ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the low-level military confrontation that has occurred between Iran and the United States in the past thirty years. At other times the conflict has produced long periods of non-violent yet intense hostility. The chapter explores several of these periods and explains the veracity of the conflict, while looking at the underlying political forces that drove the various phases of the overall Iranian-American low-intensity war. The first is the period encompassing the hostage crises and the Iran-Contra affair. The second is the Iran-Iraq War and the Tanker War, and the third is the ongoing conflict over the Iranian Nuclear Weapons program. The phase of the low-intensity war between Iran and the United States would center on what became known as the Persian Gulf 'Tanker War'. The United States had a selectorate that supported military action against Iran, while the Iranian selectorate only gave weak support for continued military confrontation with the United States.
