Elect Leaders Who Stop Lying About the Role of the United States in the Middle East

War in the Middle East won’t end until we elect more leaders who tell the truth about how the United States precipitated and continues to prolong the conflict with Iran and Palestinians.

In my years as a classroom teacher, I often broke up schoolyard fights and attempted to bring peace. After my enforced “ceasefire,” both sides invariably proclaimed, “He/she started it.” Indeed, someone was the catalyst, usually along with some prior history. Nonetheless, both sides believed their own take. Getting to the truth that someone bore more responsibility was important to avoid repeated altercations. The same is true across nations.

Focus less on who “won” the ceasefire with Iran and more on the core issue: Unless the United States confronts its longstanding provocative role in Middle East conflicts, cycles of violence will persist.

How did Iran, dwarfed economically, militarily, and geographically by the U.S., become a larger-than-life archenemy?

It didn’t start with the current U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran, the October 7 Hamas attack, the Israeli genocidal response, or even with Iran’s taking of American hostages in 1979. It goes much further back. If we are honest, the United States started and prolonged it, even if Iran subsequently engaged in aggression.

A few highlights:

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, European powers carved up the Middle East for their colonial advantage, and for the United States, access to oil, and subsequently as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. Following the Holocaust and Germany’s defeat in WWII, Europe forcibly solved its “Jewish problem” on someone else’s soil while creating a strong foothold in strategically important Palestine with the establishment of Israel as an ethnonationalist state in 1948. Predictably, armed resistance and the enmity of surrounding states followed.

Shortly thereafter, in 1954, the United States and Great Britain conspired to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected, anti-colonialist leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and installed a friendly dictator, Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The decades of support from the U.S. for the Shah’s repression and corruption led to the Iranian Revolution and clerical domination. When the Shah was deposed in 1979, he fled and eventually landed with asylum in the U.S. The Revolutionary Guards took American embassy staff hostage. The principal demand was the Shah’s return to stand trial for his crimes. Henceforth, successive U.S. regimes portrayed Iran as the aggressor who started the conflict.

U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran and subsequent war as a transactional arrangement to contain the Iraqi revolution. That continued until Hussein became an obstacle to projecting American power in the Middle East, the lies about weapons of mass destruction, and the disastrous Gulf Wars. All along, the U.S. supported the religiously dominated monarchy in Saudi Arabia to maintain access to oil and counter Russian and Iranian influence.

With these constant threats, is it any wonder that Iran sought to protect its ability to develop nuclear weapons as a protection against the United States?

During the same period, the U.S funneled billions of dollars in aid to the mujahideen’s resistance fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan– and at least indirectly, Osama Bin Laden, the eventual mastermind of the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Throughout these years, the United States maintained steadfast military and diplomatic support for Israel’s land theft from and domination of Palestinians, the self-serving fantasy of Israel as the only Middle East democracy, the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and now, genocide, and continued settler-led and IDF-supported violence.

There’s more detail to discuss about Palestinian resistance, the emergence of Hamas and Hezbollah, and Iran’s support, but ultimately, a century of U.S. bipartisan policy is at the root of today’s crisis, with Trump’s recent actions only worsening the situation.

Too much of the media and bipartisan political analysis assumes Iran as an implacable enemy, casting Trump as bungling the essential job of their defeat, without examining the role of the United States in creating the conflict.

I don’t expect either GOP or Democrat leaders to change direction, not with all the campaign contributions from AIPAC and the defense industry paying them to stay the course. That takes organizing. I do have some hope. A growing majority of Americans no longer supports the logic of unconditional support for Israel and its abhorrent behavior. That is a dramatic reversal. And most of us can readily observe the stupidity of the current Iran war.

There are red lines. Let’s start electing leaders who reject the deadly narratives of the past century. Let’s start rejecting politicians who talk progressive except for Israel’s genocide in Palestine.