1979 Was Not the Beginning of a Crisis. It Was a Declaration.
November 4, 1979. Iranian students — backed and orchestrated by Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary government — stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. They held them for 444 days. Subjected them to mock executions, sensory deprivation, psychological torture. Paraded them blindfolded in front of cameras for propaganda value.
The Carter administration negotiated. The Reagan administration made quiet arrangements. The hostages came home.
What didn't happen was any meaningful consequence to the Iranian government for seizing American sovereign territory — an embassy is technically American soil — and holding its staff for over a year. The lesson Iran took from that non-response has governed every calculation they've made about American resolve for the past four and a half decades. And the lesson was: Americans bleed easily and have a short memory. Push them and they'll negotiate.
I spent years in federal law enforcement watching foreign threats cross our border. I've seen the intelligence reports on IRGC Quds Force activity in the Western hemisphere. I've sat in briefings. What I can tell you plainly is that Iran has not had a single year since 1979 in which it wasn't actively planning, financing, or executing attacks on Americans or American interests. Not one year. That's not a series of isolated incidents. That's a sustained war.
The Attacks You've Already Forgotten
April 1983: The U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Hezbollah — created, funded, and directed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard — detonated a truck bomb that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later: the Marine barracks in Beirut. 241 American service members killed in a single morning. The largest single-day loss of American military life since Iwo Jima.
The Reagan administration withdrew from Lebanon. Iran took note.
June 1996: Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. 19 U.S. Air Force personnel killed, 498 wounded. Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah. The Clinton administration gathered evidence of Iranian involvement and then, under pressure from diplomats who wanted to preserve a possible engagement track with Tehran, declined to respond militarily.
Iran took note.
2003 through 2011: Iranian-supplied explosively formed penetrators — EFPs, a specific and sophisticated weapon technology transferred directly from Iran to Shia militias in Iraq — killed over 600 American service members in Iraq. Confirmed by General David Petraeus. Documented by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The most lethal technology deployed against American troops during the Iraq War came from Tehran.
The Obama administration offered negotiations. Iran took note.
2019 through 2020: Rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq by Iran-backed militias killed and wounded American service members. The Trump administration struck back — decisively, by killing Qasem Soleimani, the IRGC Quds Force commander who had personally overseen the deaths of hundreds of Americans. Iran's response was a missile attack on Al Asad air base that gave dozens of American troops traumatic brain injuries. The U.S. called it a de-escalation. Iran called it a win.
The Assassination Plots You Might Not Know About
In 2011, the FBI disrupted an Iranian government plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. In Washington, D.C. Using a Mexican cartel as the cut-out. The plot came within weeks of execution. The Obama administration announced the disruption, imposed some sanctions, and moved on.
Since 2020, the FBI has disrupted multiple Iranian assassination and kidnapping plots targeting American citizens on U.S. soil. The targets have included Trump administration officials, journalists, and Iranian dissidents who sought refuge in America. The Justice Department has indicted IRGC officers. None of them will ever see a courtroom. Iran doesn't extradite its intelligence operatives.
An active foreign intelligence service is running lethal operations against American citizens on American territory and the political response has been indictments. That's not a response to a national security threat. That's paperwork.
Enough of the Policy Theater
I understand the strategic complications. I do. Escalation with Iran risks drawing in Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraq's Shia militias simultaneously. Iranian retaliation could disrupt Gulf energy supplies. Israel faces a two-front threat. Russia and China would use an Iran conflict to advance their own interests.
These are real considerations. Anyone who waves them off doesn't understand the complexity of the situation.
But here's what I know from years of law enforcement work: when you fail to impose consequences for repeated violations, you don't prevent the next violation. You authorize it. Every time Iran has killed Americans and walked away without a response proportionate to the crime, it has recalculated and determined that Americans can be killed without cost. The cost-benefit analysis runs in their favor. We've been subsidizing it for forty-four years.
The response to Iran is not simple, and nobody should pretend it is. But the starting point has to be accepting what is plainly true: Iran is at war with the United States, has been since 1979, and has never stopped. American policy has been in denial about that basic fact. Ending that denial — adjusting to the reality that we are in a conflict whether we want to be or not — is the prerequisite for any strategy that has a chance of working.
