CIE hosts discussion on Iran War

Onyx Lovely / THE GATEPOST

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Editorial Staff The Center for Inclusive Excellence (CIE) hosted the discussion, “Beyond the Headlines: Making Sense of the Iran War,” on April 1. David Keil, computer science professor, said the FSU Human Rights Group pushed for this discussion to take place. The FSU Human Rights Group is a faculty, staff, and student group that studies and works on “meaningful action in the face of escalating existential global crises and their local manifestations,” according to Jonathan Martin, sociology and criminology professor. Joseph Coelho, chair of the political science department, and Martin led the discussion. Coelho said miscalculations and missed opportunities led to distrust between Iran and the United States, and when important events in the past shape the decision making for the path ahead, it is called “path dependency.” “Sometimes, those decisions in the past and those events narrow what we can or cannot do in times of war,” Coelho said. A particularly important event in Iranian history was a coup in 1953. Iran’s prime minister at the time, Mohammad Mosaddegh, won elections because he often spoke about nationalizing Iran’s oil, Coelho said. This, and the fact that Great Britain had been investing in Iran’s oil infrastructure, led to the United States’ CIA staging a coup which disrupted their government. “The fact that the Americans overthrew a democratically elected government - that is really part of their national consciousness today,” Coelho said. While the Shah was in power, Iran had good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, and they had one of the strongest militaries in the region because the United States trained Iran’s military at the time, he said. Most Iranians alive today were not around during that time period, though. “About 70% are under the age of 30, so it’s a relatively young society, right? So a lot of them romanticize. They see pictures. They read about Iran during the era of the Shah,” Coelho said. While Iran had a sense of “openness” to the rest of the world at the time, it was still an autocracy that didn’t sit right with their rising middle class, he said. Leading up to the 1979 revolution, when Ruhollah Khomeini became Iran’s supreme religious leader, he spoke about women’s rights and keeping religious figures out of politics. However, once in office, he monopolized his power, Coelho said. “A lot of those nice things he was talking about - none of those things materialized, as we know,” Coelho added. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis, during which Iran took hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran, caused a rupture in relations between Iran and the United States, he said. President Jimmy Carter struggled to get the hostages released, but as soon as President Ronald Reagan came into power, Iran released the hostages in hopes of the new president adhering to their demands, Coelho said. Reagan did not, and Iran viewed it as a betrayal, he said. Khomeini’s regime was able to consolidate more power in the ’80s during the Iran-Iraq War. During the war, the only country providing military support to Iran was Israel, which saw Iraq as the bigger threat to the region, Coelho said. After this war and the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was seen as “neutralized,” and Iran started to antagonize Israel, he said. Iran started to support organizations that engage in terrorism in the Middle East, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, he said. Through these groups, they can “create tremendous amounts of destabilization in the region through its proxies,” Coelho said. They saw Hamas as a “geopolitical opportunity to instrumentalize this conflict,” Coelho said. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Iran offered intelligence to the United States, he said. At this point, the Taliban and al-Qaida were adversaries to Iran, he said. When President George W. Bush gave his speech about the “axis of evil,” he included Iran in that axis alongside Iraq and North Korea, Coelho said. Coelho said that was, to him, a miscalculation because Iran was trying to help the United States with its “War on Terror.” Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but they were still invaded and their ruler was killed, he said. Libya gave up their nuclear program and their ruler was also killed, he said. Coelho said North Korea accelerated its nuclear program, and now they have nuclear weapons that can reach the United States. Iran followed suit, seeing it as the only way to defend themselves, he said. “It just makes rational sense for the Iranians to do this at this point,” Coelho added. Martin said it is difficult to argue the United States and Israel’s war is “morally justified,” as the consensus among experts and even Trump’s own former director of national counterterrorism, Joe Kent, is there is not any evidence of an imminent threat from Iran. Kent resigned when the war in Iran started, he added. Martin said negotiators reported before the war that Iran was willing to compromise, and then it was attacked. Martin said, “This was a war of choice by the Trump Administration,” and it violates U.S. law because Congress didn’t approve it. It also violates international law, which states it is only acceptable to attack a country in self defense, he said. In the war, it has been “well documented that the U.S. and Israel have bombed quite a few hospitals, schools, civilian neighborhoods, killing thousands of people, many of them civilians,” Martin said. The oil facilities in Tehran have also been bombed, releasing oil and toxic fumes into the water and air, he added. “To me, it’s pretty clear that a strong case can be made that both the U.S. and Israel are guilty of serious war crimes,” Martin said. To understand the causes of the war, it’s useful to understand right-wing authoritarianism and imperialism, he said. Martin said Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted the United States had to attack Iran because they needed to support Israel’s decision to attack. Martin asked, “But why was Trump the first president to be able to be convinced by Israel to do this, even though some of his own military and intelligence people warned him against it?” He said there is “clearly some overconfidence there.” Trump is a “president who is used to breaking the law and getting away with it, to be blunt about it.” Martin said Trump instigated the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and pardoned involved individuals who contributed to the violence. Trump also invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their leader, and wasn’t punished for that either, he said. Another factor is “incompetence,” Martin said. He said Trump admitted he didn’t know Iran was going to close the Strait of Hormuz and how it could affect the global economy. Some of the top U.S. military leaders are there because of their loyalty to Trump rather than their experience, he said. “I think there’s a side of the administration that was egging him on or agreeing with him because they’re yes men, because that’s who he hires,” Martin said. Distracting citizens from growing discontent is another cause, he said. The war is a way to pull focus away from various issues, such as the economy, the violence from ICE agents, Trump’s close connection to Jeffrey Epstein, and the upcoming midterm elections, he said. “Possibly, there’s the desire to kind of generate a crisis. Trump has shown a willingness to do this, to create crises in order to use them as an excuse to further repress the population,” Martin said. If the war accelerates and serious protests happen, Trump could use that “to invoke the Insurrection Act and possibly cancel the election,” Martin said. Authoritarian leaders go to war to both maintain and expand their power despite increasing public opposition, he said. “Trump is a classic right-wing authoritarian,” Martin said. There are also longstanding factors that go beyond Trump, he said. Throughout history, the U.S. has intervened militarily in other countries several times. “Our country has repeatedly invaded, bombed other countries, and instigated coups with questionable justification,” Martin said. He said there is a pattern of the U.S. going to war over false justifications. The public is misled and initially supports the war, they stop supporting it when costs rise, and then they find out they were misled. Often, it becomes clear in retrospect the real motivation was gaining political influence over a country and getting their valuable resources, he said. “Not for the country as a whole, necessarily, but especially for our multinational corporations that are operating over there,” Martin said. Also, war benefits the country’s military industry, which makes large profits off of war and has a “huge influence in Congress,” Martin added.