Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
The conflict between the US and Iran is not rooted in any grand plan for Iranian control of the Middle East. It is the result of US concern about the system of alliances Iran has built up to prevent a repeat of the disaster of the Iran-Iraq war.
If since coming to office the new Trump administration has been making tentative moves towards repairing the US's fraught relations with Russia, towards Iran it has been acting with heightened hostility. It has blamed Iran for a missile attack on a Saudi frigate carried out by Yemeni forces, criticised Iran for its missile tests, and slapped more sanctions on the country. President Trump has made no secret of his strong disagreement with the Iranian nuclear agreement Iran agreed with the Obama administration, and he has also called Iran "the number one terrorist state".
What are the reasons for this hostility?
I should say first of all that I do not agree with the criticisms of Iran which are commonly made. Many of these assume an Iranian grand strategic plan to take over or dominate the Middle East by supposedly manipulating Palestinian and Shia Muslim grievances, and by waging war on Israel. There is in fact extraordinarily little evidence of such a plan, and I don't believe it exists.
As anyone who has had any dealings with Iranians knows, the central event in defining Iranian attitudes on foreign policy was the long and terrible war waged against Iran in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
This was a clearcut war of aggression, launched by Saddam Hussein in order to capture territory and to establish Iraq as the leading state in the Arab world. Like all of Saddam Hussein's adventures it miscarried disastrously, ending in a terrible war of attrition in which hundreds of thousands of people died, and which Saddam Hussein fought in his usual ruthless way, with chemical weapons, indiscriminate bombing of Iranian cities (including Tehran) and plans to develop nuclear weapons, which were only aborted as a result of the war he fought with the US over Kuwait in 1991.
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The Duran
The conflict between the US and Iran is not rooted in any grand plan for Iranian control of the Middle East. It is the result of US concern about the system of alliances Iran has built up to prevent a repeat of the disaster of the Iran-Iraq war.
If since coming to office the new Trump administration has been making tentative moves towards repairing the US's fraught relations with Russia, towards Iran it has been acting with heightened hostility. It has blamed Iran for a missile attack on a Saudi frigate carried out by Yemeni forces, criticised Iran for its missile tests, and slapped more sanctions on the country. President Trump has made no secret of his strong disagreement with the Iranian nuclear agreement Iran agreed with the Obama administration, and he has also called Iran "the number one terrorist state".
What are the reasons for this hostility?
I should say first of all that I do not agree with the criticisms of Iran which are commonly made. Many of these assume an Iranian grand strategic plan to take over or dominate the Middle East by supposedly manipulating Palestinian and Shia Muslim grievances, and by waging war on Israel. There is in fact extraordinarily little evidence of such a plan, and I don't believe it exists.
As anyone who has had any dealings with Iranians knows, the central event in defining Iranian attitudes on foreign policy was the long and terrible war waged against Iran in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
This was a clearcut war of aggression, launched by Saddam Hussein in order to capture territory and to establish Iraq as the leading state in the Arab world. Like all of Saddam Hussein's adventures it miscarried disastrously, ending in a terrible war of attrition in which hundreds of thousands of people died, and which Saddam Hussein fought in his usual ruthless way, with chemical weapons, indiscriminate bombing of Iranian cities (including Tehran) and plans to develop nuclear weapons, which were only aborted as a result of the war he fought with the US over Kuwait in 1991.
Read more
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