Throughout its 250-year history, the United States has maintained that it has a legitimate mandate to overthrow rulers it does not like and impose in their place proxy regimes whose real function is to guarantee the interests of the White House and American corporations. After World War II, filling the vacuum left by the French and British empires, Washington implemented this state policy in the Islamic cultural area stretching from the Maghreb to Central Asia, with its heart in the Middle East.
Its first victim was the ancient Persian people, whose territory has been known as Iran since 1935. In 1951, the Iranians elected Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister, a politician who embodied all the virtues the West claims to applaud: he was moderate, secular, honest, enlightened, European-educated, democratic, and institutionalist. In 1953, faced with the refusal of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (in which the British invested greed and Iran invested oil) to account for what was clearly a massive hydrocarbon plundering operation, Mossadegh decreed the nationalization of this resource. The CIA immediately launched a plan to get rid of him and impose a dictatorship headed by Shah Reza Pahlavi. The process culminated in the 1953 coup d'état and included death squads, induced economic chaos, a campaign of demonization very similar to that continued against independent Iran today, and the bribery of politicians and military personnel willing to betray their country.
With the exception that Mossadegh was sentenced to life imprisonment and not murdered in cold blood, the script used in Tehran was replicated step by step decades later to eliminate Salvador Allende. This is not the result of speculation or anti-American prejudice; rather, it is detailed in CIA documents declassified decades after the crimes were committed.
Once the Shah was installed in Iran, Washington continued to overthrow nationalist rulers in and around the Middle East, in operations marked by a common element: secular politicians were systematically replaced by Islamist regimes practicing religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan (1992), Iraq (2003), Palestine (2006), Syria (2024) or by a total absence of a State where warlords and terrorist organizations thrive, as has been the case in Libya since 2011. Similar attempts to replicate this model were carried out against governments emerging from the process of decolonization or the collapse of unpresentable monarchies, but they failed or got out of the hands of the CIA.
This historical perspective allows us to understand that Donald Trump's farcical war against Iran cannot be attributed solely to the tycoon's well-known fondness for macho displays of force or his ideological alignment with Zionism, but rather is part of a bipartisan"tradition" that his country has followed for almost a century. However, he has left his personal mark in the way he presents the"peace" that was allegedly achieved after the farcical exchange of attacks, clearly calculated to limit the damage and serving more propaganda than strategic purposes, as a great victory attributable only to him.
The peace being claimed is as false as the previous bombings, since there can be no talk of a resolution to the conflict while Tehran is preparing to suspend all cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog and, above all, while the underlying reason for instability in the region remains untouched: the impunity enjoyed by Israel to perpetrate genocide in open daylight, seize its neighbors' territories, and bomb civilians under absurd pretexts such as"weapons of mass destruction," as nonexistent in Iran today as they were in Iraq 22 years ago. Even if the ultimate outcome of the illegal aggression against the Islamic Republic were the dismantling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons development program, speaking of success constitutes a mockery of the truth, of the American citizens who unwittingly finance their country's machinery of death, and of the thousands of victims of the attacks unleashed by Trump's decision in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw from the agreement reached three years earlier by Washington and Tehran, which established all the necessary safeguards to ensure that Iran's right to research and operate atomic energy would never lead to military applications.
