Iran 1979

I was there when this war began in 1979, and I’ve watched our enemy grow more powerful, more sophisticated, and more evilly (if that is even a word) cunning in the decades since. What started as crude harassment - small gunboats circling our ship with .50‑caliber machine guns and RPGs - has grown into a fully developed form of maritime guerrilla warfare. Today they field roughly fifteen hundred fast‑attack craft, some capable of speeds over a hundred knots (115 mph + or -), and hundreds armed with anti‑ship missiles. The hostility that erupted in 1979 never ceased; it matured.

A study of the region’s history, which I have done over the many years since that time, makes clear that Iran carried deep and legitimate grievances against the West. Those grievances could have - and should have - been addressed early by restraining Britain’s predatory control of Iranian oil and by avoiding the 1953 coup (aided and abetted by the US) that restored the Shah and tied his rule to American power. We were not guiltless. We allowed, and in some cases enabled, the exploitation of Iranian resources and the erosion of Iranian cultural dignity through aggressive Westernization. Persia is an ancient civilization with its own identity, language, and heritage, none of which were honored in that period. Into that wounded space stepped a political ideology wrapped in violent pseudo-religion, promising deliverance but ultimately becoming a new master. It imposed a system that has inflicted great harm on its own people and projected violence outward for decades. That failure - ours and theirs - created the vacuum into which radical ideology rushed, an ideology that has committed crimes against both humanity and sanity.

While the world has suffered from the inhumanity projected outward by the Iranian regime, it is still the Iranian people who carry the deepest wounds. They are the ones who have lived under the lash of a system that promised liberation and delivered bondage. They are the ones whose ancient Persian identity was smothered under a political theology that claimed to speak for God while crushing the very people it claimed to save. The tragedy is that the nation with legitimate grievances became captive to an ideology that exploited those grievances for its own power, leaving the people themselves as the primary victims of the revolution that claimed to act in their name.

The tragedy is also that the grievances were real, but the remedy that took hold was catastrophic. And the conflict that began in those waters in 1979 has never truly ended.

~Tony

A.K. Pritchard 1979-