On a historic night in Tehran, almost half a century ago,Jeff McMullenwitnessed the inability of leaders to fully grasp the treacherous paths of alliances and armed conflicts.

DECEMBER 31, 1977. In TehransRoyal Niavaran Palace, ShahMohammad Reza Pahlaviwas hosting staunch U.S. ally, PresidentJimmy Carter, in the latters first year in office.

As they clinked glasses in an optimistic New Years Eve toast, I will never forgetCarters words:

On assignment for the ABCsFour Cornerswith veteran combat cameramanDavid Brill, we were the only Australian witnesses to the supreme irony of that historic toast.

This very evening, as the White House Press Corps filed stories about Carters crusade for peace in the Middle East and how thousands of Iranian citizens lined Tehrans streets to welcome the American leader, I took a long walk in the darkened city.

While bombs fall on Tehran, Iran apologists in Western capitals dress regime change in the language of peace and security.

I ran into a mob of angry Iranian students. They were chanting Death to America and Death to the Shah. These early sparks of theIranian Revolutioncaught fire in 1978.

The Pahlavi dynasty fell just a year later as the Shah fled first to Egypt, then to the U.S for cancer treatment. The last I saw of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, he was in exile, watched by bodyguards as he swam alone at a beach on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

Decades earlier, both the CIA and MI6 played major roles in installing the Shah in Irans 1953 coup detat. This was aimed at regaining Western control of oil interests that had been nationalised by the toppled Prime Minister,Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The treachery replete in great power rivalries, the endless thirst for oil and the contest for strategic leverage in the Middle East run in a very long and bloody thread through so much history until today.

U.S. PresidentDonald Trumpand his family have strucklucrative dealswith Saudi Arabian investors as well as with a member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. How the chips fall on all speculative investments during wartime will depend on who controls these lands when the fighting is done.

Far more worrying than Trumps crypto or golf course deals, there is another grim irony.

One of the multiple explanations given for this weeks attack by the U.S. and Israel is Irans secretive designs on accruing enough nuclear material and missiles to obliterate Israelis and other enemies.

Despite the failure of President Trump and his Secretary of State,Marco Rubio, to come up with a coherent story to justify this Iranian war, please someone remind them how it was the United States that first provided Iran with a nuclear reactor.

Another Republican President,Richard Nixon, and his Secretary of State,Henry Kissinger, spent the 1970s selling advanced weaponry to the Shah of Iran as the perceived defender of U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.

As U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran escalate, billions flow into conflict while Australia backs the alliance without question.

The U.S. relationship with Iran fell apart disastrously afterAyatollah Khomeinis revolutionaries brazenly captured 66 hostages and held 52 of them for 444 days.

Each night on American television, I watched their anchormen remind a superpower of this humiliation.

Along with a failed U.S. military rescue attempt, Irans successful psychological warfare waged against the Great Satan helped bring about the defeat of President Carter in the 1980 Election.

Then followed yet another tragic chapter: the slaughter of some 500,000 Iranian and Iraqi troops in their neighbourhood war of 1980-1988.

Look back and we can clearly understand how this pointless loss of so many lives, many of them mere youths, simply exhausted both Middle Eastern nations. The savage fighting depleted so many resources and held back development for decades. That war also created massive instability, just as we are seeing today.

In the 1980s,Saddam Husseins Sunni forces had used chemical agents in their ruthless battle with Irans Shia troops. This drove the Ayatollah to unleash terrorist movements in many places with the likes ofHamas,Palestine Islamic Jihad, theYemenite Houthimovement and Shiite militants in Iraq and Syria.

These patterns of history with violence spreading unpredictably have not been grasped by Trump and others who think wars can be done and dusted quickly.

Before surrendering to despair over todays lack of far-sighted leadership, remember how some much-maligned men once seized limited opportunities to grasp peace.

It was that same hapless, unappreciated American President, Jimmy Carter, who relentlessly pursued a historic peace agreement between two of the Middle Easts staunchest enemies.

Israels Prime Minister,Menachem Begin, and Egypts President,Anwar El Sadat, had been bloodied in their own version of forever wars.

Behind the language of morality and law, Irans theocracy has spent decades protecting abusers and punishing their victims.

Then along came that quietly spoken and well-read Jimmy Carter striking such a contrast to Trumps bombastic and frequently unhinged style today.

Carter had served in the U.S. Navy. He was trained in nuclear-powered submarines that could be armed with nuclear weapons. This man knew something about the worst-case scenarios in a Middle East conflict involving Israel, a nuclear-armed nation.

In a tactful decision, Carter took Begin and Sadat to the fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where one of the most terrible slaughters occurred during Americas bloodiest war.

Carter told his two Middle Eastern guests that at least 600,000 Americans had died in theirCivil War, so he understood how much Israelis and Egyptians had invested and lost in four devastating conflicts in just 25 years.

My Four Corners film (now half a century old) was simply titled Carters Crusade. It showed Air Force One touching down in Egypt near the Aswan Dam so Carter could hold a crucial discussion with President Sadat. This was a very high-risk encounter for Sadat, as so many Arabs violently opposed his negotiating with Israel.

Deeply fatalistic and understandably mistrustful of historic enemies, Sadat went to Jerusalem and stood before enemies he had faced on the battlefield.

Begin, hailed both as an Israeli freedom fighter and an original terrorist, similarly concluded it was wisest now to give peace a chance.

TheCamp David Peace Agreementended a three-decade-long state of war between the two most bitter enemies on that blood-stained desert. The treaty holds today, although it was never followed by a just settlement of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Menachem Begin will be remembered in history as a peacemaker, as well as a man who fought for his peoples survival. The great Anwar El Sadat, as he had predicted, tragically gave his life for peace, cut down by an assassin in his own land. Jimmy Carter lived to 100 years, longer than any American president in history.

Three truly wise men. We need more like them today men who understand war and dare to become peacemakers.

DrJeff McMullenAM is a journalist, author and filmmaker known for his reporting and advocacy for 60 years. McMullen has been a foreign correspondent for Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reporter forFour CornersandSixty Minutes, anchor of the 33-part issue series on ABC Television,Difference of Opinionand director of independent documentaries. He was awarded the United Nations Media Peace Prize for his trilogy of hour-long documentaries about conflicts in Central America.

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