3 key moments that led to the U.S.-Iran war
3/12/202648 min
Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U.S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught moment we're in today. This episode originally ran in 2019 as Rules of Engagement. You can find more of Throughline's coverage into the origins of the conflict in the Middle East here.
Guests:
Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Washington Institute's military and security studies program
Kim Zetter, writer for WIRED magazine and author of Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
At this year's Oscars, One Battle After Another took home the award for Best Picture. Michael B. Jordan won for Lead Actor, and the telecast had plenty of jokes at Timothee Chalamet's expense. Listen to a recap on Pop Culture Happy Hour via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rund Abdelfatah· Host0:19
Hey, it's Rund. The current war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has been decades in the making, and Throughline has been covering the tension between the US and Iran for years. So today, we're bringing you an episode from a past series we made. Part one of this series took us inside the CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister in nineteen fifty-three. That episode is called Four Days in August, and if you haven't heard it yet, check it out in our archives. Today, we pick the story back up in nineteen seventy-nine. [instrumental music playing] The secular Shah the US put in place after the coup in nineteen fifty-three was suddenly facing a major crisis, an Islamic revolution.
Speaker 2· Soundbite1:13
For the last seven days, Tehran and other cities have seen violent clashes between troops and demonstrators demanding the Shah's return. Pelting the soldiers with rocks and homemade petrol bombs.
Ramtin Arablouei· Host1:24
Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets.
Speaker 2· Soundbite1:26
Inevitably, the result is massacre.
Unknown speaker1:29
[gunshots]