For 47 years, American leaders have treated every Iranian attack as though it were an isolated incident. A bombing here. A hostage crisis there. A roadside bomb in Iraq. A missile launched by a militia in Syria. A drone fired from Yemen.
Then, whenever the United States finally responds, critics act as though America suddenly woke up one morning and decided to start a war.
That ignores nearly half a century of history.
Congress may never have formally declared war against the Islamic Republic, but Tehran has been conducting a sustained shadow war against the United States since the revolution of 1979. Iran has used its military, intelligence services, terrorist organizations and proxy militias to attack Americans while maintaining enough distance to avoid facing the full consequences.
The exact level of Iranian control has varied from one attack to another. Some operations were directly conducted or directed by Iranian forces. Others were carried out by groups receiving Iranian money, weapons, training or intelligence. But taken together, the pattern is impossible to dismiss.
The war began in 1979
On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the United States Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans, primarily diplomats and embassy personnel, were held hostage for 444 days. They were not released until January 20, 1981.
That was not merely a protest that got out of control. It was an assault on American sovereign territory, openly supported by the revolutionary government that had taken power in Iran.
What followed was not peace.
It was an undeclared war fought through car bombs, kidnappings, hijackings, mines, roadside bombs, rockets, drones and assassination plots.
The major documented attacks and campaigns
This is not every Iranian-linked attack against an American citizen, diplomat, base or military unit. There have been too many individual rockets, drones and roadside bombs to list separately. This is the major documented record.
April 1983: An Iran-backed terrorist organization bombed the United States Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.
October 1983: Hezbollah bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members, including 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. It remains one of the deadliest single attacks against the United States military since World War II.
1984 and 1985: Iran-backed terrorists kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured and murdered. They bombed the United States Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 23 people, including two American service members. Hezbollah terrorists then hijacked TWA Flight 847, tortured passengers and murdered U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem before throwing his body onto the Beirut airport tarmac.
1988: The USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, blowing a 15-foot hole in the ship and nearly sinking it. The attack led directly to Operation Praying Mantis, the largest American naval engagement since World War II at that time.
June 1996: Members of the pro-Iran Saudi Hezbollah organization bombed the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia. Nineteen American airmen were killed and hundreds were wounded. The federal indictment described surveillance reports being provided to Iranian officials and an Iranian military officer directing surveillance of potential American targets.
Iran’s hidden war in Iraq
The Iraq War gave Iran its greatest opportunity to kill Americans without placing Iranian soldiers in conventional uniforms.
Between 2003 and 2011, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force funded, armed and trained Shiite militia groups that attacked American troops with rockets, mortars, kidnappings, improvised explosive devices and explosively formed penetrators.
The United States Treasury documented Quds Force training courses that taught militia members how to plant IEDs, conduct guerrilla warfare and fire anti-aircraft weapons. Treasury also reported that an IRGC commander transported explosives and related materials from Iran into Iraq and that Iranian-sponsored networks conducted IED attacks against Americans around Baghdad.
These were not weapons that simply fell off the back of a truck. They were part of an organized system of financing, training, transportation and targeting designed to kill coalition troops.
A Pentagon estimate later attributed at least 603 American military deaths in Iraq to Iran-backed militias. That amounts to roughly one out of every six American combat deaths in that war.
In January 2007, operatives linked to the Quds Force entered an Iraqi security compound in Karbala while disguised as American soldiers. They killed five U.S. service members and wounded three others.
Iran did not merely oppose the Iraq War politically. It trained and equipped the men who were building and planting bombs under American vehicles.
Iranian support in Afghanistan
Iran also supported the Taliban and other militants while American troops were fighting in Afghanistan.
The Treasury Department reported that the Quds Force provided training, weapons and financial support to the Taliban and Islamic militants in Afghanistan. American officials also reported recovering Iranian-produced IEDs and components intended for attacks on coalition forces.
The public evidence is more explicit about organized Iranian IED training and explosives shipments into Iraq than it is about Iranian bomb makers physically operating inside Afghanistan. That distinction should be acknowledged.
But the larger point remains. Iran aided militants fighting American and coalition troops in both wars. In Iraq, that support included direct IED training and the movement of explosives across the border. In Afghanistan, it included weapons, financing and support for Taliban networks capable of conducting roadside-bomb attacks.
The war reached American soil
In 2011, American authorities disrupted a Quds Force-linked plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., using explosives. The proposed bombing could have killed numerous Americans inside a crowded restaurant. One conspirator later pleaded guilty and received a 25-year prison sentence.
In 2022, the Justice Department charged an IRGC member with attempting to arrange the murder of former National Security Adviser John Bolton in Washington or Maryland. Prosecutors said the operative offered $300,000 for the killing.
Iranian officials and operatives have also been tied to kidnapping and assassination plots against Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in New York. Two men were convicted and sentenced to 25 years for participating in an Iranian government-sponsored murder-for-hire plot against her.
In 2024, the Justice Department charged an alleged IRGC asset in a separate Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump and other targets inside the United States.
These were not angry social-media posts or empty rhetoric. They were organized plots involving surveillance, weapons, money and hired killers operating inside America.
The attacks never stopped
In December 2019, Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah killed an American civilian contractor and wounded American service members in a rocket attack on K-1 Air Base in Iraq.
In January 2020, Iran directly launched ballistic missiles at American forces stationed at Ain al-Asad Air Base. More than 100 American troops were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
In March 2023, an Iranian-backed militia drone struck an American coalition base in Syria, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding five American service members and another contractor.
Between October 2023 and November 2024, Iran and its proxy militias launched more than 180 attacks against American forces across Iraq, Syria and Jordan. Those attacks wounded more than 180 U.S. service members and killed three soldiers.
On January 28, 2024, an Iran-backed militia launched a drone at Tower 22 in Jordan, killing Sgt. William Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Sanders and Spc. Breonna Moffett. More than 40 other American service members were injured.
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi forces launched missiles and one-way attack drones at American warships more than 170 times between 2023 and March 2025. They also attacked international commercial shipping, forcing the United States Navy into months of sustained combat operations in the Red Sea.
And the conflict continues. On July 17, 2026, an Iranian ballistic-missile and drone attack in Jordan killed two American service members, left another missing and caused additional injuries, according to U.S. Central Command.
The question is not whether Iran started a war
Iran chose the shadow-war model because it worked.
Tehran could fund a militia, provide the missile, train the bomb maker and select the target, then deny responsibility after Americans were killed. Washington would retaliate against an empty warehouse, announce that it did not seek escalation and wait for the next attack.
Every incident was treated as separate from the one before it. Every administration hoped sanctions, negotiations or limited strikes would finally change the regime’s behavior.
They did not.
None of this means the United States should enter an unlimited war without clearly defined objectives. Any military campaign must have congressional oversight, achievable goals, protections for civilians and a realistic end state.
But Americans deserve an honest debate.
The question is not whether the United States suddenly started a war with Iran.
The real question is why it took our government 47 years to admit that the Islamic Republic had already been waging one against us.
- Tooch
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