A Letter From a Young Iranian-American as We Head to War
Young Iranian Americans who grew up during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan see through this facade, terrified to see the same playbook used against us. But propagandists play into Persian chauvinism to justify why an Iran invasion would play out differently from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, despite all evidence to the contrary. The old guard of Iranian diaspora politics lean on this naïveté while only presenting half the story to the broader public. Yes, they rail against infringements on Iranians’ rights and repeat the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan, but what are their alternatives?
Well, on one side, you have the “Shah of Maryland,” the son of the last Shah, a man with no governing experience who would rule Iran either as an authoritarian monarch or as a cheap symbolic head of a puppet state. Elsewhere you have the MEK, or the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a former terrorist organization with a cult of personality around its leadership and a shifting ideology that changes depending on who gives them funding, deeply distrusted by most Iranians outside of their cadre of supporters. Most other pro-war Iranian figureheads don’t bother to account for the contradictions in Western imperial violence. They ignore Israeli and Saudi human rights abuses, the subversion of Egyptian and Pakistani democracy, and the neoliberal plundering of Iraq and Afghanistan by corrupt contractors just to secure their spot in line for a prospective power grab.
The lack of popular leadership in the diaspora produces a vacuum that allows these voices to dominate the media and lobbying rackets, but they don’t reflect the views of most Iranians. Polling shows a consistent majority of diaspora Iranians do not support the sanctions regime, designed solely to “make the economy scream.” They believe sanctions punish ordinary Iranians and impede social change.
A majority consistently oppose military strikes, favor negotiations and diplomacy, support grassroots democratic change versus foreign-led regime change, and most notably express sympathy with the Palestinian cause, regardless of their attitude toward the Islamic Republic. But our majority is ignored because we are not useful to the regime-change narrative. Small but vocal minorities like Iranian Zionists or Iranian monarchists are privileged over us, even though they often view the majority of Iranians with contempt. Their tunnel-vision support for a U.S.-backed coup blinds them to real popular will.
