By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
The Iran War did not start in 2026 but 47 years ago, with the overthrow of the Iranian Shah and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 U.S. embassy employees hostage for 444 days.
Four years later, Iran bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63. Soon, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up, killing 241 American personnel and injuring 150 others.
In 1996, another bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded 400.
Iranian militants also killed over 600 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Sporadic attacks on U.S. forces at bases throughout the Middle East followed.
In 1992, an explosion at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed 30 and injured 240. Two years later, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 and injuring over 300.
Together, these attacks have cost the lives of thousands of Americans over the last 47 years. And America decided to fight back only now with targeted attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities.
The last straw was the knowledge that Iran had enriched enough uranium to create 10 to 12 nuclear bombs. Iranian officials had deliberately fooled Western nations while they secretly continued their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Iran has also funded various Middle Eastern terrorist groups whose hostility is directed toward Israel. One is Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanon. In 2006, Hezbollah terror attacks killed 163 Israelis and wounded more than 2,500.
Iran also supported the war that broke out on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking 251 hostages. Since then, Iran has launched drone and missile strikes on Israel, killing and injuring hundreds more.
The theocratic government of Iran is the problem, not the common people. The Shah of Iran, a close ally of the United States, ruled from 1941 to 1979. In 1979, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard took over Iran.
Once the Shah fled, the direction of the revolution became obvious, causing thousands of Iranians to flee the country.
Ayatollah Khomeini believed that Islam is the only true religion, that will ultimately conquer all other religions and the entire world will come under Islamic rule. The Quran teaches “Fight against them until idolatry [worship of any God other than Allah, which includes Christianity] is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme” (Sura 2:193).
Islamic theology teaches that the world is divided into two spheres — dar al-Islam, meaning “the abode of Islam,” and dar al-harb, “the abode of war,” signifying the need to war against all non-Muslims.
The longstanding hostility in the Muslim world toward Israel is because it’s unacceptable for land that was once dar al-Islam, to revert to dar al-harb, meaning to come under the control of Christians or Jews.
Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution in Iran, began the “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” chants, popularizing the phrase that America is “the Great Satan” — and Israel and Britain are “the little Satans.”
Ever since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s top leaders have belonged to a sect of Islam that believes an Islamic messiah known as the mahdi will arise in a period of end-time trouble and lead Islam to its rightful place as the only religion of the world.
Iranian president and commander-in-chief, Hashemi Rafsanjani from 1989 to 1997, openly threatened in 2001 to use nuclear weapons against Israel, saying: “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything in Isreal” meaning that Israel is so small, less than 300 miles north to south and about 40 miles wide, that one well-placed nuclear warhead would destroy the entire country — a possibility the Israelis could never allow.
Iranian leaders are driven by the core belief that their Islamic messiah is going to appear soon, and that they can and must hasten that day by launching wars leading to global chaos.
This is why they have sponsored terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
This is also why they have been aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons — because nothing would launch global chaos faster and more effectively than nuclear detonations in Western capitals around the globe.
Many Democrats have strongly condemned Trump’s Iran War, calling the President a “genocidal tyrant’” who uses “morally repugnant” acts to achieve his goal. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) labeled Trump’s actions against Iran as “pure evil” and a “war crime.”
Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders issued a call for Congress to immediately intervene to end the war, condemning Trump’s war as the “ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.”
Numerous Democrats have accused the President of dragging the country into another costly and unconstitutional endless war.
Congresswoman Maxine Dexter (D-OR) demanded that the Speaker of the House vote on a War Powers Resolution, to legally rein in what they call the President’s war.
Some of these comments by Democrats border on treason, and, at the least, support for the Iranian terrorists’ 47-year war against the U.S. that cost the lives of many thousands of Americans.
I am very grateful to Scott Ashley for compiling the statistics and quotes in this column.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com Bergman’s website is: https://crev.info/author/jbergman/
