power with a firmer grip than before.

Here is the left's account, and I will state it fairly. The coup overthrew a government that had come from Iran's own political process. It propped up a monarchy that grew more authoritarian, with a feared secret police called SAVAK. It gave Iranians a lasting reason to believe that American friendship came with strings attached to oil and Cold War calculations. The United States government has since acknowledged its role. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke of it in 2000 as a setback for Iran's political development, and President Obama referred to it in 2009.

I do not dispute any of that. A conservative who cares about self-government should be uneasy about helping topple a parliamentary leader, whatever the oil math looked like at the time. The lesson I draw is that covert regime change usually leaves a debt that comes due on a schedule nobody planned. But "the debt exists" and "the debt explains the regime" are different claims, and the second one does not survive the record.

The 1960s: a clergyman objects

Consider what the man who would become the founder of the Islamic Republic was complaining about before he ever ran anything. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose to prominence in the early 1960s by denouncing the Shah's reform program, called the White Revolution, which included land redistribution and the vote for women. In October 1964 he attacked a law that gave American military personnel in Iran the same immunity from Iranian courts that they had under agreements in other countries. He saw it as a surrender of Iran's sovereignty, and he was exiled in November 1964.

You can sympathize with the sovereignty point. But notice what else the record shows. In lectures he gave in 1970, published as Islamic Government, he laid out the doctrine that clerics should rule directly, with a senior jurist holding the final say. That idea later became the foundation of the Islamic Republic's constitution. The point is that the ideology of rule by a supreme jurist was not a reaction to a CIA memo. It was a doctrine he had been developing for years. When the revolution came, it came with a theory ready-made.

1979: the revolution and the embassy

By 1978 street protests and strikes had turned into a national uprising against the Shah. He left Iran on January 16, 1979. Khomeini returned from exile on February 1. A referendum in the spring set up the Islamic Republic, and its constitution made the supreme jurist, the Supreme Leader, the top authority in the system.

Then came November 4, 1979. Militant students overran the American embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. Fifty-two Americans would be held for 444 days. Khomeini endorsed the seizure, and the regime used it as a tool to sideline moderates and consolidate power. Whatever you think of 1953, a government that holds diplomats hostage violates one of the oldest rules in international life. Embassies are protected, and that protection has existed in custom and treaty for centuries. Ancient envoys were immune from harm because without that rule, nobody could talk to anybody.

The crisis defined a presidency. President Carter tried diplomacy and sanctions, then authorized a rescue mission. On April 24, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw ended in the desert at a staging site known as Desert One, after mechanical failures, and a collision between aircraft killed eight American servicemen. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, under an arrangement worked out through Algeria.

The regime's first act on the world stage was to take hostages. Keep that in your head the next time someone says the hostility began with us.

The 1980s: bombs in Beirut

Iran's revolutionary government also began to build tools to project its ideology abroad. In Lebanon, in the early 1980s, it helped nurture the militant group that became Hezbollah.

On April 18, 1983, a truck bomb destroyed part of the American embassy in Beirut and killed sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. On October 23, 1983, a suicide truck bomber hit the Marine barracks near the Beirut airport and killed 241 American service members: 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers. A nearly simultaneous attack hit a French paratrooper building and killed dozens more. A federal judge, in a civil case brought by families of the victims, later found that Iran was responsible for providing material support. Nobody should treat this as a footnote. It was the deadliest day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima.

It matters for the history because it shows the method. The regime does not need to fight a conventional war. It uses proxies, deniability, and patience.

The tanker war and the honest ledger

It is worth being fair about the 1980s, because the left will bring it up. Iran and Iraq fought a brutal war from September 1980 to 1988, and in the later years the United States tilted toward Iraq. Washington provided intelligence and diplomatic cover and escorted Kuwaiti tankers. That tilt deserves criticism, since Saddam Hussein's regime was no friend of ours either, and the arrangement left us in an ugly position.

In April 1988 the guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Gulf and was badly damaged. The Navy retaliated on April 18 with Operation Praying Mantis, sinking or damaging several Iranian vessels. And on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger jet, Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people aboard. The Reagan administration called it a tragic accident in a combat zone. Iranians remember it as an atrocity. Both of those are honest parts of the record, and a fair history keeps them.

1985 and 1986: when Republicans got it wrong

This is where a conservative earns credibility by criticizing his own side. In 1985 and 1986, officials of the Reagan administration secretly sold American-made missiles to Iran, in the hope of winning the release of hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian-backed groups. Proceeds were then diverted to support the Contra forces in Nicaragua at a time when Congress had restricted such aid through the Boland Amendments. The scheme became public in November 1986 and set off investigations, including the Tower Commission, which was appointed by the President himself.

Several officials were charged. Some convictions were later overturned on technical grounds involving immunized testimony, and in December 1992 President George H. W. Bush pardoned six people connected to the affair.

I will say it plainly. Selling weapons to a regime that was, by our own State Department's designation, a sponsor of terrorism, to ransom hostages, contradicted the administration's own stated policy of making no concessions to hostage-takers. Arming Iran was a mistake. It rewarded the tactic. A history that leaves it out is propaganda, whichever side writes it. Conservatives lose nothing by saying so, and we gain the standing to say the rest.

The 1990s through 2020: the proxy years

From the 1990s forward the pattern widened. In June 1996 a truck bomb at the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia killed nineteen American airmen. The American indictment that followed alleged Iranian support for the Saudi Hezbollah group that carried it out.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American commanders reported that Iran's Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guard, supplied militias in Iraq with advanced roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, which could punch through armor. Military officials attributed the deaths of a significant number of American troops to those weapons. I am deliberately leaving out a number, because the exact count is disputed and you should check it before you repeat it.

Iran also backed the Assad government in Syria and supported armed groups across the region. In January 2020, an American strike in Baghdad killed Qasem Soleimani, the longtime commander of the Quds Force. Critics called the strike reckless, and supporters called it overdue. Whichever side you take, notice that the man at the center had spent two decades running the very network we have just described.

I am stopping the chronology at 2020 on purpose. History needs distance, and this post is about how the pattern was built.

The best objection, answered

The strongest objection goes like this: Even if the regime is ideologically hostile, American policy shaped how hardliners rose. Humiliation in 1953, backing Iraq in the 1980s, and isolation afterward strengthened the people who benefit from having an enemy.

There is something to this. Regimes do use outside threats to justify domestic repression. But the answer is that the hardliners were not created by us. They wrote their own constitution, kept their own prisons, and trained their own proxies. And note the direction of the causal arrow. The United States tried talks, tried détente, tried deals, and tried sanctions across administrations of both parties, and the basic posture of the regime did not change. If grievance explained everything, a decade of outreach should have moved the needle more than it did.

For a closer look at how that outreach ended up, see Why Republicans Said the Iran Deal Should Have Been a Treaty. And for a scorecard on the pressure side of the ledger, see When Sanctions Worked, When They Failed, and Why the Difference Matters.

The fairest reading is also the least comfortable for both camps. The left is right that 1953 happened and that we should not pretend otherwise. The right is right that the Islamic Republic made hostility a pillar of its identity, from the hostages in 1979 to the bombs in Beirut. Both things are true. Only one of them can be changed by an American president, and it is not the one that happened in 1979.

What the history teaches

Three lessons, plain and short.

• Covert fixes leave debts. The 1953 operation looked cheap and clean. It left a grievance that outlived everyone who planned it.
• Rewarding hostage-taking buys more hostage-taking. Iran-Contra proved that again. Whatever the intentions, the transaction told the other side the tactic pays.
• Take the regime at its word. A government that chants against you in public and trains proxies in private is telling you its plan. Believing it is not paranoia.

Our own record in this story is mixed, and a history that hides the mixed parts cannot be trusted on the clear parts. The alliance with the Shah, the tilt toward Iraq, and the arms sales were all judgments made by our own officials, and they deserve scrutiny. But scrutiny of ourselves does not erase what the regime has done. For more on how American presidents have handled the peace-through-strength side of this, Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse makes the case from a different theater, and Vandenberg's Conversion and the Republicans Who Built the Postwar Order shows how an earlier generation of Republicans thought about alliances.

The bottom line

• Yes, 1953 happened, and yes, it was a serious mistake. Say so, and you take away your opponent's best card.
• No, it does not explain 1979. The regime's founding doctrine, the embassy seizure, and the decades of proxy attacks were choices made in Tehran.
• Be wary of anyone, left or right, who tells the story with only one side of the ledger. The Iran-Contra scandal and the 1988 shoot-down belong in the record too.
• When someone tells you our policy toward Iran just needs a friendlier tone, ask what the last four decades of friendly tones produced.
• Read the sources yourself: the National Archives on the hostage crisis, the congressional reports on Iran-Contra, and the federal court record on Beirut.