Guardian defends Iran from 'accusations' it has attacked Americans

A Guardian op-ed by Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, is largely based on a social media comment by President Trump suggesting he was seeking regime change in Iran. Despite the fact that the White House later clarified that, following the US attack on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Washington was not seeking “regime change”, the op-ed (“Why dreams of regime change in Iran will end in a rude awakening” June 24), provides reasons why such a policy is unjustified.

Menon, using an argument popular both on the progressive left and new right, writes that Trump bombed the nuclear enrichment installations of a “country that hadn’t attacked the US, wasn’t preparing to and didn’t even threaten war.” Guardian cartoonist ‘First Dog On The Moon‘ went even further in defending the regime in Tehran, suggesting, in a June 23 cartoon replete with images and captions mirroring ‘Axis of Resistance’ propaganda about the war in Gaza, that Iran was the innocent victim of US and Israeli aggression.

However, in addition to Tehran’s ubiquitous “Death to America” threats, which Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear is a policy, not just a slogan, the regime and its proxies have committed scores of deadly attacks against Americans, and engaged in attempted assassinations of US leaders, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Here’s a partial list provided by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD):

November 1979-January 1981: Iranian students — with the backing of Tehran — take 66 Americans hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
April 1983: A suicide car bombing kills 63 people, including 17 Americans, at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. The Iran-backed terrorist group Islamic Jihad, a precursor and early branch of Hezbollah (not to be confused with Palestinian Islamic Jihad), claims responsibility.
October 1983: Operatives of the Iran-backed Hezbollah drive a truck bomb at a Marine compound in Beirut, killing 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other service personnel.
December 1983: Hezbollah operatives drive an explosives-filled dump truck through the gates of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City. No Americans are harmed.
March 1984: Terrorists kidnap CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut, subsequently torturing and ultimately killing him in 1985. Islamic Jihad claims responsibility.
December 1984: Hezbollah terrorists hijack Kuwait Airways Flight 221 on its way from Kuwait to Pakistan and divert it to Tehran, killing two American officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
June 1985: Hezbollah terrorists hijack TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome and kill a U.S. Navy diver.
July 1989: Hezbollah operatives kill U.S. Marine Corps Col. William Higgins after kidnapping him the previous year while on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon.
June 1996: A truck carrying 5,000 pounds of explosives blows up the Khobar Towers, a U.S. Air Force housing complex in the Saudi Arabian town of Khobar. Nineteen Americans die and some 500 people are injured. The Iran-backed Hezbollah Al Hijaz, a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, is deemed responsible.
August 1998: With the assistance of Hezbollah, al Qaeda suicide bombers almost simultaneously blow up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding thousands. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, al Qaeda developed “the tactical expertise for such attacks months earlier, when some of its operatives — top military committee members and several operatives who were involved with the Kenya cell among them — were sent to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon.”
September 11, 2001: While the 9/11 Commission Report concludes that Iran had no foreknowledge of al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center, the report indicates that Tehran facilitated the travel of some of the terrorists. “In sum,” the report notes, “there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”
October 2003: Terrorists from the Iran-backed Popular Resistance Committees kill three U.S. diplomatic personnel in a bombing in Gaza.
2003-2011: Iranian-backed militias kill at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. Iranian training and material support for Iraqi militias during the surge greatly increased the difficulty of U.S.
January 2007: Twelve men affiliated with the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disguised themselves as U.S. soldiers, entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in the Iraqi city of Karbala, killed five U.S. soldiers, and wounded another three. In 2019, the U.S. State Department issued a $15 million bounty for information on an IRGC Quds Force commander who planned the attack and other “assassinations of coalition forces in Iraq.”
December 2019: Rockets fired by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia, kills an American security contractor and wounds several U.S. service members and Iraqi personnel at the K1 military base in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
January 2020: A direct Iranian ballistic missile attack against the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq causes more than 100 U.S. troops to suffer traumatic brain injuries.
March 2020: The family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran in 2007, announces that he likely died in an Iranian prison at an unknown date.
September 2020: U.S. intelligence reports indicate that Iran is weighing a plot to assassinate U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Lana Marks.
February 2021: An rocket fired by an Iran-backed militia at coalition forces in the Iraqi city of Erbil wounds a U.S. service member and four U.S. civilian contractors.
July 2021: Iranian-backed militias conduct at least three rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in 24 hours in Iraq and Syria, wounding two U.S. service members.
September 2022: An Iranian rocket attack kills an American citizen in Iraqi Kurdistan.
November 2022: A captain in Iran’s IRGC orchestrates the killing of an American citizen living in Baghdad who worked at an English language institute.
March 2023: An Iranian drone kills an American contractor and wounds five service members and another contractor when it strikes a coalition base near the Syrian city of Hasakah.
October 7, 2023: Hamas kills at least 48 Americans and kidnaps at least 12 Americans in a massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel.
December 2023: A drone attack conducted by an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia against U.S. forces in Erbil wounds three American soldiers, including one critically injured with shrapnel to the head that placed him in a coma.
January 2024: A drone launched by Kataib Hezbollah kills three U.S. soldiers at a U.S. military base in Jordan and wounded more than 40 other service members.
October 2024: Iran executes German-Iranian national and U.S. permanent resident Jamshid Sharmahd on fraudulent terrorism charges.
November 2024: A report released by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies indicates that Iran and its proxies have conducted more than 180 attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East between October 17, 2023, and November 19, 2024, resulting in more than 180 wounded and three killed U.S. service members.
November 2024: The U.S. Department of Justice announces charges against an Iranian national and two American accomplices for plotting to assassinate President Trump.
March 2025: A U.S. jury convicts two agents of Iran for plotting to assassinate Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in New York in 2022.

While the merits and efficacy of the US decision to attack three Iranian nuclear facilities are of course debatable, the fact is that the Islamic Republic has committed acts of war against the US for over four decades.