When the US backed dictator of Iran, Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979 and the Islamic Republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini was established in its place–and in November 1979, the Khomeini regime oversaw the taking of American hostages–US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote to President Jimmy Carter: 

“We are never going to be able to work with the Khomeini regime…[Khomeini’s Islamic revolution] was a true expression of deep-seated national will, and the anti-Americanism we are seeing is a true expression of national outrage at US actions over the past 26 years…We are not in control of events and we must prepare for the worst. The oil fields are what count in the final analysis.” 

Brezinski’s memo to Carter neatly encapsulates, 47 years after it was written, why the US has joined Israel in military aggression against Iran. A popular revolution overthrew a US backed dictator in one of the most strategically important and oil rich countries in the Middle East and established Iran as hostile to US and Israeli hegemony in the region. The current war is US revenge on the Iranian people for the 1979 revolution. 

Indeed that is the real reason for the war–not the Iranian regime’s massacre of thousands of protestors in the months before the war–or most particularly, the supposed threat of–in reality non-existent–Iranian nuclear weapons program. After all, Iran scrupulously adhered to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)–the nuclear agreement it signed with the Obama administration in 2015 until Trump abrogated it in 2018, claiming he could get a better deal out of Iran. Going back to 2007, and including the current Trump administration, US intelligence agencies have consistently determined that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. According to Oman’s foreign minister–who mediated talks between Iran and the US–Iran had agreed to completely give up its stock of enriched uranium just before Israel and the US launched their aggression on February 28th. 

The current aggression is but the latest crime against the Iranian people by American imperialism going back many decades. Brezinski’s Iranian “national outrage at US actions over the past 26 years” referred to the US being the primary foreign sponsor of the Shah’s dictatorship. It was the US and Britain who engineered the August 1953 coup which overthrew the Shah’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh after the latter nationalized the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC–later British Petroleum). The coup allowed the Shah to eliminate the last vestiges of Iran’s parliamentary system and establish a near totalitarian dictatorship. 

While criticism of his human rights record started seeping into American mainstream media in the 1970s, the Shah was frequently portrayed by politicians and media hacks alike as a glamorous and enlightened monarch, bringing his backward people into the modern age. In contrast, Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, described the Shah’s dictatorship in 1976 thusly: “the Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country has a worse human rights record than Iran.”

The US entanglement with the Shah’s regime went well beyond selling it billions of dollars in weapons annually, allowing the dictator to build up a bloated military with his oil riches while most of his people lived in misery. The US and Israel trained SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police. The US endorsed the Shah’s so-called White Revolution launched in 1963, supposedly a multifaceted effort to modernize Iran. However much of the White Revolution was hollow PR: for example, US Peace Corp volunteers on the ground in Iran discovered that health and education programs for Iran’s rural communities publicly touted by the Shah simply didn’t exist in any form; the villagers lived in as much misery as before.

After the Shah’s 1979 overthrow, the US inflicted additional punishment on the Iranian people: for example, the US deliverance of components to make chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein for  use against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq War; the shootdown of Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians; and most significantly decades long economic sanctions which have immiserated much of the Iranian population while strengthening the government. 

The Iranian Working Class 

In January a compelling and timely book on Iran-US relations–which provides almost all the quotations and points I make above–was published by Afshin Matin-Asgari, professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles.  What makes the book particularly unique is the author’s attempt to weave a key player into his narrative that is often missing from accounts of US-Iran relations: the Iranian working class. 

The Iranian working class has been a key force over the last century in struggling against foreign domination of Iran–as well showing great courage in struggling for better working and living conditions against the wishes of economic oligarchs, domestic and foreign. One of the most legendary movements of the Iranian working class during the early and mid-20th century  was the oil workers movement centered in Abadan, the port city and capital of Khuzestan province, 

 Another notable Iranian working class  achievement was the establishment of social democratic governments in Iran’s northern Azerbaijani and Kurdish provinces under Soviet military occupation during and just after World War II. Although operating under Soviet military occupation, Matin-Asgari notes that western diplomats believed that these regimes had massive support amongst the poor and working class in the region. When, under American pressure,  the Soviets withdrew their military from northern Iran in 1946, and the Shah’s British and American backed military re-occupied the region, Matin-Asgari relates what happened next from a quotation by US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was travelling in the Middle East at the time: 

“When the Persian Army returned to Azerbaijan it came with a roar. Soldiers ran riot, looting and plundering, taking what they wanted. The Russian army had been on its best behavior. The Persian Army–the army of emancipation–was a savage army of occupation. It left a brutal mark on the people. The beards of peasants were burned, their wives and daughters were raped. Houses were plundered; livestock were stolen. The Army was out of control. Its mission was liberation; but it preyed on civilians, leaving death and destruction behind.” 

According to Matin-Asgari, as many as 20,000 people may have been executed by the Iranian army and its allied right wing militias during the reoccupation campaign.

Mullahs vs. Leftists

Matin-Asgari writes that the rulers of the Islamic Republic in Iran have, over the years, specifically invoked the Azerbaijani and Kurdish republics in an attempt to bolster their own anti-imperialist and pro-worker cachet. Indeed, they have periodically indulged in socialist sounding, pro-worker rhetoric. 

During the Shah’s regime, Ayatollah Khomeini–then in exile in Qom, Iraq–endorsed opposition to a 1970 conference in Tehran attended by representatives of American corporations to discuss investment in Iran. Khomeini declared that “any agreement that is concluded with these American capitalists and other imperialists is contrary to the will of the people and the ordinances of Islam.” Matin-Asgari notes that one of Khomeini’s proteges, a young Shiite cleric, was tortured to death in SAVAK custody for publicly opposing this conference.. 

The Iranian working class and secular progressives led the 1978-79 revolution which overthrew the Shah–before it was co-opted by the Islamists led by Khomeini. It has been long forgotten, but Matin-Asgari notes that hundreds of thousands of workers across Iran seized control of their workplaces during the revolution, establishing shuras (workers councils)–these were eventually crushed by the Khomeini regime and the Iranian left as a whole was violently repressed.

Matin-Asgari writes that in 1979, the Khomeini regime and the United States seemingly had little ground for hostility. In spite of its mimicking of left wing rhetoric, the Khomeini regime was, in reality, ferociously anti-communist. The US made no initial attempt to overthrow Khomeini. Matin-Asgari suggests that the regime’s endorsement of the seizure of American diplomat hostages on November 4th 1979 by Islamic student radicals was motivated by the regime’s domestic political battles rather than any real antagonism to the United States. Khomeini feared his government was losing popular support to radical leftists within Iran and so decided to support the seizure of hostages so as to bolster his own anti-imperialist credibility among his people.

The Role of AIPAC

Matin-Asgari describes a picture where it seems rather curious that the US and Iran should be enemies rather than friends: in different ways both regimes are devoted to repressing workers in the interests of capital accumulation. Moreover after it was established in 1979, the Islamic Republic displayed a ferocious anti-communism: Matin-Asgari writes that the CIA and MI6 may have even fed the Khomeini regime intelligence which lead it in 1983 to launch show trials against leaders of Tudeh, Iran’s once proud Communist Party. 

Since the 1990s, Matin-Asgari notes, Iran’s leaders have adopted neoliberal policies within the country. They have sought to make Iranian workers more insecure: 6 percent of Iranian workers were classified as temporary employees in 1990 but that rose to 90 percent by 2014. The regime has also sought to create favorable conditions for foreign investment in the country–and of course, the Iranian working class has paid the price for this. In contrast to the views of pro-Iranian campists like Max Blumenthal–who imply that any mass protest against the Iranian government is entirely rooted in the machinations of the CIA and Mossad–Matin-Asgari writes that economic grievances among ordinary Iranians have driven the periodic wave of mass protests which the regime has violently suppressed. Key economic sectors in Iran are controlled by the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps in a highly secretive  fashion–corruption has flourished under such conditions. 

Thinking that the US and Iranian ruling classes share the same broad interest in facilitating capital accumulation at the expense of ordinary workers and thus have no real reason to be enemies, Matin–Asgari points to AIPAC’s influence on the US congress as being the primary source for driving hostility between the US and Iran. In the 1990s there arose a strong corporate lobby in the US–centered in the oil and agricultural industries–advocating for normalizing US relations with Iran so they could take advantage of business opportunities in the country.  The late Dick Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton in the 90s, even advocated for easing US-Iran tensions. Yet this lobby was unsuccessful, defeated by the anti-Iran pro-Israel lobby which induced President Clinton to issue an executive order voiding a contract to develop oil fields that the American company Conoco (now Conoco-Phillips) signed with Iran in 1995. 

In placing such stress on AIPAC influence, I think that Matin-Asgari misses the point that I argue above: that, regardless of what AIPAC or corporate lobbies do, US policy makers have long sought  to punish Iran for taking itself outside the US sphere of influence in 1979. The Iranian regime–however hollow its posturing may be–brands itself as the leader of “anti-establishment” forces in the Middle East: as the champion of Palestinians facing US-Israeli genocide, of Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression, of the Shia living as second class citizens in US backed dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. This makes the regime a mortal enemy from the perspective of US policy makers, whether Democrat or Republican. 

In spite of such a disagreement, I can well recommend Matin-Asgari’s book. It is very readable and has admirably judicious analysis of primary sources.