longer.blue

So Iran is a peaceful misunderstood country? What suite of drugs are you on? Let’s start back a ways, ever read about Persia? The early Persian empires were often the aggressors as they expanded into one of the largest territories in world history. Expansionist Wars (550–539 BCE): Cyrus the Great initiated campaigns that conquered the Medes, Lydians, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire to establish the Achaemenid Empire. Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BCE): Initiated by Darius I and continued by Xerxes I as invasions of mainland Greece. Now skip all the wars for 2,000 years. Iran’s Qajar dynasty leader, Fath Ali Shah, invaded the Caucasus territory 13 years later. It was a disastrous move; Russia pushed back Iranian forces and ended up taking what now is Armenia and the southern portion of independent Azerbaijan. Then there was the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-1857. Persian forces invaded western Afghanistan to press their claim to Herat. In addition, border skirmishes at the southern tip of the Shatt al-Arab were common in the first decade of the twentieth century as Iranian forces sought both to consolidate control over their territory and, at times, push into Basra, southern Iraq’s major city. In 1968, Iranian forces seized Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tonbs, islands that legally belonged to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. Then, there’s the case of Bahrain. Iran laid claim to the entirety of Bahrain. The shah agreed to abide by a referendum to determine whether Bahrainis sought to be part of Iran or have their independence. They overwhelmingly chose Independence. Iranian revolutionary leader Khomeini was not so magnanimous, however. As Bahrain approached its tenth anniversary as an independent state, Iran used a proxy group it trained—the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB)—to overthrow the monarchy and return Bahrain to Iran. Lest any apologist dismiss Iranian involvement as Arab propaganda, the Library of Congress has a full set of IFLB magazines with photo essays depicting Iran’s Revolutionary Guards training the group and IFLB officials swearing allegiance to Khomeini. Then there’s Hezbollah. About a decade ago, the Islamic Republic’s first two ambassadors to Lebanon gave a lengthy interview to Asharq al-Awsat, the largest circulation pan-Arab newspaper, in which they detailed Iranian involvement in the creation of Hezbollah. In its initial years, Hezbollah focused just as much on attacking other Lebanese groups as it did Israel. Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 (and the United Nations certified its withdrawal) but Hezbollah precipitated a war in 2006 by staging a cross-border raid into Israel. While Hezbollah has constantly framed itself as a resistance organization, it turned its guns on fellow Lebanese in 2008 in a fight for control over revenue. More recently, it has carried out aggressive ethnic and sectarian cleansing inside Syria on behalf of the Assad regime. It is an Iranian proxy through and through. And, of course, there’s the Iran-Iraq War. Iraq and Iraan had fought to a stalemate/ceasefire. According to former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s memoirs, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps pressured/convinced Khomeini to keep the war going until they met the goal of “liberating Jerusalem.” There followed six more years of bloodshed at the cost of perhaps a half million more lives. Then there’s the issue of “Export of Revolution,” defined in both the Iranian constitution and the founding statute of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as an essential part of the Islamic Republic. In 2008, according to the Iranian newspaper Emruz (Today), former President Mohammad Khatami suggested “Export of Revolution” was just a call to utilize power to show the superiority of the Islamic Republic’s system: Then, of course, there’s the fact that not only has Iran become the largest state-sponsor of terrorism, but it also continues its efforts to attack Israel with a declared goal of eradicating the Jewish state. Iranian leaders have continually called for “wiping Israel off the face of the world.” And when the father of the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program died in an explosion at an IRGC missile base, the Iranian press revealed that his will requested his epitaph read, “The man who enabled Israel’s destruction.” Even if we limit the timeframe to the last 50 years, to suggest Iran hasn’t been the aggressor is to ignore its sponsorship of terrorism and insurgency. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has been perhaps the most aggressive state in the Middle East, launching more attacks against neighbors and deploying its military far more widely and aggressively than any other country