News agencies, bloggers, activists, and everyone in between have spent the last three days talking about a series of US air and drone strikes in Iraq that have killed leading members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Tehran-backed Iraqi militias, and Iranian intelligence officials. Some people were joyous that the United States directly attacked these militants, whereas others are fearful that this will only negatively escalate tensions. Regardless of what your initial reaction is, it is important to remember that the conflict against Iran started long before these drone strikes ever took place.
Over the past twenty years, both the IRGC and the United States have been heavily involved in Middle Eastern geopolitical affairs. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, the IRGC supported Syrian government forces while the US opted to back the Syrian rebels. In Israel and Palestine, the United States funds and supports Israeli military operations, contrary to Iran who aids HAMAS and Hezbollah. Basically, wherever there’s a conflict in the Middle East, you can almost guarantee that the United States and the IRGC are either partly or completely funding each opposing side.
So what led the United States to launch drone strikes against the IRGC and its’ allies? Tensions between the two nations have been heating up for quite some time. In April 2019, the White House announced that the IRGC would be classified as a terrorist organization. To counteract this declaration, the Iranian parliament’s Supreme National Security Council labeled the entirety of the US government as a “state-sponsor to terrorism”. To me, this was a strategic move by both the US and Iranian governments: it is a lot easier to justify targeting a terrorist organization than it is to tackle a foreign nation.
Since April, the United States and Iran have both been in a period of “detente”, using diplomacy to politically and economically isolate one another. As this struggle reigned on, both the United States and the IRGC also sought to intimidate their foes’ allies within the region: while the US launched strikes against Kataib Hezbollah near the Iraqi-Syrian border, the IRGC took it upon themselves to launch rockets at Saudi Arabian oilfields. These attacks against each others’ proxies boiled up to a point that eventually led to an American contractor being killed during an Iranian-backed militia’s rocket attack on an Iraqi military base. Following this, President Trump issued a warning to Iranian state officials stating that the United States would respond if Iran escalated things further. The IRGC fatefully responded by commanding Iraqi militia to raid the US embassy. As promised, Trump upped the anti and commanded the aerial assault that killed three senior allies to the IRGC, exponentially damaging their chain-of-command. Their names, as you know, are plastered all over the news.
To conclude, Donald Trump did not start a war with Iran: the war started long ago. Whereas Obama sought to appease the Radical Iranians, Trump drew a line in the sand, and held true when it was crossed by the enemy. The United States are not at war with the people of Iran, nor the Muslim faith. Rather, Trump is doing what he said he’d do: protect American lives.
Everybody is scared that Trump just started World War Three. Little do they know, the war was being fought this whole time.