Why Iran’s anger at America is rational — and why that is not the same as innocence

I see two common frameworks weaving their way through Western media these days, and I’d like to correct them both at once, as they tend to feed off of one another.

The first is the one you see every day on the US internet: that Iran is a deranged country run by medieval clerics, a nation of fanatics who scream, “Death to America!” for no reason a sane person could reconstruct. From that caricature a conclusion quietly follows — that a people this irrational can be bombed, sanctioned, and killed without the rest of us needing to think too hard about it. That is not analysis. That is propaganda standing in for memory, and it has a body count.

The second framework is the mirror image. This is the one I see in the well-meaning Western essays written to refute the first. In rushing to humanize Iran, they sand the Islamic Republic down into a blameless victim, a civilization that has only ever had things done to it. That is also false, and anyone who lets it pass is not defending Iran. They are flattering it, which is a different and lazier thing.

The honest position debunks both frameworks at once. Iranian anger at the United States is not theological lunacy. It is the rational, earned response of a people to whom the 20th century, and the Western powers who shaped it, were repeatedly and deliberately unjust. In addition to this, the regime that channels this anger has its own long record of cruelty, much of it directed at its own people, and it manufactures and meters that anger for its own survival. Neither of those sentences cancels the other. You have to carry both together in your head or else you understand nothing.

Let me show you the history, warts and all.

The oil, and the terms of the theft

Start in 1901, not 1979. That year, a British speculator named William Knox D’Arcy obtained a concession to search for oil across most of Iran. He was granted 60 years of rights in exchange for a modest cash payment and a 16% share of net profits that Iran was not allowed to ever actually audit. In 1908 the drilling struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in the southwest, the first major find in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was built on that strike. It became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and eventually British Petroleum, the BP that today sits on the London exchange as a model of corporate respectability.

The British government took a controlling stake in 1914 on the eve of war because Winston Churchill had converted the Royal Navy from coal to oil. The fleet now ran on natural resources that were under a foreign country’s ground. Iranian oil did not merely enrich shareholders. It fueled the empire’s wars. What Iran got in return was a structural insult that lasted decades. Iranian workers in the refinery town of Abadan lived in conditions the company’s own British staff would not have tolerated — poor housing, poor wages, poor sanitation — while management enjoyed the clubs and the swimming pools. The royalty terms were lopsided, and the company refused to open its books to the Iranian government, so Iran could not even confirm how badly it was being cheated. Ervand Abrahamian lays this out cleanly in “A History of Modern Iran,” and so does Stephen Kinzer in “All the Shah’s Men.” The grievance here is not a feeling. It is an accounting fact.

Mosaddegh, 1953 — the crime, and the complication

Mohammad Mosaddeq is the figure the cartoon cannot accommodate, which is exactly why he matters. He was a constitutional lawyer, European-educated, secular, devoted to parliamentary process — everything the West claims to want in a leader of the region. As prime minister in 1951 he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, with the Majlis voting for it nearly unanimously and the streets celebrating. For the first time Iranians could believe the wealth under their feet might be theirs.

What happened next is no longer in serious dispute, because the CIA itself acknowledged it in 2013, releasing documents confirming that the August 1953 coup was carried out, “as an act of US foreign policy.” In Operation Ajax (the British called it Operation Boot), the CIA and Britain’s MI6 bribed officers, paid for street mobs, planted propaganda, and brought down the elected government of a sovereign state. Mosaddeq was tried and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, dying in 1967. The fullest scholarly accounts — Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne’s edited volume “Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran,” and Abrahamian’s “The Coup” (2013) — leave no doubt about Anglo-American authorship. This is the original wound, and Iranians are right to name it as such.

Now, here is the part the romantic version omits, and a historian should not. By the summer of 1953 Mosaddeq was governing in increasingly authoritarian ways. He had assumed emergency powers, then dissolved the Majlis through a referendum that reported absurd majorities and was, by any honest reading, rigged. He had broken with crucial allies, including the powerful cleric Ayatollah Kashani, narrowing his base at the worst possible moment. None of this justifies the coup — the coup was a crime against a sovereign nation, full stop. But the man toppled was a flawed and weakening figure, not a spotless democrat felled at the height of his legitimacy. Saying so does not weaken the indictment of Washington and London. It just keeps the history honest, and honest history is more durable than hagiography.

The shah’s gilded cage

In Mosaddeq’s place the West propped up Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had been on the throne since 1941. He is often described as a modernizer, and in narrow material terms — land reform, literacy programs, women’s suffrage — there is a case to be made. However, the political reality was a monarchy that grew more isolated and more repressive the longer it leaned on foreign support.

Note the date here, because the cartoon version of this story gets it wrong. SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, was established in 1957, several years after the coup, built with American and Israeli assistance. It became one of the most feared internal-security organs in the region, and its torture chambers did as much as anything to drain the regime of legitimacy.

The vanity is genuine and almost too perfect a symbol. The shah delayed his own formal coronation until 1967* — after 26 years on the throne — because he felt no occasion had been grand enough. Then in October 1971** he staged the celebrations at Persepolis to mark 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. Kapuściński’s “Shah of Shahs” captures the texture of that disconnect better than any statistic.

1979 — the revolution, and what it devoured

The revolution of 1979 was genuinely broad. Secular nationalists, the communist Tudeh, bazaar merchants, students, intellectuals, and the religious poor marched together. They wanted different futures and were united mainly by what they were against: a corrupt, repressive, foreign-backed monarchy. When Ayatollah Khomeini offered his doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist, part of what he was selling was dignity and sovereignty — the promise that Iran would belong to Iranians rather than to the court, to the oil companies, or to Washington.

Then the revolution ate the coalition that had made it. This is the chapter the sympathetic essays skip, and skipping it is a form of dishonesty. Once in power, the clerical leadership systematically destroyed its former allies, suppressing the leftists, the liberals, and the secular nationalists who had filled the streets. The cruelty was not metaphorical. In the summer of 1988, in a matter of weeks, the state executed thousands of political prisoners after perfunctory tribunals, many of them already serving sentences, in what is now recognized as one of the worst state massacres of the late 20th century. Abrahamian documents this in “Tortured Confessions.” Amnesty International has pressed the case for decades. Add to that the repression of women codified into law, and the recurring crushing of protest — 2009, 2019, 2022 — and you have a regime whose record against its own citizens is part of the historical ledger, not a footnote to it. A people can have legitimate grievances against a foreign power and be governed by a state that brutalizes them. Both are true of Iran.

The hostage crisis of 1979–1981 belongs in this same double light. The seizure of the US embassy and the holding of diplomats for 444 days was driven by a real and not irrational fear — that America would do again what it had done in 1953, reverse the revolution, and bring back the shah. That fear has a documented basis, but the crisis was also seized upon and prolonged by the new leadership as a tool to consolidate power and to crush domestic rivals. It was both a defensive reflex and a domestic power play. Most things in this history are.

The war, and the precise shape of American guilt

If 1953 is the original wound, the Iran-Iraq war is the one that hardened it into permanent distrust, and it is also where the polemical version most needs correction, because the truth is damning enough without exaggeration.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980. It was naked aggression against a revolutionary government still finding its feet. The popular claim that Washington gave Saddam a “green light” to invade does not hold up. In 1980 Iraq was a Soviet client still on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. Historians who have worked the records — Bryan Gibson, and the military historians Williamson Murray and Kevin Woods — regard the green-light theory as convincingly debunked. The early American posture was wary neutrality, not instigation.

The tilt came later, and it is the real scandal. When Iran threw the Iraqis back and went on the offensive in 1982, Washington panicked at the prospect of a revolutionary Iran overrunning Iraq and the gulf. So in February 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the terrorism list, and in June 1982 Reagan signed a directive determining, in the words of his own NSC aide Howard Teicher, that the United States, “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran.” From there flowed satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, billions in economic credit, diplomatic cover, and a deliberate willingness to look away. This is all well-established: Bruce Jentleson’s “With Friends Like These,” Bruce Riedel’s writing for Brookings, and the National Security Archive’s documentary record (including the famous 1983 photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand) all converge on this.

Now, the chemical weapons, where precision matters most because the emotion is highest. Iraq used poison gas against Iranian troops on a massive scale — mustard, tabun, sarin — and the US knew. Reports reached the CIA as early as 1983, and the Reagan administration chose to keep supporting Baghdad anyway. The 2013 Foreign Policy reporting by Shane Harris and Matthew Aid, drawing on declassified files, showed US intelligence being shared with Iraq even as US officials understood that gas would be used. That is real complicity, and it is grave.

However, the weapons themselves were overwhelmingly not American. UN investigators traced the bulk of Iraq’s precursor chemicals to firms in Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, India, and West Germany. German companies in particular built much of the production infrastructure under the cover of pesticide plants. (There was a documented American thread — a New York–registered firm was prosecuted for shipping one key precursor — but this was a thread, not the whole spool.) So the accurate charge against the United States is enabling complicity: intelligence, cover, dual-use exports, and a calculated refusal to stop a war crime it could see. That is bad enough. It does not need to be inflated into “America gave Iraq the gas,” which is false and lets the actual European suppliers off the hook.

Halabja, in March 1988, is the most haunting episode. Thousands of Kurdish civilians (in Iraq; this was Hussein attacking Iranian forces inside Iraq) were killed in a single chemical attack, the largest against a civilian population in history. It deserves a further hard note, because it cuts against simple narratives in every direction. The attack came as Iranian forces had just taken the town, the victims were mainly Iraqi Kurds, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency initially muddied the waters by suggesting Iran might be responsible, a claim the weight of later evidence rejected. The American sin at Halabja was not the gas. It was the obfuscation, and the strategic decision to keep the relationship with Baghdad intact.

Iranian mothers who lost sons to those attacks are alive today. Iranian veterans still carry the scarred lungs. When they hear an American official lecture them about weapons of mass destruction, their bitterness is not a glitch in their reasoning. It is their reasoning, working correctly on the facts they lived.

The encirclement, and Iran’s own hand in it

Since 1979, the United States has subjected Iran to some of the most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed on a nation — on oil, banking, technology, and, through their knock-on effects, on medicine, in a country of nearly 90 million people. It has ringed Iran with bases across the gulf and beyond. Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated on Iranian streets, operations generally attributed to Israel rather than to the United States, though the strategic alignment is obvious. From inside Iran, this looks exactly like what it is: a superpower trying to strangle a state for the offense of refusing to obey.

Yet a historian cannot stop there, because Iran is not merely an object in this story. The regime made choices. It built a network of armed proxies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — Hezbollah foremost among them — that has killed civilians and destabilized neighbors; calling that “patient statecraft” or something, as the sympathetic version does, is a euphemism. Iran pursued nuclear capability with enough ambiguity to invite exactly the pressure it then complained about. Its rhetoric called openly for the overthrow of neighboring governments, which is part of why those neighbors bankrolled Saddam against it. The encirclement is real. So is the fact that Tehran helped build the coalition arrayed against it. Causation runs in both directions, and pretending otherwise is not sympathy — it is condescension, the soft bigotry of treating a sophisticated state as though it had no agency.

What the chant actually carries

So when Western commentators profess bewilderment at, “Death to America!” they are confessing their own ignorance, and they should be corrected. Strip away the theater and the chant carries the 1953 coup, SAVAK’s cells, Persepolis in a hungry country, a war the United States deliberately prolonged, and gas attacks Washington watched and abetted. If any Western nation had endured a fraction of that at foreign hands, the slogan born from it would be taught in its schools as an anthem of resistance. The asymmetry in how we read it — righteous when it is ours, deranged when it is theirs — is the real irrationality, and it sits on our side of the line.

Finish that thought honestly. “Death to America!” is also a state-managed ritual, scheduled and amplified by a government that needs an external enemy to justify the way it treats its own people — the same government that didn’t gas anyone but did execute its prisoners by the thousand, jail its women for their hair, and gun down its young in the streets. The chant is a genuine cry of historical injury and a manufactured instrument of regime legitimacy. Iranians themselves know the difference; many who honestly mean the grievance part of it despise the regime that performs it. We should be able to hold the same two thoughts they do.

The verdict

The thesis I started with survives the scrutiny, and it survives it stronger for the caveats: Iranian anger at the United States is rational, historically grounded, and morally serious. It did not come from the Quran. It came from Operation Ajax, from a stolen audit, from a desert party, from a war Washington would not let Iran win. Anyone who calls that anger “mad” or “crazy” has simply declined to read.

Now, the mirror-image error is just as corrosive, and I will not pretend otherwise to make the argument land cleaner. Iran is not innocent. Its government has tortured, executed, repressed, and exported violence, much of it against the very people in whose name it chants. There are no clean hands in this story — not Britain’s, not America’s, not the shah’s, not the Islamic Republic’s. The honest conclusion is not that one side is the cartoon villain and the other the blameless victim. It is that this is a history of injuries inflicted in many directions, that the West’s are real and largely unacknowledged in Western media these days, that Iran’s are real and largely unmentioned by its defenders, and that understanding any of this requires the discipline to refuse any flattering stories.

Iran is not a cartoon. Neither is it a saint. It is an old and complicated civilization with a long memory and a hard government, wronged by foreign powers and wronging its own people, and it deserves to be understood as the difficult real thing it is rather than as either of the convenient fictions we keep reaching for.

Civilizations have long memories. So should historians — including for the parts that complicate the case they would try to make.

A note on sources

The interpretive backbone here rests on standard scholarship rather than on any single polemic. On the oil concession, the 1953 coup, and the Pahlavi period: Ervand Abrahamian, “A History of Modern Iran” (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and “The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations” (The New Press, 2013); Stephen Kinzer, “All the Shah’s Men” (Wiley, 2003); and Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., “Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran” (Syracuse University Press, 2004). The CIA’s 2013 acknowledgment of the coup was released via the National Security Archive (George Washington University). On the revolution and the Republic: Michael Axworthy, “Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic” (Penguin/Oxford University Press, 2013), and Ervand Abrahamian, “Tortured Confessions” (University of California Press, 1999), on the 1988 prison executions. Ryszard Kapuściński’s “Shah of Shahs” (Polish 1982; English translation 1985) is the source for the texture of the late monarchy.

On the Iran-Iraq war and the American role: Bruce Jentleson, “With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982–1990” (W. W. Norton, 1994); Joost Hiltermann, “A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja” (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bruce Riedel, “Lessons from America’s First War with Iran” (Brookings Institution, 2013); and Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran,” Foreign Policy (Aug. 26, 2013). The debunking of the “green light” theory for the 1980 invasion draws on the work of Bryan R. Gibson and on Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, “The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History” (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The precursor-supply findings (Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, India, West Germany as the principal sources) come from United Nations investigative reporting compiled after the war; the documentary record of the US tilt, including the Teicher affidavit and the Rumsfeld-Saddam meeting, is held by the National Security Archive.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: history, iran, israel, middle-east, politics