The Iranian attack against Israel, in retaliation for the bombing of its consulate in Damascus, is the latest episode in a long historical process of confrontation between the Islamic regime installed in Tehran in 1979 and the West. There have been almost five decades of confrontation. Ever since Shiite clerics overthrew the last shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, and seized power, the slogan has been “Death to America! “Death to Israel.” The rhetoric against “the big Satan” and “the little Satan” has not changed. It continues printed on the walls.
The Islamic revolution was an earthquake that profoundly altered the balance in the Middle East. It had a huge impact. A theocracy was born in a country of very extensive geography, of great economic and demographic weight, successor to the Persian empire, and with notable hydrocarbon reserves. It was compared to what the French Revolution meant for Europe. After the initial perplexity and a certain innocence, the view of Islam in the Western world changed. It was, in effect, the starting point of a very articulate, uninhibited and violent Muslim fanaticism that has manifested itself in diverse forms to this day.
The victory of the revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini – who lived in exile near Paris – was also, in part, the Iranian version of the anti-imperialist struggle. Behind what happened in 1979, the explosion of anti-Western resentment, was the humiliation suffered by the 1953 coup d’état, orchestrated by the CIA and the British secret services. The plot brought down the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohamed Mosadeq after Parliament had decided to nationalize the oil industry. Thanks to the hand of Washington and London, the Shah saw his power reinforced and thus definitively became a pawn of Western interests.
The destabilization caused by the Islamic revolution was immediately felt in the United States elections. The long hostage situation at the American embassy in Tehran was one of the reasons why Democratic President Jimmy Carter was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The Iranian theocracy drastically aggravated, both ideologically and materially, the geopolitical threat that had already weighed on Israel since it achieved independence in 1948. The ayatollahs caricature Israel as the outpost of a neocolonialist domination led by the United States. and that is why they urge the total destruction of the Hebrew State.
Also Iran’s Arab neighbors, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the petro-monarchies of the Gulf, were very sensitive from the beginning to the danger emanating from Tehran. Iraqi Saddam Hussein – then a useful instrument of Washington, Paris and other capitals – launched an eight-year war against Iran, in the vain hope that the theocratic regime would collapse and that he could seize rich disputed regions in the south. . The calculation was wrong, for Saddam Hussein and for those who helped him.
Terrorism has been one of the resources most used by the Iranian regime, directly or through allied groups, to confront its Western enemies and local rivals. The actions are counted in dozens over the years. Especially deadly were the 1982 and 1983 attacks in Beirut, first against the United States embassy and then against the North American and French troops that swelled the multinational UN force. There were hundreds of victims. The terrorist offensive has had very diverse and distant scenarios. Just a few days ago, the Argentine justice system confirmed Iranian responsibility for the anti-Israeli attacks committed in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, in which more than a hundred people died, a terrorist blow never seen in the South American country.
In parallel with its harassment of Westerners, Iran has expanded its regional influence with subordinate forces and allies, whether in Syria, Iraq – especially after the disastrous US invasion of 2003 – Lebanon, Yemen and the Palestinian territories. The Tehran regime therefore arrives at this clash with Israel, of unprecedented severity, as a consolidated regional power and which, furthermore, seems to be on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. This fact, with unforeseeable consequences, would mean, once again, as much or more than in 1979. a before and after in the Middle East and in global stability. Although there is strong internal opposition, especially from the youth, and a harsh economic environment, the ayatollahs are still there and have the world on edge.
