The US-Israel war against Iran did not occur in a historical vacuum. It is the product of almost half a century of relentless Western hostility arising from an insatiable lust for regional domination, says Faisal Bodi.
The 2026 war against Iran did not start on February 28th, it has been decades in the making. Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that the West, led by the US, has been in a de facto state of war against Tehran since at least the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And just like the “Cold War” against the Soviet Union, it has been characterised by an unrelenting propaganda campaign intended to demonise the “enemy” and shape public and political opinion to accept it.
The origins of the West’s unhealthy obsession with modern day Iran predate the Islamic Revolution, lying in the post-World War 1 post-colonial carve up of western Asia to secure hydrocarbons needed to power their economies. Iran was never directly colonised but having possession of the world’s third largest oil and gas reserves (behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela) meant that it was never far away from the covetous claws of Western powers.
From the 1930’s to the 1950’s, it was Britain that extracted Iran’s oil wealth through the vehicle of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. When the popularly elected prime minister Mohammed Mosaddegh attempted to put a stop to the plunder in 1951 by nationalising the oil industry, London and Washington engineered a coup to topple him. His replacement would ensure western oil interests in the country for almost the next 30 years.
As with nearly all neo-colonial projects undertaken by self-proclaimed western democracies, their predatory nature needs to be masked by an appeal to noble intentions and higher motives. The 1953 overthrow of PM Mosaddegh was framed as a necessary intervention against the rising influence of the Soviet Union, the so-called Red Menace. Note how the same playbook is in operation today, only that the Communist bogeyman has been substituted by an equally threatening and tyrannical ‘Islamic fundamentalist regime’.
The use of pejorative terminology that “regime” exemplifies, along with the wider narrative, aims to engender animus against Iran in the western popular imagination in the service of neo-colonial objectives. It has been in operation ever since the Iranian people rose up in 1979 to depose the western puppet, Shah Reza Pehlavi. Much of it rests on the Orientalist trope of a bloodthirsty Muslim autocrat who brutalises his own population while simultaneously posing a clear and present danger to the rest of the world.
The violent anti-government unrest of January 2026 is a case in point. Incited and orchestrated by foreign intelligence agencies – including by its own admission the Israel secret service Mossad – the riots were a western sponsored insurrection to hijack peaceful and legitimate economic protests in reaction to the sharp fall of the Iranian currency in December 2025, itself orchestrated by the US as boastfully admitted by Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. The aim was to soften the state and security apparatus ahead of a knockout military campaign.
Western funded dissident media channels operating from outside Iran manufactured anti-government sentiment . If you relied on these and other western information networks, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an organic mass uprising against a “repressive regime”. Viewed inside this frame, the government’s response to the insurrection (wildly exaggerated in western settings) only served to reinforce that pre-existing construct. To augment the ‘internal threat’ to its own citizens, Iran’s purported nuclear weapons ambitions were resurrected (and to a lesser degree its support for the popular Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen), giving urgency as well as legitimacy to the military action that had already been planned.
The vilification of the Islamic Republic has become so entrenched in the West that all popular discourse proceeds from the premise that Iran is a rogue state and a threat to global peace and stability. This narrative is often amplified by voices on the anti-imperial left who, accurate as they might be in their criticism of Western policy, cannot conceive of liberation or independence outside western cultural norms. Even for those that aren’t so blinkered the pressure is so great that they feel compelled to preface their criticism with the de rigeur “I’m no supporter of the Iranian regime” refrain (with friends like them who needs enemies?).
Unfortunately, the same seems to be true of many Muslims, who have become willing or unwitting purveyors of Iranophobia. This phenomenon also has its roots in the fallout from the 1979 overthrow of the Shah which saw the region’s other major power, Saudi Arabia, launch a huge propaganda drive in the Sunni Muslim world to undercut support for the revolution. Hundreds of billions of dollars were pumped into spreading “petro-Islam” to boost support for Arab monarchies and undermine the immense popular appeal of the revolution.
Petro-Islam attacked what it framed as a religious aberration that had no basis or legitimacy in the Sunni tradition. It sidelined the revolution’s religiously inspired and universalist anti-imperial message to successfully peddle virulent anti-Shia propaganda, presenting the new republic as an insidious threat to Sunnism. Madrasas across the Sunni world were flooded with publications pushing anti-Shia polemics, most of them with little or no grounding in fact. The propaganda was so pervasive and so effective that three generations on, much of the Muslim world continues to reel under its impact.
By design rather than accident, it fed directly into the western aim of eliminating the Islamic Republic. But Iran withstood and it endures. And the US obsession with Iran only gets stronger the longer it survives. War is politics by another means and Washington’s resort to armed aggression speaks also to its inability to dominate Iran in the same way as it has co-opted most of its Gulf neighbours.
After the 2024 fall of Baathist Syria to a western-Turkish led pseudo-Islamic militia, Iran stands alone as the last bastion of Arab or Muslim independence. It refuses to conform to the template set out by the neocon think tank, the “Project for a New American Century” which used the events of 9/11 as a pretext for “regime change” in seven countries within five years, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran. The strategy dovetails with Israelis interests as enunciated in the 1982 Yinon Plan by which the Zionist entity seeks to exploit ethnic and religious faultlines in Muslim and Arab states in order to destabilise and ultimately Balkanise them.
More than Iran’s capacity to endure, it is what Iran represents that keeps western powers awake at night. Every day that Iran survives economic strangulation, international isolation, externally orchestrated insurrections and proxy or direct wars, is an excruciating reminder that there is an alternative to the existing world order. Iran is the reification of the natural human longing for an ethics-based politics. Its hybrid theo-democratic system cocks a snook to a world that pays only lip service to the liberal values it preaches and adheres to the maxim that might is right.
Iran not only stands firm against bullies but pushes back. For its adversaries, the attitude of defiance to injustice is just as dangerous as the physical resistance, for it is a source of inspiration to the oppressed. As Muslim majority nations fall like dominoes in their duty to protect Al-Aqsa and the Palestinians, dressing their pusillanimity in the garb of realpolitik or rapprochement (the latest iterations being the Abraham Accords and the Gaza Board of Peace), Iran refuses to submit.
Its stand on Palestine is not dependent on the shifting sands of national interests but enshrined in law as an expression of the constitutional duty of the Islamic Republic to “support the righteous struggle of the oppressed against oppressors in any part of the world”. It views the defence of Palestine as a religious obligation for all Muslims and has consistently dedicated a part of the state budget for this purpose. Despite the huge financial and human cost it faces, Iran has backed Palestine from the moment it drew its first breath. When all is said and done, this is the reason that it is in US crosshairs: it is a formidable obstacle to Western, and by extension, Zionist ambitions for regional hegemony.
