Bombing Iran

I figure I’m ok with bombing those nuclear production sites in Iran.

Yeah, I know tensions are high, but who in their right mind would want some country that’s hostile to the US (and our allies) to have a nuke that could kill millions in one strike?!

It’s not rocket science… or is it? It’s kind of a long story, and I had to do some googling for the timeline since it all kind of just blurs together after a while. Skip to the end if you just want my two cents.

So, the big deal about Iran is oil. They have a metric shit-ton of it. Back in the 50’s this guy Mohammad Mossadegh got democratically elected (means the Iranian people voted him in) as the Iranian leader. He was popular with the people because he wanted to take control of all the oil fields. That would have been great for Iran but really bad for the British since they controlled the oil fields at the time.

After this guy got elected, the British government got all pissy since they were going to lose a bunch of money and cried to President Eisenhower who told the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to get rid of the guy. I mean the brits are allies, so it would be a bummer to see them losing a bunch of bling, right?

The CIA, being the devious SOBs that they are, managed to rile things up and get the guy ousted and replaced with their puppet Mohammad Rez Pahlavi as ‘Shah of Iran’. This guy was a tool and totally under the thumb of the US. That worked out fine for a while and the brits kept the oil fields as far as I know.

Things were good between Iran and the US for a few years, so in the mid 70’s the US actually kick-started the Iranian nuclear program with some sort of agreement to develop nuclear power plants and stuff like that. Just a few years later the Iranian people decided enough was enough and revolted against the Shah. Maybe giving Iran nuke tech wasn’t such a good idea. Seriously, this guy was a real tool, and the people literally hated him.

Anyways! The Iranian people really didn’t like the US government at this point since we put that idiot in control of the country and basically let the brits milk their oil fields dry until things came to a head in ’79. The Shah fled Iran to the US in January and Ayatollah Khomeini became the ‘supreme leader of the Islamic Republic’ This is a guy that the Shah had arrested and deported years earlier.

Not long after, a bunch of Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took a bunch of hostages. I’m a little fuzzy on how a bunch of university kids were able to storm the embassy and hold these people as hostages to negotiate for the extradition of the Shah back to Iran, but that was the ‘official’ news at the time. I’m pretty sure Khomeini was behind it all, but he didn’t want to admit it since that would have been a blatant declaration of war.

Iran keeps these people on ice until President Reagan’s inauguration in January of ’81. The hostages get released a few minutes after the ceremonies. A bunch of Iran state assets got unfrozen as part of the deal (the Shah died in July of ’80 while in Egypt, so they couldn’t get him). President Carter had cut diplomatic ties with Iran prior to Reagan taking office, so it was kind of big deal to get those people released. This was some major political hocus-pocus in my opinion, but I liked Reagan. He had jellybeans.

This is where things get fuzzy. The Iran-Iraq war started in September of 1980 under President Carter’s watch and continued until August of ’88 under President Bush. The US gave BILLIONS of dollars in aid to Iraq (who we later bombed along with Syria) to support the war. President Reagan declared Iran a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ in 1984, which still stands today. There was some major garbage with the Iran-Contra Affair during President Reagan’s term and in July of ’88 the USS Vincennes ended up shooting down the civilian passenger jet Iran Air Flight 655, mistaking it for a fighter jet (I can’t make this stuff up).

Shortly after the civilian plane got shot down, the Iran-Iraq war officially ended in 1988 with Iran’s acceptance of a ceasefire. The results? A half million dead people (mostly Iranians), no border changes, a trillion-dollar cost, and all the atrocities that go along with chemical warfare. War sucks.

Fast forward to 2002 where President Bush refers to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an ‘Axis of Evil’ during his State of the Union address after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers. Just to clarify, the Taliban that supposedly were responsible for 9/11 is an Afghan political and militant movement out of Afghanistan. My brain hurts a little linking trying to link everything up, but that’s how it worked out. Thank you, President Bush.

In 2003 (thirty years after we gave Iran nuclear skills), President Bush got worked up about a report that Iran had some highly enriched uranium at a nuclear plant. This is the stuff used to make the bombs. Long story short, they denied it and pissed and moaned about US sanctions for the next 10 years until they signed an agreement with President Obama to ‘slow Iran’s nuclear development’ in order to lift the Iranian sanctions.

Of course, the agreement was completely ignored by Iran and the US backed out of it in 2018 when President Trump called it out as the garbage it was. President Trump then decided to again implement the always ineffective, but ever popular sanctions against Iran. I don’t think it did much good.

President Trump double downed in 2019 and designated the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization. I’m not sure how this differed from President Reagan declaring all of Iran a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ in 1984, but there it is. Iran responded by declaring the US a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. Just like President Reagan did to them 35 years earlier. Feels bad.

2019 was a banger year. After President trump called out the Iranian military as terrorists they blew up some oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, exploded some oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, shot down a US drone and announced it was going to totally ignore the still existing nuclear deal it had with the rest of the world and ramp up enrichment of its uranium.

Not sure how it was related, but the US did airstrikes against Iraq and Syria later in 2019 which resulted in pro-Iranian demonstration trying to storm the US embassy in Baghdad (Iraq). A few people were killed in the air strikes. This stuff just gets more stupid crazy going forward.

In 2020, President Trump ordered an airstrike to kill Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani with a drone strike since he was the leader of the IRGC that he designated as terrorist the year before. It worked, and Iran retaliated by firing missiles at military bases with US troops located in Iraq. Nobody was killed, but President Trump decides to increase the sanctions against Iran again (since it’s been working so well /s).

Now it’s Iran’s turn to shoot down a civilian passenger jet, mistaking it for a US military aircraft. All 176 people on board are killed. They followed it up with the harassment of American warships in the Arabian Sea and showing off their ICBM tech by launching its first satellite into orbit, proving they can send a missile to US soil.

Cue President Biden. He attempted to revive the nuclear deal while Israel blew up an Iranian nuclear facility. Obviously, that didn’t go over well, so Iran ramped up its uranium enrichment program again to make nukes faster. Things seem to quiet down for a while after Iran gets a new president, but I guess Russia sees this as an opportunity, so they invaded Ukraine with Iran providing weapons to support Russia. With the focus on Ukraine now, Iran keeps making nuclear stuff.

There’s more stuff that happens in 2022-2024 but President Biden was mostly asleep at the wheel until shit hit the fan in April of 2024 when Iran fired a couple hundred missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria that killed sixteen people. Eight of them were IRGC officers.

Iran still wants to kill people in the US and Israel, but President Trump proposed a new nuclear deal to Iran in March of this year which was “very close to a solution” at the end of May, but I guess it didn’t work out since Israel started bombing Iran nuclear facilities on June 13th of this year.

According to the news – As of today, the US has bombed the crap out of the Iranian nuclear facilities. I say good riddance. I don’t want an Iranian nuke landing anywhere close to me. Yeah, I think Iran has gotten a raw deal with US interactions for a lot of years. No, I don’t know what I would change. The US dollar runs on oil and the last 70 years of politics has been all about the money. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

The US started screwing with Iran a long time ago. Feels bad, but nothing any of us can do about it now. Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want a nuke in my face any time soon, so I’m glad we bombed those facilities. It’s probably just kicking the can down the road a bit, but I’m pretty sure there are bigger things on the horizon than the squabbles of nations.