CJ Day
Staff Writer
Students in 2020 might have a new fear to compete with student loans – getting drafted.
Over the break, tensions between Iran and the United States reached a boiling point, with many doomsayers on the Internet claiming it was the beginning of World War III. Some on social media said they feared this would lead to a new draft, and that American youth would be enlisted to fight a ground war in the Middle East
Though many students have expressed concern that they might have to join the army before they get their diploma, few have any context for this fear beyond memes they saw on Instagram.
“I don’t know, I guess I just think of it as a thing that could happen now,” said freshman Sarah Pearson. “It’s like getting hit by a car or something, just something that might happen to me.”
Pearson said she did not really understand the reason why she might get drafted. She did not know much about the situation in Iran, beyond the fact that the US killed an Iranian general.
“We killed an important dude, and now Iran’s all mad about it, and then they shot some missiles at us,” she said.
Relations between the US and Iran have always been complex. To explain what is happening now, however, the question is not just what has happened, but where to begin. To get a real thorough understanding of the issue, the best place to start is 1941, when the US, along with other Allied powers, helped to prop up a pro-US emperor, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as to maintain power in the region.
This system worked out pretty well for America until 1979, when a violent revolution overthrew the pro-US regime and installed an Islamic republic ruled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. This is when relations between the US and Iran started to get a little frosty.
Khomeini’s regime was, and still is, far less friendly towards America than the Shah was. After the revolution, the US gave Shah Pahlavi asylum, and in response, a student group stormed the US embassy in Tehran, Iran and took 52 of the embassy’s staff hostage. Though Iran released their hostages in early 1981, the US has not reestablished an embassy there, and uses the Swiss embassy whenever American diplomats must visit Iran.
Relations continued to deteriorate throughout the 1980s and 90s. The US froze all of Iran’s assets that were stored in American banks, meaning that Iran could not spend any of the estimated 12 billion dollars it had stored abroad. The US said it unfroze the majority of Iran’s assets in 1981, while Iran contends that the share is still inaccessible. The US also passed massive sanctions that prevent Iran from trading normally with any company that also trades with the United States. The US has blamed Iran for a myriad of terrorist attacks since 1980, like the 1983 bombing of the US’s embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.
Of course, the US has not done a perfect job of staying on its side of the fence, either. In 1988, the US Navy shot down a commercial jet in Iranian airspace, killing 290 civilians. The navy said it thought the flight was a warplane, and has made no effort to make amends with Iran.
US-Iranian relations mostly stayed tense but stable after 2000, despite George W. Bush describing Iran as part of the “axis of evil” four months after 9/11. During Barack Obama’s second term as president, he made an effort to normalize relations with Iran. In exchange for the US lessening the sanctions it had placed on Iran, Iran would agree to stop working on its nuclear programs, which had been largely ignored by the Iranian government until 9/11 spurred them to work towards nuclear weapons. This deal, which Obama brokered in 2015, is called the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, also known as the ‘Iran deal’.
The Iran deal seemed like a step forward in normalizing US-Iran relations, but many conservatives disliked it, and when Donald Trump took office in 2017, he backed out of the deal and reimposed Iran’s sanctions. The Trump administration put more and more pressure on Iran, until things finally reached a boiling point in late 2019.
On Dec. 31, 2019, Iranian-backed militia groups stormed the US embassy in Iraq, Iran’s neighbor. The US then killed Iranian general Qasam Solemani, who led the country’s military intelligence wing. Iran threatened the US with a proportional response, claiming this opened up the US’s generals to similar attacks. It shot missiles at a few of the US’s military bases in the area, but did not kill anyone.
Since then, things seem to have settled into some kind of new status quo. Some are worried about a possible nuclear strike against America from Iran, but Iran does not have nuclear weapons, so this seems unlikely. Military officials have said they have no plans to institute a draft to fight any war in the Middle East, so students have very little to be worried about.
It seems as if January’s events were just another footnote in a cold war that has been going on for the last 40 years.
