When Americans hear "death to America," most assume it comes from irrational hatred. Gen. Stanley McChrystal says the story is far more complicated - and far older - than most realize. In a conversation with New York Times columnist David French, the retired four-star general traced Iran's hostility not to 1979, when the American Embassy in Tehran was seized, but to 1953, when the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran's constitutionally elected prime minister and installed the Shah.
The Shah's regime oppressed its population for 25 years, particularly through Savak, the secret police, McChrystal said on the New York Times podcast "The Opinions," as "Hvylya" reports. "When the Iranian revolution erupts in 1978, we may have been surprised, but the Iranian people were not surprised," he said.
The next mark on Iran's collective memory came during the eight-year war with Iraq - a conflict twice as long as World War I. McChrystal emphasized that the generation who survived that bloodletting now forms the backbone of support for Iran's clerical establishment. Then in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians. Fourteen years later, in 2002, George W. Bush named Iran to the "axis of evil," reportedly surprising the Iranians themselves.
McChrystal's point is not that Iran is blameless. He personally led a task force in Iraq that fought Iranian-backed Shia militias and their explosively formed projectiles. "Of course, they were the enemy," he acknowledged. But he warned that ignoring this chain of grievances leads to catastrophic miscalculation. "If we don't understand that journey to this point, we don't understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make," he said.
Previously, "Hvylya" reported that Iran's new supreme leader vanished from public view after the opening strike, with rumors of serious wounds circulating.