Former Navy SEAL and military expert Matt Bracken provides context for the current Iran war. The US overthrew their elected government in 1953, sponsored the invasion in 1980 that killed half a million Iranians, and now, Iran has to fight the Americans again. Video interview by Info Wars.
”Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died repelling what they see as an American-backed invasion of their country, which included the use of poison gas, and this war went from 1980 to 1988.”
Transcription, shortening and text improvements for clarity by T. Sassersson, editor of NewsVoice
”Imagine 500 Scud missiles being fired into Chicago or New York, or poison gas being used as a country’s as your land border is being invaded, and America is the one providing the armoured vehicles, the poison gas, the artillery shells.
So, if the Iranians have a grudge against America, and you understand that this is what they’re taught in their schools. You know, they’re taught that America overthrew their elected government in 1953, sponsored the invasion in 1980 that killed half a million Iranians or more.”.
”This is what their children learn in school. This is like their World War II story. And the men who survived this war, say they may even have had poison gas injuries, they’re now college professors, they’re doctors, they’re people’s parents and uncles. They’re in their 60s. They’re my age.
Those are the men that the young Iranians look up to in terms of, ’Once again, we have to repel the Americans’, and this time they’re going to completely wreck our country. They want to turn our country into something like Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip. They know this is an existential fight.”
”The idea that at this point Iranians are going to rise up against their government is ridiculous. You know, most of Iranians don’t love the Basij, the militias, but they see their country on the verge of total destruction, where it will be reduced to a Mad Max warlord terror state, the way that Syria is today or Lebanon, or Iraq for that matter.”
”They want to be a united country still. I mean, Persia has more than a thousand-year history within essentially the same borders. It [Iran] has not been trying to conquer other countries around it. The borders have been very finite. Iran feels like it has plenty of land.”
”People I have followed [on social media] for a long time because they were pretty much MAGA conservative, pro-military, they have split and forked off from my position over the Iran war.”
”A lot of it comes down to: where does your history start? Where do you begin the story?.”
”What is the Iranian narrative? Well, the Iranian narrative is that in 1953, they had an elected government, and our CIA overthrew him, a guy named Mohammad Mosaddegh.”
”The British Petroleum and other companies were not happy with him because he wanted the oil revenue to stay inside Iran and [to] develop Iran, and not just be exported to the West. So we took him out, and we installed [the Shah]. It was called Operation Ajax. We installed the Shah” … ”and that lasted until 1979 when the pressure inside the cooker couldn’t withstand it anymore. There were huge street demonstrations for months and months.”
”And as soon as this was successful and the Shah fled and his regime fell, then the communists were purged and wiped out, and that left the Islamic hardliners in charge, and they are still in charge to this day.”
”[In] 1979, it was a huge year of turmoil, obviously, in Iran. We had the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. Jimmy Carter was seen to be very ineffective. Reagan was running for president. 1980 was an election year. And we had the failed Iranian rescue fiasco, where a helicopter and a plane crashed in the desert. We had to abandon some of our dead and equipment. It was a very humiliating period in our history.”
”If you’re an Iranian, the date September 22, 1980, is like December 7th of 1941 for the Americans, or 9/11 2001. So on September 22, 1980, remember, Iran is still in a very confused state. They’ve gotten rid of the Shah and his army. They haven’t really quite figured out what kind of military they’re going to have. And the CIA then sponsored an invasion using our proxy, a guy who was our friend at the time, our ally, our buddy, our pal, Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran.”
”So Iraq was going to steal the crown jewels, in a sense, of the oil wealth of Iran with a blitzkrieg across a long front. Iran didn’t really have an established military, so they had to figure out how to defend themselves on the fly as they went. They ended up losing hundreds of thousands of people in this war, which went on for eight years.”
”That’s when Iraq fired 550 Scud missiles, which have a 1,000-kilogram warhead, randomly into Tehran for months. That was in 1985. Another part of this war was the use of poison gas, mustard gas and sarin gas.
America and Germany, at our request, supplied Iran with industrial quantities of the precursor chemicals to make sarin gas, poison gas, fired in artillery shells and rocket warheads. It didn’t turn out to be so effective in rockets, but it was used widely in artillery shells.
This is part of the origin of the whole WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] thing. We knew that they had poison gas in Iraq, you know, after we went into Operation Iraqi Freedom, because we gave them the chemicals and the know-how to make the poison gas.
Most Americans remember later when they used it against the Kurds in their own, in the northeast part of Iraq, but that wasn’t the first time they used poison gas. They used it on the Iranians, and the Iranians had to figure out how to stop this offensive where their military was disorganised from a year of revolution.”
”Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died repelling what they see as an American-backed invasion of their country, which included the use of poison gas”.
”Imagine 500 Scud missiles being fired into Chicago or New York, or poison gas being used as your land border is being invaded, and America is the one providing the armoured vehicles, the poison gas, the artillery shells. So, yeah, if the Iranians have a grudge against America…”
Transcription, shortening and text improvements for clarity by NewsVoice
Sources
- Info Wars: Matt Bracken, Wednesday Live, March 18, 2026, VIDEO
- Specialforcesroh.com: Matthew Bracken
