We need a decisive break from the previous century of US policy toward Iran, which has been based on domination.
One year after the United States government assassinated Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and nearly plunged the two countries into war, will the new administration lead a shift in relations?
Incoming president Joe Biden has said that he wants to rejoin the Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump backed out of. But not every country will welcome the post-Trump United States with open arms—and picking up where Washington left off with Iran, in particular, may not be so easy.
A look at the last year in the US-Iran relationship reveals why. After assassinating Suleimani, Washington made other decisions that were devastating for Iranians. While Trump wavered and shrugged in the face of the pandemic’s toll in the United States, he was focused and relentless when it came to making life worse for Iranians. Even as the pandemic exploded, the United States intensified a decades-old sanctions regime, hurting the Iranian medical industry and impoverishing millions of Iranians.
Washington ratcheted up military hostility too, doing just about everything to provoke Tehran short of actually invading Iran. It moved aircraft carriers to Iran’s coast and kept them there for the entire year. It added thousands of troops to the region in countries surrounding Iran, where they joined the many thousands who were already stationed there. It armed and encouraged its allies Saudi Arabia and Israel in their own actions targeting Iran.
In fact, the year was bookended with the assassination of another high-profile Iranian, nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November. Fakhrizadeh had long been targeted by Israel, and a US official has said that Tel Aviv was behind the killing, though Israel officially denies it.
In the days after last January’s assassination, when the United States and Iran stood on the brink of greater conflict, Americans in multiple cities rallied, denouncing war. Crucially, Tehran showed restraint in its response, carrying out a limited attack on US bases in Iraq calculated to show that Iran could not be stepped on without a response, while avoiding American casualties.
Washington cannot count on that restraint forever, however, given that its hostility has produced tremendous Iranian suffering. That suffering, which is unavoidable for people in Iran, barely figures in the American conversation about the relationship. This is why we should not expect Iran to easily and graciously accept a US return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, the formal name of the nuclear deal)—and why a return to that deal alone is not enough.
American policy toward Iran needs to be guided by dignity, not domination. And that means, beyond rejoining the agreement, Washington must dramatically transform its approach. This should start with dismantling every aspect of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign—including the sanctions, additional troop deployments, and the assassinations.
But the United States must also work to repair the damage from a much longer history of violence toward Iran.
That history began in 1953, with the CIA-engineered coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular prime minister of the country’s first democratically elected government. Mosaddegh wanted Iranian control over its oil; in response, the US and British governments toppled him, and the autocratic shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, returned to power, which he would hold until his overthrow in the 1979 revolution.
Later, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, the United States supported the Iraqi dictator with arms and intelligence. Entire Iranian neighborhoods were flattened, and tens of thousands of Iranians were made refugees. Thousands of Iranians were killed by Saddam’s chemical weapons while a million people on both sides lost their lives in the war.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-iran-sanctions-nukes/
