By Jamal Abdi and Farshad Farahat
Americans of Iranian descent know the price of war only too well.
Many of us lived through the gruesome Iran-Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein’s U.S.-made missiles rained down on cities in Iran. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives in a drawn-out conflict that eventually ended in a stalemate.
And as if the war was not enough, the revolutionary Iranian state exploited the external threat to crack down internally, targeting political opponents and executing thousands to solidify its hold on power.
Fellow Americans who did not live through the Iran-Iraq war have now experienced their own drawn out and devastating war in Iraq. Setting out to quash the illusory and misleading threats of Iraqi WMDs, Americans have lost thousands of young servicemen and squandered trillions of dollars in a war that has had no winners, but many victims.
And while the destruction of the two wars dominated events in the Middle East, another conflict loomed on the horizon. A U.S. military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program.
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