The likely temporary Israel-Iran ceasefire notwithstanding, if you need proof of how despicable Donald Trump is, consider this:

When asked last week if he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop bombing Iran, which had already said it would stop retaliating for Israeli attacks, Trump said, “I think it’s very hard to make that request right now. If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do that [than] if somebody’s losing. But we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran. Israel is doing well, in terms of war, and… Iran is doing less well. It’s a little bit hard to get somebody to stop.”

Of course, Trump could have done more than request. He could have told Netanyahu that the transfer of American tax money, bombs, missiles, planes, arms, and spare parts would end at once if he did not stop the war. Trump did not do that. Instead, he made light of the question. That’s despicable.

To say the least, Trump has a thing about Iran. That is likely explained in part by the 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew the American- and Israeli-backed dictator-monarch, and the taking of hostages in the American embassy. However, history did not begin in 1979. The U.S. government had helped abuse the Iranians long before that. A more suitable date on which to begin the story is August 15, 1953. That is when the CIA and British operatives ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restored the autocratic Shah of Iran to power. Mosaddegh, among other things, had nationalized the oil industry to the detriment of British oil interests.

It so happens that in 2014, when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and congressional Democrats and Republicans were trying to undermine the interim agreement that had been agreed to, my old friend Marc Joffe and I wrote an article in the Guardian detailing the U.S. government’s long abuse of Iran. Here are highlights from that article.

Congressional hostility toward Iran is rooted in a black-and-white worldview that runs as follows: the United States and Israel are liberal democracies that defend individual rights and human dignity, whereas Iran is a despotic theocratic regime that sponsors terrorism and would do anything within its power to wipe Israel off the map.

The world is rarely black and white, and conflicts are usually not resolved until each side understands the other’s point of view. With that in mind, it may be worth pondering some inconvenient truths that would cause a fair-minded Iranian to doubt congressional wisdom.

The assertion that US policies are driven by a concern for human rights is not consistent with the history of US-Iran relations.

That may have been (and still may be) news to many Americans, but it should not have been. It wasn’t news to the Iranians. The U.S. government has been aligned with brutal regimes all over the world for a long time. You can look it up. No need to go through the larger record here. The history of U.S.-Iran relations makes the point.

As the CIA now admits, [the U.S. government] overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. For the next quarter century, until the 1979 Islamic revolution, the US government supported the autocratic Shah—whose regime also enjoyed close relations with Israel.

The Shah’s secret police—Savak—became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. By the 1970s, the regime’s brutality had been well documented in the west.

In 1976 the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva reported: “There is abundant evidence showing the systematic use of impermissible methods of psychological and physical torture of political suspects during interrogation.”

Yet successive US administrations supported the Shah until the very end and then shielded him from prosecution after his overthrow.

Not only did the United States impose and support a regime that tortured innocent Iranians, there is also evidence that the CIA assisted Savak. A 1980 report on CBS’s 60 Minutes documented close ties between these two organizations.

Joffe and I pointed out that this “adds perspective to the US embassy hostage-taking drama that stretched over the last 444 days of the Carter administration. Many in Iran believed that US embassy staff had aided and abetted Savak and were thus fair targets for retaliation. One need not condone the hostage-taking to understand that it was not merely an unprovoked, sadistic act.” The 66 American embassy personnel were not seized by militant students until months after the revolution, when President Jimmy Carter admitted the Shah to the United States for medical treatment and presumably political refuge. The students were backed by the new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

That was not the end of the story. Americans might have forgotten the U.S. role in Iraq’s savage war on Iran.

It is now well known that the Reagan administration helped Iraq with “intelligence and military support” after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and launched a brutal eight-year war. “[I]t was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost,” Shane Harris and Matthew M Aid wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last year. With the administration’s knowledge,

Note well: “Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces, killing thousands. Declassified government records show that the Reagan administration, represented by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, helped Saddam’s military produce and deploy these awful weapons of mass destruction, which included biological as well as chemical agents.”

Got that? The U.S. government provided WMD to Saddam Hussein for use against Iran. Iran’s ruler refused to permit his military to produce chemical weapons for retaliation. (In 2003 the U.S. military invaded Iraq supposedly over WMD that Saddam had gotten rid of years earlier.)

To add injury to injury:

In 1988, while the war was in progress, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 aboard, including 66 children. The captain of the ship said it was under assault by Iranian gunboats at the time and that the Airbus A300 was misidentified as an attacking F-14 Tomcat. Iran countered that flight 655 left Iran the same time every day. Witnesses with Italy’s navy and on a nearby US warship said that at the time it was shot down, the airliner was climbing. In 1996 the United States settled an Iranian claim against it at the International Court of Justice for $131.8m. While it was appropriate for the US government to accept responsibility, it could not make up for the Iranian people’s losses: more innocent lives were snuffed out by this attack than were killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

President George H. W. Bush, however, refused to apologize for the tragedy. As Bush I put it: “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” Sensitive, yes?

The new century signaled no diminution in American belligerence toward Iran—not even after the 9/11 attacks, which presented an opportunity for rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Despite Iran’s efforts to cooperate with the United States after 9/11 (the Shiite regime opposed both the Sunni Taliban and al-Qaida in next-door Afghanistan to the east), President [George W.] Bush in 2002 included Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” along with North Korea and Iraq. The following year, the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq—placing US forces on both Iran’s western and eastern flanks. Finally, in 2011, Iranian forces captured a US surveillance drone that was flying well within its air space—about 140 miles from the Afghanistan border.

Thus, “far from being innocent, US policy toward Iran appears downright hostile when viewed from the other side. Rather than continuing to tell ourselves tales, it is time we embrace the truth about our relations with Iran, which even American and Israeli intelligence agencies say is not building a nuclear weapon. We have a historic chance to end the destructive cold war with Iran, which, like it or not, will remain a major power in the Middle East. It would be a tragedy if Congress were to sabotage this opportunity.”

Congressional obstruction notwithstanding, Obama, working with the other Security Council members, Germany, and the rest of the European Union, finalized the nuclear agreement with Iran, which imposed an additional inspections regime along with other restrictions and seemed to take war off the table. In return, Western sanctions were to be lifted, and Iran was to rejoin the world economy. In the 1990s, Iran’s second and current “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa forbidding the procurement, production, or use of nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. President Joe Biden did precious little to revive his old boss’s deal, but Trump presumably would have torn that up too when he returned to office this year. The U.S. government’s shameful record concerning Iran continues to haunt the world. It’s not over yet, no matter what Trump says.