Iran: The Neocon Playbook

In 1953, the CIA and British MI6 orchestrated a coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The operation — code-named AJAX — was launched because Mosaddegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later renamed BP), ending British control over Iranian oil. The coup installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ran a repressive monarchy backed by a US-trained secret police (SAVAK) for the next 26 years.

The CIA formally acknowledged its role in the coup in 2013, releasing declassified documents confirming that the operation was "explicitly a US foreign policy operation." The documents confirmed that the stated goal was "to remove Mosaddegh from power."

When the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah and Iranian students seized the US Embassy, American news coverage treated it as inexplicable hostility. The 1953 coup — and the 26 years of US-backed authoritarian rule that followed — received far less attention. This is where the "anti-American hostility" the US media warns about was manufactured.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 by Iran, the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China, was a verified arms-control agreement. The IAEA — the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog — repeatedly confirmed Iran was in compliance with its obligations. Iran had reduced its uranium enrichment to agreed levels. Inspectors had access to declared facilities.

In May 2018, Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and reimposed comprehensive sanctions on Iran — including "secondary sanctions" that threatened to punish European companies doing business with Iran. Trump described his decision as "maximum pressure." The IAEA confirmed Iran had been complying at the time of US withdrawal.

After US withdrawal, Iran began incrementally exceeding its JCPOA limits — a predictable consequence of the US having broken the deal first. US officials and media subsequently reported Iran's non-compliance as evidence of Iran's bad faith, without noting that Iran had been in compliance when the US pulled out.

Comprehensive US sanctions on Iran have extended beyond their stated military and nuclear targets to affect civilian access to medicine, medical equipment, and basic goods. Multiple human rights organizations — including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — have documented that despite formal exemptions for humanitarian goods, the sanctions regime has effectively cut Iran off from international banking systems needed to pay for medicines and equipment.

Patients with cancer, thalassemia, epilepsy, and rare diseases have faced shortages of treatment drugs. Medical equipment manufacturers have declined to ship to Iran due to secondary sanctions risk, even where the equipment itself is nominally exempt. Iranian hospitals have reported inability to obtain replacement parts for dialysis machines and surgical equipment.

"Maximum pressure" is not a policy that stops at military assets. It is collective punishment of a civilian population for the choices of their government — a government that has been in power, in part, because the US and UK destroyed the democratic alternative in 1953.

The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose signatories included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton, identified Iran as a target in the same 1997 documents that called for regime change in Iraq. When the Iraq War — premised on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist — proved catastrophically wrong, the same network pivoted to Iran without pausing to acknowledge the Iraq failure.

John Bolton — Trump's National Security Adviser 2018–2019 — has publicly called for military strikes on Iran in 2015, 2018, and multiple times since. He resigned after Trump rejected his push for strikes following attacks on Saudi oil facilities. The Israeli government has lobbied for US military action against Iran's nuclear program since 2010. AIPAC has made Iran's nuclear program a centerpiece of its political spending.

The pattern: manufacture urgency, dismiss diplomacy, label opponents as appeasers, frame military action as the only option that takes the threat seriously. It worked for Iraq. The only thing that has prevented it from working for Iran is the scale of the Iraq disaster.

Iran holds the world's fourth-largest proven oil reserves and the world's second-largest proven natural gas reserves. Its geographic position along the Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 20% of global oil supply flows — makes control of Iranian foreign policy a permanent objective of oil-state actors and the US strategic class.

The defense contractors who profit from Middle East military operations — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Boeing Defense, General Dynamics — are among the largest political donors in the United States. A war with Iran, estimated by analysts to cost at minimum $1 trillion, would be the largest defense procurement event since the Iraq War.

The working class that would fight that war, the civilians — American and Iranian — who would die in it, and the global economy that would be disrupted by Strait of Hormuz conflict: none of them would profit. The same people who profit from every US war would profit from this one. That is the relevant fact about every "national security" argument for war with Iran.