In 1971, a royal celebration was held in Iran. It was the 2,500th birthday of the Iranian monarchy, a rule which began with King Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC and continued (with a few interregnums) to the reign of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in the 20th century. Shah Pahlavi ascended to the Iranian throne in 1941, making 1971 not only a celebration of the Persian monarchy lasting two and a half millennia, but also the Shah’s 30-year Jubilee.
At the beginning of his reign, Shah Pahlavi led his nation through World War Two, assisting the Allies by permitting Roosevelt and Churchill to meet with Stalin in Tehran, where they agreed on the invasion of Normandy. After the war, the Shah forged alliances with the United States, Western Europe, and the free world at large. This proved invaluable during the Cold War, when nations across the Middle East were flirting with Soviet communism as the antithesis of Western colonialism.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Shah Pahlavi revitalized Iran’s impoverished economy by embracing capitalism and harnessing his country’s oil resources. A benevolent monarch, the Shah carried out powerful and transformative social reforms, including women’s suffrage. He invested in education and health care improvements, which doubled Iran’s literacy rate and cut Iran’s infant mortality rate in half. He attempted land reform programs to increase property ownership among the peasant class and protected the religious freedom of his citizens: a rare blessing in the Islamic world.
By the 1970s, Iran was miles ahead of its neighbors in terms of modernization. While countries around Iran languished in communist-induced poverty and jihadi-induced repression, the forward-thinking Pahlavi regime was a model of freedom and relative prosperity. Of course, the Shah was not perfect. His most glaring fault was the establishment of SAVAK, a secret police, intelligence, and security apparatus that suppressed protest and imprisoned people for political dissent. SAVAK is most infamous for using enhanced interrogation techniques against their political prisoners, which included beatings, sleep deprivation, and prolonged solitary confinement. These human rights violations damaged the Shah’s reputation and angered millions of Iranians.
The propaganda machine started churning. The Shah was labelled a pawn of Western imperialism, a puppet who cared more about his opulent wealth than the good of his people. The Shah’s accomplishments were downplayed and his faults were magnified. Professional malcontents preached violence in the streets, radicalizing cadres of young militants to their cause of revolution. The mood on the ground became one of angry discontentment and hatred toward all those associated with the Shah.
In 1979, the people revolted. An Islamic revolution, led by the murderous cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew Shah Pahlavi. The streets of Tehran were flooded with citizens chanting “Death to the Shah!” while tearing down his statues and burning his images. The Shah escaped with his life and sought asylum in Egypt. Shortly thereafter, Pahlavi asked US President Jimmy Carter for permission to seek medical treatment in New York for a rapidly progressing case of lymphatic cancer. Carter graciously welcomed him to the US. This infuriated the Iranian revolutionaries, who replaced their riotous “Death to the Shah!” chants with a new mantra: “Death to Carter!
A group of enraged students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and fought the US Marine guards for three hours. After overpowering the Marines, the Iranians charged inside the embassy and took every person hostage, 66 Americans in all. 52 of these poor souls remained in the hands of their Iranian captors for an unimaginable 444 days before Iran finally released them upon Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency. During this hostage crisis, the Shah died, defeated in the end by the bodily and societal cancers that plagued him.
The return of our hostages was a relief, but the trouble Iran had brewing for the free world had only begun. The Islamic State of Iran instituted shariah law and commissioned a “morality police” to ensure that, among other things, women were wearing their burkas and hijabs properly. Iran quickly became the largest state sponsor of terrorism, funding multiple extremist groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which continue to commit terrorist attacks to this day. Iran refers to the United States as “the Great Satan” and Israel as “the Little Satan.” Iran’s regime expresses solidarity with those determined to wipe Israel off the map and celebrates a national holiday every year called Death to America Day, in which they celebrate the anniversary of Iran’s taking of the American hostages.
Iran also has ambitions of developing nuclear weapons. Various strategies have been employed by the US and her allies to try to prevent this from happening. The most famous action was the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, negotiated and supported by President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry. Among other things, this agreement agreed to give Iran $100 billion in exchange for a promise to reduce their uranium stockpiles and never develop a nuclear bomb. Why the signers deemed the Iranian mullahs as trustworthy is a puzzling question for another day, but America withdrew from this deal two years later under President Trump.
Meanwhile, despite their promises, Iran’s attempts to create a nuclear weapon (ostensibly to attack Israel) have continued uninterrupted. During the 12-Day War of June 2025, the US carried out Operation Midnight Hammer, during which B-2 bombers destroyed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. This effectively ended the 12-Day War and ensured that Iran would not acquire atomic weaponry in the near future. However, over the next several months, the Iranian regime started rebuilding their nuclear infrastructure, escalated their build-up of ballistic missiles, and threatened to fire them at American ships and bases. On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury to neutralize this threat, killing Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of other high-ranking members of Iran’s theocratic oligarchy. Iran has responded by indiscriminately firing missiles and drones across the region, everywhere from an apartment building in Bahrain to a hotel in Dubai: any country that is not hostile to the United States is now a potential target. The US and Israel have continued to bomb Iranian government buildings and missile infrastructure in an effort to limit Iran’s capacity for violence and bring those left in Iran’s leadership to the table to negotiate for peace.
Fifty days before the beginning of this operation, the people of Iran took to the streets. Forty-seven years earlier, their parents and grandparents had revolted against the Shah’s decadence and abuse of power. They drove him from the nation and embraced an Islamic theocracy they were promised would bring them freedom. But after a lifetime of war, terrorism, chaos, and suppressions of all rights and liberties, the youth of Iran see the Ayatollahs for who they really were: conmen. The architects of the Iranian Revolution and the mullahs who have run the Islamic state ever since were nothing more than power-hungry war-mongers who used greed, religion, and hatred to control a population that had once been the envy of the entire region. Now, after 47 years of tyranny and terrorism, the majority of the Iranian people have come to understand that.
When the youth of Iran took to the streets in January 2026, Ayatollah Khamenei ordered his police force to “crush the protests by any means necessary.” What followed was a massacre. Iranian forces fired into the crowds, killing tens of thousands of innocents, unarmed protestors: a series of bloodbaths that make the Tiananmen Square Massacre look civilized. Now, the orchestrators of those mass shootings are dead. No one knows how Operation Epic Fury will end. But if Iran is to be made great again, it won’t happen by American military action alone. It will require the great people of Persia to collectively construct a more perfect union.
Jonathan Kettler is a history teacher at Brandon High School.
