<![CDATA[US-Iran tensions: Qassem Soleimani's death was decades in the making]>

The assassination by the United States of Iran's Major-General Qassem Soleimani this week took two seemingly ideologically opposed countries to the brink of war.

Yet it was not so long ago that the two countries were allies " democratic ones at that. Indeed, one strand of thought has it that it is America's strategic mistakes in the history of the Middle East that have created the very problem it now faces.

In the early 1950s, Iran was ruled by a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

However, the US and Britain, perceiving him to be aligned with what was then the Soviet Union, overthrew him in 1953 and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. (This action was itself something of a U-turn as his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi had been ruling Iran since a coup in 1925 but was forced by the British to abdicate in 1941.)

But suspicions of Soviet leanings were not the only motivation for the CIA's plot " Operation Ajaz " to overthrow Mosaddegh. Another one was oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region's oil wealth and were angered when Mossadegh nationalised the domestic oil industry.

Of course, to many people, the new Shah had drawbacks, too. Keen on emulating Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and modernising Iran, Pahlavi was personally profligate; he turned Iran into a police state; he neglected merchants and peasants; and his reforms for women greatly angered the Shia clerics.

But supporting the Shah was important for the US. The USSR had backed coups in Iraq and Syria, and in 1973 OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, deliberately cut oil shipments to the US and much of Europe.

Iran sits atop the Persian Gulf and even now, much of the oil from the Middle East transits its narrowest part, the Straits of Hormuz. The US therefore had two imperatives: contain the USSR and its proxy Iraq, and ensure the free flow of oil.

The US and the Shah had their critics, not least among them one Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, sitting in exile in Paris, who spent much of his time on sermons and speeches talking about how the Shah was betraying Iran and its people.

THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

The US " and the Shah " assumed he was merely a nuisance. Although US intelligence had worked very closely with the Shah's internal security forces they were caught off guard by a popular uprising in 1979 (even though demonstrations against the Shah had been occurring from October 1977 onwards).

The US president of the time, Jimmy Carter, went out of his way to support the Shah " but in the end, the popular upswell, rumours and fast-moving events led to the Shah fleeing Iran in January 1979 and Khomeini flying in from Paris the next month. What is now known as the Iranian Revolution was complete.

To counter the perception of an extreme leader, Khomeini first appointed a moderate, Mehdi Bazargan, as prime minister " though after his positions came into conflict with the radicals, Bazargan's government fell.

The Shah meanwhile was admitted to the US for cancer treatment and Washington refused to hand him over to the Iranians, who were demanding he stand trial for crimes during his reign. This angered Tehran and prompted a group of Iranian college students to take 52 hostages at the US Embassy in what is now called the Iran hostage crisis.

The botched military attempt to rescue the hostages, which resulted in the deaths of eight American servicemen, still haunts Washington. Donald Trump even nodded to these events when he warned Tehran against retaliating against his assassination of Soleimani " saying he had 52 Iranian targets in his sights.

It was also around this time that the USSR invaded Afghanistan. The US responded by backing jihadist fighters against the Soviet invaders, further increasing Iran-US hostility.

One year later, the Iran-Iraq war broke out. The US was happy to let the two nations " both Shia, though Saddam ruled with a minority Sunni regime " fight to a standstill. It figured this would mean two fewer actors to play a part in its cold war with the USSR.

So it supplied weapons to Iran (the Iran-Contra affair) and ignored Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Two years later after the war ended in 1988 " after, on some estimates, a million deaths " Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US hit back with the first Gulf War, led by George HW Bush.

The US strategy here appeared to be derived from Britain's colonial adventures. The idea was to maintain a regional balance of power to stop the emergence of larger powers that could threaten US interests. Essentially, to have local powers neutralise each other.

To preserve this balance, Bush very astutely did not allow the US forces in 1991 to finish off their victory and topple Saddam. Rather, the US reinstated the Iran-Iraq balance of power to prevent Iran becoming too powerful.

Iran is four times the size of Iraq, three times as populous (80 million) and its levels of education and bureaucratic institutionalisation are higher. Iran, at this juncture, was yet constrained.

Any semblance of balance went following the events of September 11, when two planes flew into the World Trade Centre in New York.

The US responded by attacking the Sunni Taliban, one of Iran's enemies, and in 2003 invaded Iraq once again. George W Bush, it was said at the time, was finishing off what his father had started. Saddam's regime was destroyed, as was his Baath Party and the Iraqi Army. Iran was happy to see Saddam go, as it created an opportunity for it to control the next government.

But this was a miscalculation on America's part. To thwart a convergence of Shia influence, it had blocked Shiite aspirations, fought the Sunnis, and ended up in the crosshairs of both sides. It withdrew from Iraq in 2011.

The collapse of the Sunni-led regime in Iraq, the US withdrawal and the subsequent increased Iranian influence over Iraq led to a regional imbalance of power, freeing the Iranians to pursue their agenda of a "Shiite Crescent".

Iran began to establish a contiguous sphere of influence stretching from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean in order to fulfil its long-standing dream of becoming a dominant regional power in the broader region. This caused consternation among the Sunnis in the Middle-East " as it would have fundamentally shifted the balance of power against them.

Iran's consolidation was, however, disrupted after the 'Arab spring' reached its proxy, Syria, in early 2011 " this threatened to undermine Iran's hold in the Levant. But even as it was fighting to retain Syria under Assad, the Sunni jihadist group Islamic State emerged. It hated Iran.

Once again, the US had to rethink allegiances and worked with both Iraq and Iran in its fight against Islamic State. Ironically enough, Soleimani was himself involved in this fight against Islamic State and was in that sense on America's side.

His death then was not as sudden as it might seem. It could be argued it was decades in the making, at the hands of a country long unsure whether Iran is friend or foe.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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