Iran’s Alleged 47-Year War on America: Debunking the 1,050 American Deaths Canard
On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not even remotely establish that the regime in Tehran had been wantonly prosecuting a murderous war against Americans.
Thus, from the ballyhooed list of 1,050 Americans allegedly killed by the Iranian regime during the last 47 years about 29o of these deaths had occurred before 9/11. Yet more than 90% of these unfortunate fatalities occurred in Lebanon in the midst of the war between the indigenous Shiite/Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli occupiers, including 241 deaths of US servicemen at the Marine barracks.
So let us say it again. For crying out loud, US soldiers should never, ever have been in Lebanon. Moreover, by his subsequent action which amounted to “cutting and running” under the euphemism of repositioning these forces to a far away aircraft carrier, President Reagan himself admitted his mistake.
In a word, Israel’s long running battle with the PLO and other Palestinians, which had spilled over into Lebanon’s already fraught confessional fissures in the early 1980s, had no bearing on America’s homeland security. None whatsoever. Had Washington maintained the good sense to stay out of this fight, even the car bomb incidents at the US embassy during these years would surely not have occurred, either.
Again, this period also proves the hoary myth that Iranians or their proxies killed Americans because they hated our freedoms is just damn nonsense—casuistry confected by Israeli/neocon propagandists to fuel that Big Lie that Iran has been “attacking” America for nearly five decades. To the contrary, these deaths happened because Washington was meddling where it had no business intervening at all, thereby putting American servicemen and State department employees in harms’ way for no good reason.
During this 22-year period there were also a handful of incidents where Americans were killed in Israel or Gaza by Hamas operatives. Yet no one can argue with a straight face that without what was actually Iran’s limited, episodic and secondary support for Hamas (versus the much, much larger support from Sunni Gulf states) that Israel and Hamas would have laid down together in blissful harmony.
In fact, the perpetual war between Hamas and the Israeli govenrment would have been every bit as brutal and intense, and what were 7 American deaths attributed to Hamas during the 1990s would likely have happened anyway. Surely, the Iranian regime did not provide modest aid to Hamas in order to instruct it to go out and find visiting Americans to kill.
Indeed, even the 1996 killing of 19 American servicemen at Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia by Shiite militants actually proves a wholly different point. As it happened, the Saudi’s were supremely embarrassed by the breakdown of security with respect to the American troops still domiciled there at a time about five years after the First Gulf War ended. So in short order they rounded up six Shiite militants who they claimed had been responsible for the attack.
The interesting point, however, is that the Saudi’s refused to extradite these admitted members of Saudi based Hezbollah al-Hajaz, but instead extracted “confessions” from them with respect to their alleged Iranian-backing while in Saudi prisons. The only time America officials were ever allowed to see them or question them was on a single occasion from behind a one-way mirror in response to be pre-submitted questions. None of them ever faced US officials, prosecutors or courts without Saudi chaperones.
Needless to say, the attack occurred in the heart of the Saudi oilfields near Dhahran, which is the headquarters of Aramco, where a restive Shiite population has always been a supreme worry to the ruling Sunni government in Riyadh. And even at that stage Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran were already bitter foes.
So whether the Khobar Tower attackers’ confessions with respect to Iranian support were extracted by torture in Saudi prisons or actually contained some elements of truth cannot be known because none of them every faced American justice. But what is clear is that not a single one of the 6,000 US military personnel stationed in Saudi at the time should have been there.
As it happened, there mission at the time under Operation Southern Watch was to help enforce a “no fly” zone in Iraq against Washington’s erstwhile ally, Saddam Hussein. The latter, of course, had been unwilling to give up the ghost after having been driven from Kuwait during the first Gulf War.
In short, 19 American soldiers lost their lives in the ballyhooed Khobar Tower attack because they were located in a country where they shouldn’t have been (Saudi Arabia) to carry out a mission with respect to governance of Iraq (protecting the Kurds in the north of the country) that was none of Washington’s business; and which mission ended up in the cross-hairs of Shiite-Sunni conflict internal to Saudi Arabia that Washington didn’t understand and which incident may or may not have actually been directed from Tehran.
Then, of course, came the real blowback from Washington’s meddling in the middle east—the attack by 12 mainly Saudi Sunni’s on 9/11. And that had occurred, of course, because Osama bin Laden had issued his own form of fatwa against the alleged blasphemy of crusader boots on sacred Arabian soil during Washington’s fatuous intervention in the tift between Saddam and the Emir of Kuwait in 1990-1991.
And yet and yet. It gets worse. The above mentioned Operation Southern Watch was just a prelude for the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the spurious grounds of WMDs and the equally untruthful claim that Saddam had harbored the 9/11 attackers.
At that point, however, a long-running series of so-called terrorist attacks on American servicemen did occur, but the culprits were overwhelmingly Iraq-based Sunni’s. As it happened, the latter were definitely not copacetic with the American occupation, and, besides, most of them had been stripped of their Iraqi military paychecks under the foolish “de-baathification” when Saddam was shown the end of a rope subsequent to operation Shock & Awe.
Needless to say, as could have been easily determined then and is known without a shadow of doubt now, there were no WMDs or 9/11 terrorists in Iraq. Accordingly, the whole $1.5 trillion war, which included 4,500 American military deaths and upwards of 200,000 deaths among Iraqis, and which dragged on for more than a decade and which also later gave rise to ISIS and even more Sunni terrorism in Syria, should never have happened at all. There was not one single iota of Homeland Security benefit to the entire Iraq disaster.
Ironically, even then the seeds of the next war’s rationalization were being laid. To wit, the large Shiite minority in Iraq didn’t cotton to the Washington invasion, either, and were in possession of pre-existing militias and para-military capacities. So as the Iraqi revolt against the American occupiers gathered steam subsequent to the initial 2003 Shock & Awe invasion, this Shiite militias joined the fight.
Now anyone with even a minimum respect for the facts would say the Shiite militias who attacked US soldiers with both guns and roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were essentially Iraqi patriots—misguided or not—who wanted to rid their homeland of Yankee invaders.
At minimum, they weren’t sent to Baghdad by the Ayatollah to kill Americans. They lived there! And so had their ancestors for untold generations before them.
Yes, they happened to be Shiite and therefore religious kinsman of the Iranians, and they surely did get help in the form of training and weaponry from the IRGC, but what the hell?!
This very same Washington dispatched war machine had spent eight years helping Saddam Hussein slaughter Iranian soldiers—often barely armed mere teenagers— in the desert battles between 198o and 1988. The Iranians, therefore, just might have had a grievance.
But what is truly hideous is that the Bibi Netanyahu/Washington neocon axis has had the temerity to pick through the 4,500 death certificates of servicemen who lost their lives in the Iraq war in order to determine that exactly 603 or 13% of these senseless deaths were delivered by the hands of Iraqi Shiite militiamen who might have been carrying guns originating in Iran!
There is no words for such mendacious propaganda other than bull shit! And there is no word for the claim that 1,050 American have lost their lives to Iranian terrorism other than it’s One Big Stinking Lie.
Virtually, all of these deaths were owing to Washington’s folly in putting US personnel in harms way in the Hezbollah and Hamas battles with Israel or the utterly wicked US war on Iraq after 2003.
In short, virtually all of the so-called “terrorism” in the middle east has been generated either by Israel or Washington’s foolish serial interventions in the region after 1979. And even though these deaths were unfortunate and unnecessary, the hardly amount to a casus belli or a valid basis for the narrative that Iran has conducted a 47 year war against America.
Stated differently, virtually every one of these 1,050 fallen American servicemen or civilian officials were put in harms’ way by foolish decision-makers on the banks of the Potomac. None of them should have died, but even then over the 47 year period in question more than twice as many Americans died from being struck by lightening and four-times more succumbed to fatal cardiac arrest while having sex.
At the end of the day, the warmongers who peddle the 47-Year War on America narrative to justify the current mayhem in the Persian Gulf are basing their case on a story that is so threadbare that even Joseph Goebbels would have been reluctant to proffer it.
On the other hand, there has been a real war with respect to Iran. But it came from the Israeli assassination squads and the armchair warriors on the banks of the Potomac who have attempted to suffocate Iran via brutal economic sanctions and trade embargoes, as we will amplify in Part 6.
Even then, however, this relentless punishment has been based on the claim that Iran was seeking, or on the verge of having, a nuclear weapon. But that is even a bigger lie that has not been remotely valid, either.
Not one of these US military deployments from the Beirut Marine barracks incident of 1983 forward were necessary for America’s homeland security. To the contrary, all were elective wars undertaken pursuit to the imperatives of Empire.
Accordingly, the resulting deaths are due to putting American military and civilian personal wrongfully in harms’s way. And most especially from taken sides in local and regional military conflicts that were none of Washington’s damn business.
Footnotes
¹ Central estimate from itemized events (~971) plus modest additions for broader proxy support (e.g., Afghanistan, scattered post-2011 attacks), consistent with U.S. government compilations citing over 1,000 linked deaths.
² No confirmed fatal attacks by Iranian agencies/proxies on U.S. mainland soil.
³ Direct actions only (e.g., Karbala planning/execution, Levinson death in custody, select direct strikes); vast majority of fatalities are via proxies.
⁴ Proxy groups (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, Kataib Hezbollah, other militias); calculated as total minus direct govt figure.
⁵ Overseas military-focused incidents (e.g., Beirut bombings, Khobar Towers, Iraq 603, recent bases); this dominates the total. These figures draw from reliable sources like the Pentagon (e.g., 603 in Iraq), White House/State Department (e.g., 46 on October 7), and think tanks (FDD, AJC); exact attribution varies slightly due to classification or indirect responsibility debates.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
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