The US and Iran's decades as adversaries started with the Iranian revolution in 1979. But the seeds of those tensions were planted decades before.
The US and Iran have been adversaries for roughly four decades, and that contentious relationship has at times sparked acts of extreme aggression — including the assassination of Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani, on Friday.
Mossadegh introduced a number of reforms and was popular domestically, but his nationalization of the country's oil industry in 1951 was a step too far for the British, which had controlled Iran's oil for years via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co . The 1979 Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis at the US embassyIn 1979, millions of Iranians rose up against the shah, who was widely viewed as corrupt, dictatorial, and illegitimate. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile after leading protests against the shah's rule years years earlier, returned to Iran in February 1979 to great fanfare and would go on to declare Iran an Islamic Republic after his backers overwhelmed another faction in street fighting.
CIA documents declassified in 2013 showed that US intelligence officials helped Hussein gas Iranian troops in the later years of the war by conveying their location to Iraq, even with the knowledge chemical weapons would be used. At the time, Bush said:"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
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