CEP Senior Advisor Edmund Fitton-Brown writes: "Iran has defined itself in opposition to Israel, the United States, and the wider West since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Over the course of half a century of complex regional and global events, the clerical regime’s hostility and determination to “resist” has never abated, even when Iran finds itself naturally on the same side as the US in a given conflict. For example, when the American-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 to drive out Iran’s deadliest enemy, the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, and with the partially articulated intention of giving Iraq’s Shia majority the decisive voice in the country’s government, it only took Iran a matter of weeks to start orchestrating the killing of US and British soldiers."