The Iran War: A Background of Decades and Centuries

I’ve followed news of the recent Iran war particularly closely, not least in part because I was scheduled to fly to Israel as part of a Beyond Today television crew to film some long-planned programs. Due to the outbreak of the war, all our flights were cancelled. It would’ve been my seventh trip to this region.

I was in Jerusalem in October 2023 when thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded, killing some 1,200 civilians and soldiers and taking more than 250 hostages into Gaza. The group I was part of evacuated to neighboring Jordan, flying home from Amman several days later.

On a previous trip to Israel in 2005, the night before Beyond Today writer Darris McNeely and I were scheduled to fly out of Amman, three hotels near ours were struck by suicide bombings that killed and maimed hundreds of people.

As the saying goes, the Middle East is a dangerous neighborhood. We know that Bible prophecy foretells a time of unparalleled global turmoil in which weapons of mass destruction and religious deception play major roles (Matthew 24:4-7, 21-22). The Middle East is also at the center of many end-time prophecies.

What is it about this part of the world that brings so much bloodshed, destruction and chaos—including in Iran? What has drawn American and Israeli intervention? Have they faced serious threat here? And where should our focus be as we see great conflicts arise with potential for terrible destruction?

A 47-year war

The Iran war did not start with the latest hostilities. The current phase of this war started 47 years ago with the overthrow of the Iranian Shah and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In that event, 52 U.S. embassy employees were taken hostage and held for 444 days in one of the most embarrassing and humiliating episodes in American history.

But that wasn’t all. Four years later the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was bombed, killing 63 and injuring many more. Later that year a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut was blown up by a massive car bomb, killing 241 American military personnel and injuring roughly 150 others. In 1996, another bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded more than 400.

During the Iraq war, Iranian-supplied bombs and Iranian-supported militants killed more than 600 U.S. soldiers and injured countless others. Since then, other sporadic attacks have taken place on U.S. forces at bases throughout the Middle East. All of these attacks were carried out by individuals and groups that were supported, financed and armed by the Iranian government. And in March of this year a Pakistani man, trained and supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was convicted of plotting to assassinate U.S. President Donald Trump.

These are just some of the many attacks against the United States that were organized, funded and armed by Iran’s government. Together, they have taken the lives of hundreds of Americans over the last 47 years, with many more maimed and injured.

Iran has clearly been at war with the United States for almost half a century. It’s just that America hadn’t decided to fight back until last year with targeted attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities and more recently all-out attacks on Iran’s ballistic missile program and its attempt to rebuild its nuclear program.

The last straw

The last straw apparently took place just before the war started when Iranian “peace talk” negotiators announced that they had enriched enough uranium to 60 percent purity to create 10 to 12 nuclear bombs. This 60 percent enrichment may not sound like much, but further enrichment to make a nuclear weapon takes about one week. So Iran presented itself as extremely close to being able to produce live nuclear warheads, which could strike any nearby national capitals or military bases.

This amounted to an admission that Iranian officials had deliberately fooled Western nations for years by lying while they secretly continued their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Claims that their nuclear material production was for the peaceful generation of civilian power are belied by the fact that commercial nuclear power uses uranium enriched to only 3 to 20 percent. Iran’s claimed 60 percent enrichment of half a ton is useful only for nuclear weapons and totally unusable for peaceful power generation.

The seriousness of this development, along with other intelligence about Iranian missile stockpiling, made the situation utterly untenable.

Iran’s war on Israel

What about Israel? Why did Israel join in joint attacks with the U.S. military? Again, some historical perspective is helpful.

More than 30 years ago, in 1992, an explosion at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed nearly 30 people and injured 240. Two years later a Jewish community center was bombed, also in Buenos Aires, and 85 were killed and more than 300 injured. These attacks were traced back to Iran.

Iran has also funded and supported and armed various Middle Eastern terror groups whose hostility is directed toward Israel. One of the largest is Hezbollah, which arguably dominates Lebanon. In 2006, a war started in response to repeated Hezbollah terror attacks. During those hostilities, 163 Israelis were killed and more than 2,500 were wounded and maimed.

Iran also provided support for the war that broke out 21/2 years ago when thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel. During that initial attack, approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed and 251 were taken hostage. As a percentage of population, that would be the equivalent of an attack in the United States killing some 40,000 Americans.

In the years since then, Iran has launched repeated drone and missile strikes on Israel, in addition to the missiles launched from Hezbollah and Hamas. And Israel is of course determined to keep the Iranians from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, as we’ll note more about shortly.

Why Iran’s leaders have sought to destroy Western powers

Now we’ll look at why Iran has pursued international conflict for 47 years. And to be clear, we’re discussing the Iranian government, not the Iranian people. Iranians I’ve personally met have been very friendly and industrious. It’s the theocratic government that is the problem. To understand what we’ve covered so far, we need to grasp what drives the regime.

This goes back to the last Shah or monarch of Iran, who ruled from 1941 to 1979. The Shah was quite Western-oriented and a close ally of the United States. Iran was a major producer of oil, which it sold to Western nations. But that all changed in 1979 with the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah and took over Iran. It was led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an extreme Islamic hard-liner. Once the Shah fled and the direction of the revolution became obvious, thousands upon thousands of Iranians fled the country to Western nations.

What were Ayatollah Khomeini’s beliefs? The teaching of Islam, going back all the way to Muhammad in the seventh century, is that it is the supreme and only true religion, that it will ultimately conquer all other religions, and that eventually the entire world will come under Islamic rule. The Quran, essentially the Bible of Islam, says this (Dawood translation):

“Fight against them until idolatry [disbelief or worship of any God other than Allah, which includes Christianity] is no more and Allah’s religion [Islam] reigns supreme” (Sura 2:193).

“It is He [Allah] who has sent for His apostle [Muhammad] with guidance and the true faith, so that he may exalt it above all religions, much as the idolaters [those who worship other gods, including Christians] may dislike it” (Sura 61:9).

Understand that “idolaters” in the Quran are those who practice any religion other than Islam—be they Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, or anyone else holding different beliefs.

Again, I want to make a distinction between the religion of Islam and individual Muslims. I’ve encountered many Muslims in travels to Israel, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. And most have been very friendly and hospitable. However, their holy book is clear in what it says. So the religious theocracy in Iran and those who support Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and other terror groups are following what they read in their holy book.

Another major feature of Islamic theology is that the world is divided into two spheres—dar al-Islam, meaning “the abode of Islam,” and dar al-harb, meaning “the abode of war,” signifying the need to fight against all non-Muslim lands to eventually absorb them into the abode of Islam, as noted in the verse from the Quran quoted earlier. Initial offers of “peaceful” conversion to Islam would, upon rejection, be followed by force.

This is a primary reason why there is so much longstanding hostility in the Muslim world toward Israel—because it’s completely unacceptable for land that was once dar al-Islam, part of the reign of Islam, to revert to dar al-harb, to come under the control of Christians or Jews. The land of Israel came under Roman and Byzantine Christian control until conquered by Muslims in A.D. 636-638, then was retaken during the Crusades, then recaptured under the Muslim leader Saladin in A.D. 1187, then again came under Christian control with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I before becoming a Jewish state again in 1948. Most Muslims today are united in their desire to bring it back under Muslim rule—and Iranian leaders have been at the forefront of that effort.

Regardless of what happens in the near term in Iran, this larger conflict is not going to stop.

Implications of the beliefs of Iran’s leadership

Returning to Iran in particular, let’s note more about the progression of the conflict. Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution in Iran, started the “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” chants and popularized the phrase that America is “the Great Satan”—the enemy of Islam and the great obstacle standing in the way. He called Israel “the little Satan.”

He died of natural causes in 1989 and was followed by Ali Khamenei, who was recently killed in the opening minutes of the Iran war. For decades, he and his officials referred to America and Israel with the same terms, and also referred to Britain as “the little Satan.” (See “Khamenei’s Proclamations Against America, Britain and Israel” above.)

Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian president and commander-in-chief 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 . . . It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

What he meant was that Israel is so small, less than 300 miles north to south and averaging about 40 miles wide, that one well-placed nuclear warhead would destroy the entire country—again, a possibility the Israelis could never allow.

Ever since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s top leaders have belonged to a particular 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 dominant religion of the world. (Their sect identifies this individual as the last of a series of 12 imams or Muslim religious leaders through history.)

This belief was demonstrated to the entire world in the opening words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2009 address to the United Nations: “In the Name of [Allah], the Compassionate, the Merciful, praise be to Allah, the Lord of the universe, and peace and blessings be upon our master and prophet, Muhammad . . . O [Allah], hasten the arrival of Imam Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those who attest to his rightfulness.”

Ahmadinejad closed his speech by stating, “There will come a time when justice will prevail across the globe”—that time being “under the rule of the Perfect Man, the last Divine source on earth, the Great Mahdi.” He then called on the world to begin preparing for what he called “that bright future” under the reign of this coming Islamic messiah.

The bottom line is that these Iranian leaders have been driven by the deeply rooted 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 for decades been sponsoring terror groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and their own Revolutionary Guards. This is also why they have been aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons—because nothing would launch a period of global chaos faster and more effectively than nuclear detonations in Western capitals around the world. For other nations, the idea of a regime with such apocalyptic intentions acquiring nuclear weapons should be out of the question.

Weathering the storms

This background should give insight into dangerous and volatile geopolitics of this region of the world. End-time events will center on this area—including massive invasions, devastating battles and leaders who will bring the world to the brink of destruction (Matthew 24:21-22), with Jerusalem remaining the focal point of international conflict (Zechariah 12:2-3).

The question for us is: Where should our focus be amid the turmoil of the present—and the worsening conflict that lies ahead? In Matthew 7:24, Jesus Christ compared those who follow what He taught with a wise man building his house on a rock—a house that amid the raging storms did not fall. Likewise, we can weather all the coming storms by building our lives on Christ and His teachings (watch our Beyond Today short video “Iran’s Storm” at ucg.org/mj26).

It’s not enough to know what’s going on. We must trust God, doing as He commands us, and He will see us through—to His glorious Kingdom that lies beyond. May it come soon!

Khamenei’s Proclamations Against America, Britain and Israel

Ali Khamenei was Iran’s supreme ruler for 37 years until his recent death by U.S.-Israeli military action. Among his many declarations against America, along with Britain, were these:

• March 2006: “Today, America is a threat to global peace and security. Therefore, today, ‘Death to America’ is not just a slogan . . .”

• June 2009: “They [Western nations] are showing their true enmity towards the Iranian Islamic state and the most evil of them is the British government” (prompting chants of “Death to the English”).

• Sept. 2017: “The regime of the United States is indeed the most vicious Satan.”

• Aug. 2025, just last year: [The Iranian Islamic revolution] “empowered everyone to courageously chant ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel.’”

This was proclaimed to their own people in Farsi and Arabic while in English they maintained, “We want peace; we want to negotiate.”

Note also what Khamenei was saying about Israel all this time:

• July 2016: “Nothing called the ‘Zionist regime’ will exist by 25 years from now.”

• June 2018: “There is no cure for the conflict in Palestine except the annihilation of the Zionist regime.”

• Oct. 2023, just before the Hamas terror attack that killed some 1,200 Israelis: “This cancer [Israel] will definitely be eradicated, [Allah] willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”

• March 2025, just last year: “It’s everyone’s religious, human duty to strive to eliminate the Zionist criminal gang [meaning Israel] from the region.”

These quotes are not repeated in our agenda-driven Western media. But this is what Iran’s top leadership was consistently telling its people and the terror groups it supported over many years—that the United States, Israel, Britain and other obstacles needed to be eradicated.