By Rob C. Art by Patrick Chappatte

TL;DR: The current war with Iran isn’t a “defense of democracy”—it’s the final chapter in a 70-year U.S. corporate heist. From the 1953 CIA coup that murdered a democracy for cheap oil to the current “Military Incursion”, the West has spent decades punching Iran and then acts surprised when they punch back. If you want to know why the Middle East is on fire, stop looking at the “religious fanatics” and start looking at the British Petroleum receipts and the suitcases of cash Israel used to fund Hamas. It’s the Fading Empire Playbook: when you can’t provide a quality of life at home, you export “Maximum Lethality” abroad. Let’s talk about who threw the first punch—because Trump and his band of Crusader- enthusiasts and the U.S. propaganda machine really wants you to believe Iran woke up one day in 1979, decided they hated freedom, and has been terrorizing the innocent West ever since. It’s a great story—simple, patriotic, and complete bullshit. If you want to understand why we’re currently flushing trillions into the Persian Gulf while your local bridge is held together by duct tape and prayers, you have to look at where it all started.

1901-1953: The Great British Oil Grab Long before it was “BP” (which I assume stands for British Plunder), it was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1901, a British businessman secured the rights to Iran’s oil for a pittance. By 1908, they struck black gold, and the British Royal Navy decided to ditch coal and run their empire on petroleum, making Iranian oil a strategic military asset for the British Empire. This is also, coincidentally, right around the time Zionism was being invented—just a fun historical note about European colonial projects reshaping the Middle East without asking anyone who actually lived there. For the next 50 years, Iran’s oil was extracted by a foreign corporation. Iran got the crumbs while the West got the cake. When Saudi Arabia negotiated a 50-50 split with ARAMCO, Iran asked for the same deal. The British response? “How about zero, and you’ll like it?” So, in 1951, Iran did something radical: they used democracy. Their Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the oil. It was legal, constitutional, and backed by a unanimous vote in parliament. His logic was dangerously simple: “This is our country; it’s our oil.” Britain’s response? An international blockade. No negotiation. No compromise. Just: give us back our oil (not theirs to begin with). When the blockade didn’t break Iran, Britain called in reinforcements. In 1953, the CIA (Operation Ajax) and MI6 (Operation Boot) overthrew Mossadegh, the only democratically elected leader Iran ever had. They bribed clerics, funded fake “grassroots” protests, and MI6 literally kidnapped and murdered the chief of police as a warning. We destroyed a democracy to keep the gas cheap.

After the coup, BP retained 40% stake in Iranian oil. American oil companies—Exxon and Mobil—got significant shares. Iran’s democratic government was gone. Its oil was back under foreign control. Mission accomplished! They destroyed Iran’s democracy, reinstalled a dictator, and took back the oil. The CIA officially acknowledged its role in 2013—60 years later, when most of the architects were dead and it was too late for accountability.

1953-1979: Our Favorite Dictator The Shah’s Reign of Terror (Brought to You by the CIA) The Shah ruled for 26 years as a Western-backed authoritarian. His secret police—SAVAK—was trained by the CIA and Mossad. SAVAK tortured and killed political dissidents systematically. Iran became one of the largest purchasers of American weapons. The Shah lived in extraordinary luxury while much of the population remained poor. And here’s the kicker: During this entire period, Israel and Iran were close allies. SAVAK and Mossad shared intelligence. Israel sold weapons to Iran. Nobody in the West called Iran a “terrorist state” because the dictator was “our” dictator. Funny how that works. When the 1979 Revolution happened, the U.S. media acted like religious fanaticism just fell from the sky. It didn’t. It grew out of 26 years of American-sponsored torture. Iranians were done living under a brutal Western-backed dictator who tortured dissidents and extracted their oil for foreign corporations. They wanted their country back. When the revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy, they weren’t being “paranoid” about spies—they remembered that the 1953 coup was run out of that exact building. They were being historically accurate.

The “Unprovoked” Myth: The “War Pigs” loves to list Iranian “aggressions” while ignoring the map. Look at where our troops are: Iraq: We invaded in 2003 based on a WMD lie that killed a million people. No one was prosecuted. Now we’re mad that Iran has influence next door? Lebanon/Hezbollah: Hezbollah didn’t exist until Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and killed 20,000 people. It was a resistance movement born from an invasion. Yes, the 1983 Marine barracks bombing killed 241 Americans. Tragic. But why were U.S. Marines in Lebanon? Because the U.S. had intervened in the Lebanese Civil War, shelling Druze and Shia positions from naval vessels. They weren’t neutral peacekeepers. They were participants in the conflict. Yemen/Houthis: They’re attacking ships because a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition spent years bombing them into a famine, creating what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Over 150,000 dead. Famine. Cholera outbreaks. And the U.S. sold Saudi Arabia the weapons and provided targeting intelligence. Why does Iran pursue nuclear capability? Possibly because Israel sits on 80-400 undeclared nukes, refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, faces zero international inspections, and has never been sanctioned for it. Iran signed the NPT. Iran agreed to inspections. Iran signed the nuclear JCPOA deal in 2015. Trump pulled out in 2018. If only his father had done the same.

Who Built Hamas? If you want the darkest laugh of all, look at Hamas. Netanyahu’s favorite punching bag, but according to Israeli officials, Hamas was an Israeli creation. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” said Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for over two decades, to the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israeli military governor in Gaza in the 1980s, told the New York Times he helped finance Hamas as a “counterweight” to the PLO. “The Israeli government gave me a budget, and the military government gives to the mosques.” Israel supported Hamas to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state by dividing Palestinian leadership. And it didn’t stop in the 1980s. According to the New York Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled into Gaza with Qatari officials carrying suitcases filled with cash. In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich—currently Netanyahu’s finance minister—summed up the strategy: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden. Hamas is an asset.” Netanyahu told journalists it was important to keep Hamas strong as a counterweight to the secular Palestinian Authority, lessening pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state. In 2018, Netanyahu literally wrote a letter to Qatar asking them to continue funding Hamas. So when Israel now claims Hamas is an existential threat they must destroy—remember that Israel created, funded, and maintained Hamas as a deliberate strategy to prevent Palestinian statehood. They built the monster. Now they’re using it to justify genocide.

Follow the Money: When someone punches you for 70 years—overthrows your government, installs a dictator, trains his secret police to torture your people, extracts your oil, invades the countries on your borders, surrounds you with military bases, and sanctions your economy into the ground—and then you punch back, the question isn’t “Why are you violent?” The question is: “Who’s been profiting from the fight ever since?” This isn’t a defense of the Iranian regime. The theocracy that replaced the Shah has its own brutal record, especially against women. But that regime exists because the CIA destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953. The West created the very thing it now claims to oppose. But that regime is the monster the West created when we murdered Iran’s democracy in its crib. The 1953 coup was about oil. The Shah was about strategic control. The current “terrorist state” branding is about Permanent War. It justifies billions in arms sales to the Saudis and keeps the “Epstein Class” in control of the global energy architecture. The United States propaganda machine works overtime to make you forget all of this.

The Fading Empire Trump is just following the playbook of every fading empire in history. You manufacture external enemies. You wrap yourself in the flag. You claim God is on your side. You start wars to distract from domestic failure and give people something to rally around besides their own collapsing standard of living. You find a “monster” to fight so people forget the monsters in the boardroom. And working people everywhere are paying the price while billionaires count their blood money and plan the next war.

F*CK ICE, RELEASE ALL THE FILES!

Please like, share, and subscribe—because we threw the first punch, and we’re still pretending Iran started the fight.

— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Booksellers everywhere.

Special thanks to Andrew Sterling Ansley for inspiring this post.