For the few first weeks of 2020, the United States and Iran were in the midst of tense and catastrophic conflict. The conflict came to its conclusion on Jan. 8. One Iranian missile fired from a military base in Iraq, accidentally hit Ukrainian International Flight 752, killing all 176 people on board.

The Iranian military fired missiles in retaliation to President Trump’s ordered assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. General Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Corps that specializes in unconventional war tactics (terrorism). The Quds forces have alleged ties to terror groups in the Middle Eastern region.

More or less, the assassination of General Soleimani, the second in command of Iran, was due to his heinous crimes against Americans and fueling terrorism in the region.

While it’s no question that Soleimani held responsibility for turmoil in the region, he was also a respected person in Iran. His death could have led to destabilizing a delicate territory in the world. For a few days, it did. This is why the Trump Administration needs to take responsibility for briefly and recklessly endangering Iran’s civilian population.

Let’s be clear here, if we would have gone to war with Iran, the only people that would have deeply felt the consequences of it would have been brown people in the Middle East.

The United States is the sole reason the Middle East is constantly in a battle for identity. Western countries only make foreign policy decisions based on their national interest. That is exactly what America’s done with Iran since the 50s.

Americans wonder why Iran and the U.S. have a strained relationship. No, it doesn’t start with the 1970s Iranian Hostage Crisis. In the 50s, the American-British backed the removal of democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry to return the profits of the industry into the Iranian economy.

Of course, the British, who owned Iran’s oil for decades, objected to this progressive and independent decision from Mosaddegh. Thus America, a British ally, teamed up with British Intelligence. MI6 and the CIA overthrew the government and restored power to a corrupt former leader Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, started implementing western economic principles which lead to the consequential rejection of western ideology and economics. In 1979, Iran’s youth protests Pahlavi, his policies, and the west. Pahlavi fled Iran and the people looked to another formerly exiled leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran has valid reasons for its hatred towards America. We systematically dismantled their democratically elected government. American and British interests consistently trumped Iranian ones. We still continuously vilify them when we have this huge missing chunk of history absent from people’s perspectives.

Our historical demons always have a role in our present-day decisions. Most of all, Trump seems like he has no issue repeating the ugliest actions in American history.

American aggression continuously puts non-American civilian life in danger. Millions of people in the Middle East died due to our interests in combatting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are a country that starts endless wars without understanding the unintended and intended consequences. The unintended consequences, in this case, are the 176 people killed as a casualty of America purposefully escalating war-like interactions with Iran.

Whatever ego-trip this was, is no longer a justification. These kinds of actions are no longer in favor of American national interest, and maybe their decades’ long justifications for these endless wars were never real. The only people that end up suffering the unintended costs are people that never deserved it.