Radical Obsession: The Unholy Truth about Iran and Terrorism

If the biased, polemical feel of the first few minutes of Radical Obsession was any measure, one could easily get the sense that this documentary about Iranian state-sponsored terrorism was going to be some ridiculous one-sided Dinesh D’Souza-type propagandist affair that serves as little more than a recruiting tool for the Republican Party. We get one talking head expert after another flashing onscreen talking about how Iran has been the most prominent sponsor of global terror for several decades now. We get a quick onscreen history lecture about the abiding ideological conflict between Shias and Sunnis, and how this religious infighting is at the core of why Iran is in the politically backward state its currently in. But just as you brace yourself for politically biased hatchet job with the factual bona fides of a Breitbart report or a Fox News special, suddenly director Barry Avrich begins to branch out his thesis to cover some fascinating middle ground. Avrich’s thesis is that Iran has been fighting proxy wars against the West (especially the US) through Hezbollah for decades, ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise to power of the radical Islamist Ayatollah regime. Hezbollah has conducted attacks all over the world for years against Israeli and American targets, all with the financial and ideological backing of Iran. But the film is as much a condemnation of the bumbling and incompetent attempts by the West, especially the US, to essentially tame a politically radical beast that they themselves helped create through, what else, greed for oil. In fact, as we learn, Iran in the 1940s and 1950s was a Westernized democracy with an elected liberal prime minister, Mosadech. But Mosadech was quickly deposed by a US-led coup because he wouldn’t open his oil fields to the Western powers. Once the Shah and his puppet regime stepped into a power vacuum it was the beginning of the end. The West-backed Shah’s brutal repression of his own people ended up making American-hating revolutionaries out of what seemed to be all Iranians. Avrich pulls no punches in not only exposing the bloody details of the Hezbollah-initiated violence that serves Iran’s interests, but he also is unsparing in highlighting how badly the US has handled relations with Iran over the decades: from the hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, the Iran Contra scandal during Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and even Obama in the 2000s, whose Nuclear Deal with Iran saw 150 billion dollars go straight into Iran’s (proxy) war chest. But of course, Donald Trump’s idea of pulling out of the deal, as the film tells us, was even dumber. Essentially, the mess the West made in Iran in the 1950s is a mess we’re still trying to clean up. Highly Recommended. (M. Sandlin)