Pierre A. Maroun *

I was a teenager when the Iranian Revolution began. I remember the demonstrations in Tehran — the atmosphere, the slogans, the raw anger directed at America. “Death to America” and “America the Great Satan” weren’t just crowd chants that faded away. They became official fixtures in Khomeini’s and Khamenei’s speeches for decades. The same slogans were painted on walls across Beirut.

I remember Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, and other American and Western hostages kidnapped in Lebanon by Iranian-backed groups. Iranian-backed militias even murdered the CIA’s station chief in Beirut. Years later, when I worked as an armed security officer at the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, American Marines trained our staff on terrorism awareness and explosive recognition because the threats from Iranian militias were constant and deadly serious. The Islamic Republic became the most determined enemy America has faced without the two countries ever fighting a conventional war.

That’s why, when people claim America only became the aggressor when it finally struck back, it just doesn’t ring true. The regime built its entire identity around hostility to the United States from day one.

People forget how this started. In 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days. Then in 1983, Iranian-backed militants from Islamic Jihad bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks, killing 241 Marines and wounding hundreds more. Those Marines weren’t conquerors — they were part of a multinational peacekeeping force that had come in peace to help evacuate the PLO from Lebanon to Tunisia.

Some bring up 1953 and the CIA-backed coup against Mossadegh. That history is real, but the Islamic Republic didn’t simply inherit legitimate grievances — it turned them into permanent, institutional hatred and built its whole political project on top of them. “America the Great Satan” wasn’t a side slogan; it was the core doctrine. And it never stopped at words. Iran funded and armed Hezbollah in Lebanon, backed Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and supported the Houthis in Yemen. In 2016, Iranian forces seized American sailors and forced them to kneel on camera for propaganda. That wasn’t peace — it was a message.

So when an American president finally decides to strike back to keep Iran from becoming even more dangerous, I don’t see it as the start of aggression. I see it as a very late response to decades of provocation. The world can pretend Iran is the innocent party every time America responds, but that story only holds up if you erase the hostages, the bombings, the kneeling sailors, the murdered Marines, and the proxy wars. Whatever anyone thinks about any single U.S. decision, one thing is simply true: this hostility didn’t begin in Washington. It began in Tehran, and Washington finally decided to end it.

*Strategic Analyst

SOUL for Lebanon

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