On April 9, 2003, a statue of Saddam Hussein came down in Baghdad.

American television carried it live. Marines wrapped a cable around the neck, an armored recovery vehicle pulled, and Saddam tipped forward and fell.

The United States had destroyed the Iraqi government in three weeks. From Washington it looked like victory.

From Tehran it looked like something else.

In under two years the United States had removed both governments Iran feared most. First the Taliban. Then Saddam Hussein.

Iran had nearly gone to war with the Taliban in 1998 after Taliban forces killed Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif. Saddam was worse. He had invaded Iran in 1980, used chemical weapons across an eight-year war, and killed an entire Iranian generation.

America removed both of them.

And then called Iran part of the Axis of Evil.

If that sounds contradictory, welcome back. Because the strangest thing about the American-Iranian relationship isn’t that two countries spent forty years behaving like enemies.

It’s how often one of them accidentally solved the other’s problems.

What Does “Death to America” Actually Mean?

Time to deal with the phrase.

The Persian is Marg bar Amrika. Literally, death to America. That translation is not wrong. Iranian official English versions sometimes render it “down with America,” which sounds considerably less homicidal.

Iran’s leadership has tried to explain the distinction. Khamenei has said repeatedly that the slogan targets American policy and the American ruling establishment rather than ordinary Americans — in 2015 framing it as death to American policy and arrogance, and in 2019 restating that the quarrel is with the government, not the people.

There’s real linguistic and political context there. There’s also an enormous temptation to sanitize it. Don’t.

The Islamic Republic has supported organizations that killed Americans. The Reagan administration

implicated Iranian-backed Shi’a militants in the 1983 Beirut embassy and Marine barracks bombings; 241 American servicemen died in the barracks attack alone. In 1996 a truck bomb at Khobar Towers killed

nineteen American airmen, and a federal grand jury later indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, with the Justice Department alleging that elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised the organization and directed portions of its surveillance. No Iranian official was charged — an important

distinction — but the allegation wasn’t rhetoric invented afterward.

So when Iranian officials say the chant doesn’t mean they want to murder American civilians, take that seriously. When Americans point out that the state chanting it has armed people who killed Americans, take that seriously too.

Both are true.

A slogan can be symbolic without being harmless.

The Enemy Becomes Useful

By the 1990s the relationship had settled. America sanctioned. Iran denounced. Iran backed Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups. Washington read Iran through terrorism, Israel and the nuclear question. And as we saw last week, Israel had gone from quietly selling Iran weapons during the Iran-Iraq War to treating Iran as its principal strategic threat.

Then September 11 happened, and for a moment the map moved.

Iran hated the Taliban. Iran hated al-Qaeda. Iran had backed the Northern Alliance — the same Afghan factions the United States suddenly needed.

So Iran and America cooperated. Not rhetorically. Actually.

At the Bonn Conference in late 2001, American envoy James Dobbins worked alongside Iranian

representatives toward the same goal: a post-Taliban Afghan government. Dobbins has publicly described Iran’s role as constructive and credited Iranian diplomacy with breaking negotiating deadlocks.

The country whose crowds chant Death to America helped the United States build the government that replaced the Taliban.

Because the Taliban was their enemy too.

Structure beat ideology again. For about five minutes.

Axis of Evil

January 29, 2002. Four months after 9/11, with American forces still fighting in Afghanistan, George W. Bush grouped Iraq, Iran and North Korea together as an Axis of Evil.

From Washington the reasoning was straightforward: Iran backed militant organizations, opposed Israel, pursued missile technology and had a nuclear program the administration distrusted.

From Tehran the sequence read differently. We just helped you beat the Taliban. Now we’re in the Axis of Evil.

Neither reading cancels the other. And Washington’s brief optimism had other causes for fading — accusations of Iranian interference in Afghanistan, support for Palestinian militants, and the January 2002 seizure of the Karine A, a ship carrying weapons the United States and Israel said came from Iran and were bound for the Palestinian Authority.

The opening narrowed.

Then America invaded Iraq.

The Greatest Gift America Ever Gave Iran

Saddam wasn’t just another hostile Arab dictator to Tehran. He was the man who invaded, the man who gassed Iranian soldiers, the man whose army nearly broke the Islamic Republic in its first year.

Iran spent the 1980s trying to survive him.

The United States removed him in 2003 — and then dismantled the state that had contained Iranian power. The Ba’ath Party was purged. The army was dissolved. Exiled Iraqi political organizations came home, and many of the most important Shi’a parties had spent years in Iran. The Supreme Council for the Islamic

Revolution in Iraq had been founded in Iran during the Saddam years; its armed wing, the Badr Brigade, had fought alongside Iran during the war.

Those people now helped build post-Saddam Iraq.

This is the strategic irony at the center of the modern Middle East. The United States invaded Iraq partly to transform the regional balance of power, and transformed it in Iran’s favor.

Washington destroyed Iran’s eastern enemy in Afghanistan. Then its western enemy in Iraq. Two American wars opened strategic space Iran could never have created for itself.

Tehran stepped into it.

That doesn’t mean Iran sat innocently by. The opposite.

Qasem Soleimani

If one man embodied what Iran did with the opportunity, it was Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the foreign-operations arm of the Revolutionary Guard.

His specialty wasn’t invasion. It was relationships. Militias, political parties, intelligence networks, weapons, training, money — people who could influence governments without formally belonging to them.

Lebanese Hezbollah was the mature model. Iraq became the laboratory. Iran cultivated Shi’a political parties while simultaneously arming groups that fought Americans. The United States accused the Quds Force of supplying rockets, sniper rifles, mortars and explosively formed penetrators, and State Department reporting identified the Quds Force and Hezbollah as training and equipping groups targeting coalition forces.

Americans died. That cannot be waved off as defensive strategy. Iran exploited a battlefield the United States created and helped armed groups kill American soldiers on it.

But look at the structure from Tehran. Hundreds of thousands of American troops next door on two sides.

American bases around the Gulf. A public designation as part of an Axis of Evil. Two governments overthrown in eighteen months.

If you’re sitting in Tehran in 2003, do you assume Iraq was the last one? Or do you build enough leverage that attacking you becomes catastrophically expensive?

That doesn’t make Iran’s conduct moral. It makes it intelligible.

And this is the distinction American political language keeps refusing to make. Rational does not mean good.

The Proxy Architecture

People describe Iranian foreign policy as if Tehran woke up one morning and decided to encircle Israel with terrorists because Shi’a theology said so.

Religion matters. Revolutionary ideology matters. Geography matters more than most speeches admit.

Iran learned during the war with Iraq what happens when the enemy reaches your border. So it pushed the battlefield outward. Hezbollah in Lebanon. Militias in Iraq. Assad in Syria. Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A relationship with Hamas despite Hamas being Sunni. Later the Houthis.

They aren’t identical organizations and they don’t take identical orders. Calling every group receiving

Iranian help an Iranian puppet is too simple. Pretending there’s no architecture is equally ridiculous. Money moves. Weapons move. Training, intelligence and personnel move. The Quds Force connects many of them.

The purpose is strategic depth. Iran cannot match the United States aircraft for aircraft, cannot match Israel technologically across every domain, and cannot march a conventional army around the region without

inviting a war it would lose.

So it builds layers. Attack Iran and Hezbollah can threaten Israel. Strike Iranian interests in Iraq and Iraqi militias can hit American bases.

That architecture gives Iran something more valuable than territory. It gives Iran veto points. And America helped create the political space several of them grew in.

The Fax

In May 2003, with Saddam gone and American power looking unstoppable, a document reached Washington through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran.

It proposed broad negotiations. Nuclear transparency. Iraq. Terrorism. Iranian support for Palestinian militants. Security guarantees. Sanctions. Recognition of Iranian security interests. Essentially the entire relationship.

It became known as the grand bargain proposal. Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann told Washington he believed senior Iranian leadership backed the initiative. Later accounts disagreed sharply over how

authoritative the document was and whether Tehran could have delivered. Some former American officials call it a major lost opportunity; others say it was an informal paper inflated afterward.

That distinction matters. We can’t write Iran offered peace and Bush refused. The evidence isn’t that clean.

We can write this: a potentially comprehensive negotiating framework reached Washington through the official Swiss channel, and the Bush administration chose not to pursue it.

And notice the timing. Iran was weak. America looked invincible. Saddam had just fallen. If there was ever a moment Washington could believe it didn’t need to negotiate, this was it.

That judgment would age badly.

The Nuclear Program

Iran’s nuclear program didn’t begin with the Islamic Republic. The Shah wanted nuclear power, and the United States helped introduce the technology under Atoms for Peace. After the revolution the program stalled, restarted and expanded.

Then it surfaced — and not through American intelligence.

On August 14, 2002, at a Washington press conference, the National Council of Resistance of Iran accused Tehran of clandestinely developing nuclear weapons, and spokesman Alireza Jafarzadeh described two top-secret facilities under construction at Natanz and Arak. Iran acknowledged them the following year, and IAEA inspection found the program more advanced than U.S. intelligence had anticipated.

I want to sit on that for a second, because it complicates something.

The NCRI is the political front of the MEK — an exiled opposition organization with a long record of unreliable claims and an obvious interest in provoking Western confrontation with Tehran. I would not cite them as a source for anything in this series.

And they broke Natanz.

Both of those are true. An interested party with a bad record can still be right, and being right once doesn’t make them reliable. If that seems like an uncomfortable place to leave it, good. It’s where the evidence leaves it.

Now the vocabulary, because nearly every political faction abuses it.

Uranium enrichment is not a nuclear weapon. Low-enriched uranium is not weapons-grade uranium. Weapons-grade uranium is not a bomb. A bomb design is not a deployable warhead. A deployable warhead is not a missile carrying one.

Related stages. Not interchangeable.

Iran gave real grounds for suspicion. The IAEA found that Iran had repeatedly failed over an extended

period to report nuclear material, processing and facilities as its safeguards agreement required, described Iranian information as slow, changing and contradictory, and said it could not assure the world that all Iranian nuclear activity was exclusively peaceful.

That’s not propaganda. Iran concealed things it was obligated to disclose.

Now the complication. A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with high confidence that Iran had maintained a nuclear weapons program and halted its weapon-design and weaponization work in the fall of 2003 — while continuing enrichment and missile development, and keeping the option open.

All of it true at once. Iran conducted weapons-related work. Iran halted important parts of it. Iran kept building technologies that shorten the distance to a bomb.

Anyone telling you only one of those sentences is curating.

The Bomb Iran Didn’t Have

American and Israeli politicians increasingly spoke of preventing Iran from getting the bomb.

Fair enough. A nuclear-armed Iran would transform the regional balance and create obvious dangers for Israel, the Gulf states and American forces. Iran gave everyone reasons not to trust its assurances.

But four distinct claims kept collapsing into one image:

Iran might eventually be capable of building a weapon. Iran has decided to build one.

Iran is building one now. Iran has one.

Four different statements requiring four different kinds of evidence. Compressed into a mushroom cloud. We’ve seen this movie before. We’ll see it again next week.

Obama Tries Something Different

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action didn’t make Iran friendly. It didn’t end Hezbollah, the missile program, the Revolutionary Guard, or Syria. It didn’t transform the Islamic Republic.

That wasn’t the deal. It was a nuclear agreement.

Iran sharply reduced installed centrifuges, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent, cut its low-enriched uranium stockpile from roughly 10,000 kilograms to 300, stopped enrichment at Fordow for fifteen years, redesigned the Arak reactor, and accepted extensive monitoring. In exchange, nuclear-related sanctions lifted.

Supporters and opponents were arguing about two different agreements. Supporters said it blocked a weapon. Opponents said it didn’t stop terrorism, missiles or regional aggression. Both could be true, because the second list was outside the agreement.

The harder question — whether freezing the nuclear file while leaving the regional network intact improved the strategic problem or postponed part of it — is a real argument.

Then Donald Trump entered it.

Maximum Pressure

In May 2018 Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, restored sanctions and launched maximum pressure. The case was that the deal was too narrow and too temporary — Iran got relief while continuing missiles, militants and regional expansion. The administration wanted a bigger agreement, so it increased the pain.

One problem. The old agreement had been constraining the nuclear program.

The IAEA verified and monitored Iran’s implementation of its nuclear commitments from January 2016 through May 2019. The United States left in May 2018. Iran stayed in for a year. Then it began progressively exceeding its limits.

So the policy produced an inversion. America left because the agreement was insufficient to contain the Iranian threat. Iran responded by expanding the activity the agreement had contained.

That doesn’t prove Trump was wrong to leave. It tells you what happened afterward. Pressure is an instrument. It is not an outcome.

What Each Side Did in the Dark

Before we get to Soleimani, the ledger needs the parts Americans hear least.

Sometime around 2009 and 2010, a cyberweapon later called Stuxnet destroyed roughly a thousand centrifuges at Natanz. It was widely reported as a joint American-Israeli operation and has never been

seriously disputed. It is the most consequential covert operation of the period, and it was an attack on Iranian soil.

Between 2010 and 2012, at least four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated inside Iran — bombs attached to cars in Tehran traffic. In November 2020 Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the most senior figure associated with Iran’s weapons research, was killed on a road outside Tehran with a remotely operated weapon.

In June 2019 Iran shot down an American Global Hawk drone. Trump approved retaliatory strikes and called them off with aircraft already airborne.

None of that excuses what Iran did. All of it belongs in the file, because you cannot explain Iranian threat perception with a list that contains only Iranian actions.

When Improbable Things Are Real

Which brings us to something I want to handle carefully, because it’s where a lot of writing about Iran goes off a cliff.

In 2011, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western countries of destroying clouds headed for Iran, saying European states used special equipment to force clouds to dump their water before reaching Iranian territory. In 2018 the head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization blamed Israel directly for cloud theft.

Americans laughed. The obvious reading is that the Iranian leadership is unhinged. Now the parts that complicate the laughter.

A state really did weaponize weather. Between 1967 and 1972 the United States ran Operation Popeye, cloud-seeding the Ho Chi Minh Trail to extend the monsoon. It was secret, it was real, and when it came out it produced the ENMOD Convention of 1977 banning environmental modification as a weapon — a treaty that exists because the United States did the thing the treaty prohibits.

And in 1996 a team of seven officers wrote a paper for an Air Force futures study titled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” It is a real document, it is often waved around as proof, and here is what it actually is: a student research paper whose disclaimer states the views don’t reflect the official

policy of the Air Force, the Defense Department or the United States government, and which contains

fictional representations of future scenarios. The paper itself concedes that artificial weather technologies do not currently exist.

It is a thought experiment, not a directive. If you cite it as policy, the disclaimer is on page two. So where does that leave Ahmadinejad?

The best answer comes from Iran. When the cloud-theft claim was made in 2018, the head of Iran’s own meteorological service said that on the basis of meteorological knowledge it is not possible for a country to steal snow or clouds, that Iran’s drought is part of a global trend, and that raising such questions deters Iran from finding the right solutions. He added that if it were possible, the United States wouldn’t have water shortages of its own. Meteorologists note that cloud seeding is a local measure affecting an area of at most a hundred kilometers, with precipitation gains in the range of 15 to 20 percent — it cannot redirect weather systems moving in from the Mediterranean.

Iran’s drought has causes that don’t require an enemy: groundwater over-extraction, dam-building, agricultural policy, aging infrastructure and a warming region.

And the theory is still mutating. In 2026, amid the current war, claims circulated across regional media that rainfall in Iran and Iraq increased following strikes on US-linked radar installations — the supposed weather machinery having been knocked offline. Meteorological authorities rejected it again; Iranian weather officials stated that military and aviation radar cannot manipulate large-scale precipitation systems, and

independent assessments found no evidence of any technology capable of engineering regional drought. Fifteen years, three governments, and the mechanism changes while the story holds.

But I don’t think the interesting question is whether the claim is true. It isn’t. The interesting question is why a government would reach for it.

Put yourself in that position. Your prime minister was removed by a foreign intelligence operation, and for forty years you were told that was a conspiracy theory until the documents came out. Your centrifuges were destroyed by a weapon nobody admitted building. Your scientists were shot in traffic. Your most senior

general was killed by a drone at an airport.

A state with that history develops a particular epistemology. Improbable-sounding covert operations against it have repeatedly turned out to be real. So the filter that would normally reject an absurd claim gets worn down — and eventually a president says the West is stealing the rain.

That is what a real grievance does to a country’s reasoning. It doesn’t make it right. It makes the failure legible.

And it isn’t only my read. Writing on the legal status of environmental warfare, one international law scholar makes the point that attribution here is exceptionally difficult, that ordinary weather variability generates suspicion in politically volatile environments, and that under those conditions perception becomes as

geopolitically consequential as scientific verification. Narratives of climate theft gain traction not because they are established but because environmental stress deepens geopolitical mistrust — producing a

convergence of climate anxiety, information warfare and strategic competition.

Which is worth holding onto, because the same convergence is available to any state under stress. Including this one.

Before that sounds like a lecture aimed only at Tehran, consider what the identical process did to Washington in 2002. That’s next week.

Then Trump Killed the General

January 3, 2020. Baghdad International Airport. An American drone strike killed Qasem Soleimani.

The Defense Department said Soleimani was actively planning attacks against American diplomats and service members and held the Quds Force responsible for hundreds of American and coalition deaths.

From Washington he wasn’t merely an Iranian official. He commanded an organization that armed people who killed Americans.

From Tehran the United States had assassinated one of its most senior military officers while he traveled in a third country.

Perspective isn’t absolution. Soleimani had blood on his hands.

The question is what happened next. Iran fired ballistic missiles at American bases in Iraq. No Americans were killed immediately, though more than a hundred service members were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

For several hours the two countries stood closer to open war than they had in decades. Then both stopped.

Notice that. The supposedly irrational regime calibrated its retaliation. The supposedly trigger-happy

administration didn’t answer with another major strike. Both wanted to demonstrate strength. Neither wanted the war their rhetoric implied.

Rational does not mean peaceful.

The Thing America Built

By the time Soleimani died, the map looked nothing like it had when Saddam’s statue fell.

Iran had influence in Baghdad. Iranian-backed militias were embedded in Iraq’s security and political structures. Hezbollah was among the most powerful forces in Lebanon. Assad had survived a civil war largely because Iran, Hezbollah and Russia kept him alive. Iranian missiles and drones had multiplied.

Washington called this Iranian expansion. It was.

But look at the chronology. Before 2001, Iran was boxed in by the Taliban to the east and Saddam to the west. America removed both. Then America spent twenty years trying to contain the power that filled the vacuum.

There’s no contradiction in saying Iran exploited that vacuum aggressively. There’s also no serious way to tell the story without naming who created it.

This is where the chant becomes something larger.

America became the indispensable enemy of the Islamic Republic. External threat justified repression. Sanctions explained economic failure. American intervention validated revolutionary mythology. Every assassination, sanction and deployment fitted the story told since 1979: they are coming for us.

And America had its own version. Every proxy attack, every missile, every hostage, every enrichment cascade, every chant, every Iranian flag over a militia funeral fitted another story: they are coming for us.

Two curated histories. Each containing enough truth to sustain the next escalation.

The Part Each Side Leaves Out

The Iranian story starts in 1953. America removed Mosaddegh, restored and supported the Shah, backed Saddam during the war, shot down Flight 655, ringed Iran with bases, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, sabotaged Natanz, killed scientists, sanctioned the economy, assassinated Soleimani.

Read only that and Iran looks purely reactive.

It isn’t. Iran’s government imprisoned dissidents and executed opponents. It supported hostage-taking. It

built Hezbollah. Iran-linked organizations killed Americans and Iranian weapons killed American soldiers in

Iraq. The Revolutionary Guard armed movements across sovereign borders. Iran concealed nuclear activity it was legally required to declare. Its leaders threatened Israel and funded organizations committed to armed struggle against it.

Leave those out and you’re doing propaganda for Tehran.

Now reverse the camera. The American story starts in 1979. Hostages. Death to America. Hezbollah. Khobar Towers. Iraqi militias. Enrichment. Missiles. Soleimani.

Read only that and the Islamic Republic appears to have materialized from nowhere as a civilization-sized psychosis.

Leave out 1953, the Shah, SAVAK, Saddam, chemical weapons, Flight 655, sanctions and the consequences of the Iraq invasion, and you’re curating too.

That has been the point of this series from the start. Not Iran good, America bad. Not the reverse.

Put the missing pieces back in.

An Enemy Can Still Be Rational

This is where American analysis of Iran fails most often. We hear chants and clerics and language about martyrs, and we leap: these people can’t be reasoned with because they’re irrational.

The record doesn’t support it.

Iran backed Christian Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan. Iran worked with the United States against the Taliban. Iran bought weapons from Israel while denouncing Zionism. Iran supported Sunni Hamas as a Shi’a theocracy. Iran helped fight ISIS. Iran negotiated the JCPOA. Iran calibrated its retaliation for Soleimani to avoid a war.

None of that describes a state governed by religious frenzy. It describes a state. A revolutionary one, a repressive one, a dangerous one, whose leaders believe things most Americans don’t.

But a state — calculating threats, opportunities, buffers, costs and survival.

That’s more unsettling than irrationality. You can wait for an irrational enemy to blunder. A rational enemy adapts.

Then Came October 7

For forty years America and Iran managed something remarkable. They fought without quite fighting — through Lebanon, Iraq, sanctions, covert operations, assassinations, cyberattacks, proxies, Israel and the Gulf. They approached the line repeatedly and stopped short.

Then on October 7, 2023, Hamas crossed Israel’s border from Gaza. Roughly 1,200 people were killed and the Gaza war began.

Iran had armed, funded and supported Hamas for years. But the evidence available immediately afterward did not establish that Tehran ordered or operationally directed the attack itself.

That distinction matters. And what followed pulled nearly the whole architecture into one conflict — Hezbollah from Lebanon, the Houthis from Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria, Israeli strikes on Iranian-linked targets, American bases taking fire, American ships shooting down drones, and Iran and Israel moving from covert confrontation to direct exchange.

The structure Soleimani spent decades building activated all at once. And America was standing in the middle of it.

The country whose president had promised to end the endless wars was approaching another one. Not with Saddam. Not with al-Qaeda. Not with the Taliban.

With Iran.

How did that happen?

To answer it we have to leave Tehran, and go back to a fifteen-year-old girl in front of a congressional committee in Washington in October 1990.

She had a story about Iraqi soldiers. Babies. And incubators. Her name was Nayirah.

And almost everything Americans believed about her was wrong.

 

Next Thursday: Part VI — The War Nobody Voted For.