Why iraq hates america

Policy Analysis PolicyWatch Jan 9, Also available in Arabic. About the Authors. David Pollock. Brief Analysis. To top. The Harrowing of Mustafa Kadhimi. The Future of Putin's War in Syria. Stay up to date Sign up for email alerts. In , when the September 11 terrorist attack devastated the US, Iran again reached out. Iranians are very keen to highlight that their brand of Islam, Shi'ism, had not unleashed this terror on American soil," Professor Ansari says.

During the Obama administration, a nuclear agreement was reached between Iran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including America. The US has since withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal , and adopted what Mr Byrne calls a "more confrontational approach". Professor Ansari says "of course there are moderates in Iran" — but a lot of them are in prison. Professor Ehteshami says there were three fundamental reasons for Mr Trump's decision to withdraw from the deal.

The first? Internal pressures from "people in his administration [with an] inherent hostility towards the [Islamic] Republic". The second, he says, is that Mr Trump is "incredibly hostile to anything that the Obama administration achieved". There are bushfires in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Yemen and elsewhere in the region," he says. And while they felt that Obama did not have a listening ear, in Trump they found a willing ally in not just containing Iran but to try and roll back Iran's influence.

Professor Ansari would like to see people in the West "taking the problem of Iran much more seriously". Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

America and Iran have despised each other for decades. But where does the bitter tension between the two nations come from? But the war left a greatly weakened Britain in its wake.

RN in your inbox Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter. Email address. From then on, my friends and I often took the subway to play soccer there. We never lost our way, because as long as we saw those two tall buildings, we would find the field.

But one day, those two tall buildings suddenly disappeared. If we can't see them, how can we find our soccer field? However, when Americans use this word, it has another meaning: "landmark.

The polling data from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in shows that 42 percent of Americans feel that the US is less safe than it was before the terrorist attacks in , while almost 90 percent believe that terrorism is likely to be a part of life at least to some degree in the future. That's because the tragedies in occurred at a time when the world had entered the age of television and internet. When Americans witnessed the landmarks of New York collapsed live in air, their hearts collapsed as well.

At least 2, people lost their lives in the terrorist attacks, while the death toll at Pearl Harbor was 2, As of right now, this looks like the end of the latest round of hostilities. However, the risk that a larger war could break out remains. Several experts told Vox that Iran will almost certainly attack the US and its allies again at some point. In fact, it would commit the US to hitting Iran repeatedly if or, more likely, when it engages in anti-American military activities.

So long as both sides are committed to using force in this fashion, the conditions that led to this latest flare-up in violence are still there. While the immediate cause for panic may have passed, the situation remains unstable.

The simple answer is that it would be hell on earth. The US strategy would almost certainly involve using overwhelming air and naval power to beat Iran into submission early on. That plan makes sense as an opening salvo, experts say, but it would come nowhere close to winning the war. And the options facing the president at that point would be extremely problematic, experts say.

The riskiest one — by far — would be to invade Iran. The logistics alone boggle the mind, and any attempt to try it would be seen from miles away.

Iran has nearly three times the number of people Iraq did in , when the war began, and is about three and a half times as big.

By contrast, America never had more than , service members in Iraq. Iran has small mountain ranges along some of its borders. Entering from the Afghanistan side in the east would mean traversing two deserts. Trying to get in from the west could also prove difficult even with Turkey — a NATO ally — as a bordering nation.

But the hawkish aides at his side, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo , could try to convince him not to look weak and to go all-in and grasp victory. A US invasion of Iran would likely lead to thousands or hundreds of thousands of dead. But it could spread chaos in the Middle East and around the world, hoping that a war-weary US public, an intervention-skeptical president, and an angered international community would cause America to stand down.

That may seem like a huge task — and it is — but experts believe the Islamic Republic has the capability, knowhow, and will to pull off such an ambitious campaign. US allies would also be prime targets. Hezbollah , an Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, might attack Israel with rockets and start its own brutal fight. Iran could also encourage terrorist organizations or other proxies to strike inside Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf nations.

Last year, it planned and executed drone strikes on two major Saudi oil facilities deep inside the kingdom, convulsing world markets. Experts note that the Islamic Republic likely has sleeper cells in Europe and Latin America, and they could resurface in dramatic and violent ways. In , Argentina arrested two men suspected of having ties to Hezbollah. The chaos would also extend into the cyber realm. Iran is a major threat to the US in cyberspace. All of this — proxies striking around the world, cyberattacks on enterprise — would happen as Iran continued to resist conventional American forces.

In the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, Iranian sailors could use speedboats to put bombs on oil tankers or place mines in the water to destroy US warships. Iranian submarines would also play a huge part in trying to sink an American vessel.

Should US troops try to enter Iranian territory on land, Iranian ground forces would also push back on them fiercely using insurgent-like tactics while the US painfully marched toward Tehran.

Trump brushed off an immediate exit and went as far as to say he would impose harsh sanctions on the country if it forced out US troops. But then confusion reigned.

William Seely to Iraqi Lt. But Esper and Army Gen. Trump has long wanted US troops out of Iraq, saying that America has already spent enough money and lost enough lives since the invasion. But a precipitous force withdrawal could hurt the US strategically in the Middle East.