“Take over your government,” President Trump urged Iranians as bombs fell this past weekend. “This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.” It was a stirring call, drawing on the dream of democracy.
The United States has issued it many times before; it tends to end in disaster.
During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe encouraged Hungarians — my parents among them — to rise up. Listeners believed US military assistance was coming. On Oct. 23, 1956, Hungarians took to the streets. A new government formed under Imre Nagy, announcing Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact.
Western help never came. Russian tanks rolled in. My parents watched soldiers open fire on a busy square. Up to 3,000 Hungarians were killed; tens of thousands were arrested. Nagy was later executed.
Something similar unfolded in 1961, when Cuban exiles prepared to invade their homeland and overthrow Fidel Castro with the expectation of US air cover. The military support never materialised. More than 100 rebels were killed at the Bay of Pigs and over 1,000 captured. Castro emerged stronger, emboldened in ways that helped set the stage for the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later.
The pattern repeated in the 1980s when the United States funded and armed Afghan mujahedeen fighting Soviet occupation. American backing initially appeared successful.
The Soviets withdrew in 1989 — but so did US attention and support. What followed was civil war, the rise of the Taliban, the radicalisation of fighters such as Osama bin Laden and, eventually, two decades of American war.
In 1991, after Operation Desert Storm pushed Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait, President George HW Bush urged Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands — to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside”. Iraq’s Shiite majority rose up, driving Baathist forces from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
Within days Saddam’s Republican Guard regained control. Rebels were rounded up, tortured and killed. Some were burned alive after kerosene was poured on them from helicopters. Washington chose not to intervene. Tens of thousands died.
The death tolls tell only part of the story. The deeper legacy is the sense of betrayal that lingers for generations. In 2003, two decades after the United States abandoned those Shiite rebels, my “60 Minutes” colleague Bob Simon and I interviewed the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf, the city at the heart of the 1991 uprising. Asked whether he welcomed the US removal of Saddam, he replied: “The little serpent has left, and the great serpent has come.”
Authoritarian regimes rarely collapse on their own. With everything at stake, they fight back fiercely. Real regime change requires far more than removing a leader. It demands weapons, logistics, intelligence, time, money and often American lives. Yet US presidents frequently speak boldly at the outset and reconsider when the true costs become clear.
Left out of that reassessment are the people who believed the promises — the Hungarians who filled the streets of Budapest, the Iraqi Shiites who seized their cities, the Cuban exiles who waded ashore expecting support that never arrived.
In Iran today, the obstacles are daunting. While most Iranians oppose the regime, there is no organised movement to lead them. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is powerful and brutal. Over 6,800 civilians died during recent protests; some estimates are much higher.
Military analysts say that without weapons or ground troops, Iran’s rebels have little hope. Furthermore, many Iranians remain skeptical of American intentions, remembering 1953 when the CIA overthrew a democratically elected leader to reinstate the shah.
If an uprising succeeded, internal divisions could cause the nation to fracture, creating a power vacuum in a country on the brink of developing nuclear weapons.
Watching the crackdown in Tehran reminds me of the scenes my parents described in Budapest. Without overt US intervention, it took three decades for Soviet control to end there. Will the United States stick around to support the Iranians it is goading into a dangerous uprising? Or will it achieve its immediate military goals and move on?
The rhetoric of liberation is cheap; the cost of delivering on it is not. The people who believe the promises are the ones who bear the price. Before Iranians bet their lives on the United States’ commitment, they deserve to know the odds.
The New York Times