By Mark Tooley, Christianity Today.
How should American Christians think about Iran, which US and Israeli forces are now attacking with the stated aim of overthrowing its Islamist regime?
Saturday night, President Donald Trump announced that Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei had been killed in a strike, and Iranian state media soon confirmed it. And since late December, Iran’s dictatorship has reportedly killed thousands of anti-government protesters, which has been typical of its repressive theocratic rule across 47 years.
Historically known as Persia, Iran is a rare nation to have endured since Bible times. Straddling the crossroads of the world, it sits on the Persian Gulf, with Russia to the north, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the east, Iraq and Turkey to the west, and the wealthy oil sheikhdoms to the south.
Americans of a certain age will recall Iran’s 1979 revolution, in which Islamist followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the pro-US monarchy, which the CIA had helped install, and established a murderous theocratic dictatorship led by mullahs. Since then, Tehran’s reigning ideology has defined itself against the United States and Israel. Its first self-created crisis was taking 52 American diplomats hostage for over a year, helping to doom President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in the process.
In the subsequent 47 years, Iran has been a continuous thorn in the flesh for every American president. The Iran-Contra affair—in which weapons were covertly sold to Iran in exchange for supposed help in freeing American hostages held in Lebanon by Iran’s allies—proved catastrophic for the Reagan administration. Every subsequent American leader has contended with Iranian hostility and support for militant proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza.