The Reagan administration supported Iraq during the war but didn’t seek a major confrontation with Iran. It buried Lyon’s plan. “No, we’re not going to have a war with Iran,” Reagan told a press conference after one of the aforementioned skirmishes in the Gulf. “They’re not that stupid!”

Congress likely would have opposed a war. In July 1987, Robert Greenberger, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the bipartisan “protectionism sentiment” that existed in Congress at the time. Representatives questioned why U.S. allies were not helping pay for Operation Earnest Will.

The escort mission ended one month after the Iran-Iraq War did. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed, along with any reasonable fear of a Russian invasion of Iran. The new Russian Federation, preoccupied with its own post-Soviet domestic crises, no longer even shared a border with the Islamic Republic.

The next time the U.S. military deployed to the Persian Gulf, it was to confront Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. Iran remained neutral during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. However, it quickly grew uncomfortable with the continued presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region following the war. Javad Zarif, the deputy Iranian ambassador to the United Nations at the time, alleged that the U.S. presence had “objectives that go beyond the liberation of Kuwait.”

U.S. efforts in the region in the 1990s primarily focused on containing Iraq. However, when a truck bomb devastated the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, killing 19 American airmen, Washington suspected Tehran was responsible.

“I don’t want any piss-ant half-measures,” Pres. Bill Clinton told National Security Advisor Richard Clarke. The administration reportedly mulled a ground invasion of Iran.

Years later, Clinton’s former secretary of defense William Perry revealed that one of the Clinton administration’s contingency plans entailed an attack targeting “a number of their military facilities that would have weakened – substantially weakened … the Iranian navy and air force.”

“They feared what action we would take,” Perry said of the Iranians. “They rightly feared it. In fact I had a contingency plan for a strike on Iran, if it had been clearly established. But it was never clearly established, and so we never did that.”

In 2007, Perry said he was convinced that Al Qaeda had carried out the Khobar bombing.

In the 2000s in Washington, there was frequent talk of, and even detailed proposals for and against, a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear program. After the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, some pundits advocated a follow-up invasion of Iran. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran,” was a popular joke among neoconservatives.

Soon the United States was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Invading Iran lost its appeal. As early as July 2003, one commentator writing in The Los Angeles Times argued that talk of confronting Iran constituted “an empty threat, since the U.S. does not have the military means and the American people do not have the will to invade Iran.”

“The threat of American military intervention, therefore, only helps the conservative mullahs to rally people around the Iranian flag.”

A decade later, attitudes changed. In the summer of 2018, the Trump administration withdrew Washington from the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and imposed harsher economic sanctions on Tehran. Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton, told a rally of the militant anti-Iran Mojahedin-e Khalq group that he sought regime change in Tehran “before 2019.” The administration later claimed it didn’t seek regime-change.

Image: Reuters