Jeremy Scahill

The United States was also engaged in similar activities inside of Iraq as well.

And so Mossadegh is overthrown and the U.S.

reimposed the Shah of Iran, a monarchist regime.

And over the decades between 1953 and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, you had an increasingly brutal, autocratic, U.S.-backed dictatorship that was in control of Iran.

And of course, that dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution that brought Khomeini to power.

And so from 1979 all the way to the present, Iran has existed as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And the United States has, for all of those decades, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, portrayed Iran as the kind of great menace in the Middle East.

Now, the counter narrative to that is that the imposition of the state of Israel on the region in 1948, 1949, beginning with the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Nakba, most people in that region would say that that was the sort of lighting of the fire for all of these wars, etc.,

And to bring it more into the modern context, both Democrats and Republicans have wanted to overthrow the Iranian government since 1979.

When Donald Trump was in his first term in office, he ripped up really a landmark deal that had been brokered in 2015 during the Obama administration that was meant to address what the US and Western European countries were saying was the kind of grave threat that is that Iran would pursue a nuclear bomb.

And so that agreement, by all measures, had ended any ideas in Iran about pursuing a nuclear weapon.

It should also be stated that U.S.

intelligence estimates going back decades said that at the end of 2003, the Iranians had abandoned any active program for making nuclear weapons.

That remains the current intelligence as briefed to Congress literally just this week by the director of national intelligence.

in that first Trump administration, when he won the election against Hillary Clinton in 2016, one of the first things he did was to rip up the Obama era deal.

He imposed these sweeping sanctions that were intended to kind of economically strangle the Iranian people in the hopes that they would rise up and bring down the government.

Trump was reluctant to get involved

overtly with a regime change war, although he did, for instance, greenlight the assassination of the head of Iran's most elite military force, General Qasem Soleimani, at the Baghdad airport toward the very end of his first term.

But he generally kept the kind of neocon wing of his administration in that first term, you know, one step outside of being able to push for this kind of regime change.

What we've seen happen in the second Trump administration is that the strands of kind of libertarianism or isolationism within the MAGA movement have been entirely sidelined.