Breaking The Silence Between The U.S. And Iran
Tension, distrust, hostility: For more than 30 years, those words have described the relationship between Iran and the United States. But there's one other overriding word to describe it: silence.
Since 1979, no American president had spoken with a leader of Iran. That all changed on Sept. 27, when President Obama entered the White House briefing room and said that he had spoken with Hassan Rouhani, Iran's new president, by telephone.
This apparent milestone in U.S.-Iran relations was big news. The talk between Obama and Rouhani was greeted with great hope — and deep skepticism, born from three decades of bad blood, mistakes and sometimes outright aggression.
A Tense Goodbye
The long silence started in 1979, but the roots of the discord are much deeper. In 1953, Iran was a democracy with a popular prime minister. But the CIA helped overthrow that government and re-installed a monarch — the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — who was much friendlier to U.S. interests.
Pahlavi would rule brutally until 1979, when he fled amid mass protest. Stepping into that void was Iran's revolutionary leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, who came out of exile to become the grand ayatollah — the supreme leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran.
Columbia University professor Gary Sick tells NPR's Arun Rath the new Islamic Iranian state was a "new creature" to the U.S. — and to much of the rest of the world.
"To say we were unprepared is absolutely an understatement," says Sick, who also served on the National Security Council for President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
The relationship frayed further when on Nov. 4, 1979, protesters and militants overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of staff members as hostages. They demanded that the shah, who was in the U.S. seeking medical treatment, be returned home to face justice.
After 444 days, the hostages were released, but the crisis caused the U.S. to formally break diplomatic relations with Iran. Since then, the two countries have gone through many periods of tension and occasional opportunity.
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