Is The World Failing Iran?

As I'm speaking, an American Navy is assembling in the waters around Iran. Its timing isn't coincidental. Iranians weeks earlier had held their largest protests to date against the Islamic Republic, which were then crushed in a crackdown, killing thousands. The American Navy, then its physical presence imposes a question. Should the United States intervene in Iran?

The general response around the world from what I can tell is no. We live in a time of skepticism regarding interventions. If an intervention should occur, an extremely strong case must be made to justify one. Whether we should intervene or not is an open question and one I won't try to answer. My issue is that we can't seem to think about the question clearly. I think there's an aspect being underlooked here, a disconnect between principles and reality. There's something broken between what the world expects of Iran in order to meet the criteria for an intervention and what Iran is able to realistically provide.

In scenarios where interventions start to seem justified, we expect to see grandcale loud extreme traumas, perhaps an invasion from a much more powerful country or a genocide or mass starvation, some sort of national crisis with the people pleading for help. Surely in those cases, the outside world should at least consider getting involved. Like the French intervention during the American Revolution helping the Americans, the European intervention during Greece's war of independence, the UN defense of South Korea in the '50s, India's intervention in Pakistan in the 70s creating Bangladesh, the 42 country coalition defending Kuwait from Iraq during the Gulf War. In every case, there was an acute crisis with the people needing help. Regardless of the intentions of the intervening countries, the interventions have been vindicated by history. They're not really debated or vilified. They're generally celebrated or at least accepted as justified.

But what about Iran? There is no conventional war being fought in Iran. There's killing, but not on a scale that we typically call genocide. There's an intense amount of repression happening in Iran, but it's a repression that overwhelmingly is a quiet one. It's partially quiet because Iranians can't speak about it. Anyone who speaks against the government in Iran is an enemy of the state. Both a heretic and a terrorist, a crime punishable by death. They can typically talk politics quietly with close friends, for example, and family. But to the world, it silences the conflict. They cannot speak to us, so we can't hear them. No organized movements against the state can be seen in Iran. The state doesn't allow them to organize. No leaders can be seen from within Iran. As potential leaders rise, the state eliminates them. Iranians are unarmed and also cannot peacefully protest. As the government recently demonstrated, it will use extreme means, widespread violence, and a complete communications blackout to crush them.

The current dominant philosophy on intervention dictates that nations need to work out problems themselves if at all possible. But Iranians cannot speak. They cannot organize. Leaders can't emerge. They can't protest. And they're unarmed. What can they do? We might say we could intervene, but only in extreme cases. Again, thinking loud crisis, overt grand scale atrocities. But the conflict in Iran is a quiet one. The government has proven adept at keeping it that way. Complicating things further, it's not easy to tell what's actually happening in Iran. International journalists can't freely enter it and Iranian journalists can't freely publish. Technological blocks separate Iranians from the mainstream internet. Blocks Iranians are learning to overcome, but not always easily and not always safely.

I wanted to do some investigation of my own. Since the communications blackout lifted, I've spent about 3 weeks interviewing people in Iran. It's not easy to talk to an Iranian, to get an Iranian to open up about politics. Luckily, I had my audience, my channel, and through that I found many people willing to speak to me. People who trusted me enough, provided I followed a number of security measures. Even then, I'd only sometimes learn their names, only sometimes see their faces, and of course, for their safety, I have to keep virtually everything about them private. I interviewed about 36 people in total from about 10 cities across Iran. large and small, conservative and progressive. I intentionally spoke to as diverse a range of people as I possibly could, which meant that at some point I actually stopped interviewing people in Tran.

First, I wanted to know if Iranians were really against their government. For an intervention designed for regime change to be justified, at least a majority of people living under that government should want to remove it. A government could be a highly controlling one like China's, but its citizens might want to keep it. One can't assume that control means disapproval. I found some professional statistics coming from a Dutch think tank which works with VPN companies to pull Iranians then tries to professionally weight their data against bias. In 2024, they found that 70% of Iranians were against the Islamic Republic. This isn't a disapproval rating or the amount of Iranians that want to reform the government. This is the amount of Iranians that want their government to cease to exist. That number went up to 81% during the Masa Ammony woman life freedom protests. One might imagine that those numbers are still consistent today, if not higher, as the economy has practically collapsed, even if it's largely due to sanctions. The mass protests followed by the mass killing, one would imagine, has not helped.

Everyone I talked to said the same. Not one person believed that most Iranians want the government to continue. Perhaps a decade or two ago, but for them these days, the notion was even absurd. It's a question I asked everyone. The most conservative figure I was given was that 60% of Iranians were against the government with most people saying around 80%. With the highest estimate around 90%. They aren't pulling these numbers out of thin air. For Iranians, it's a question that can literally be a matter of life and death. They actively observe their own society, searching for markers, trying to discern each other's opinion. Everybody I pressed could give me evidence for their thinking. But over the years, the answer has become more and more obvious. For example, the recent anti-government demonstrations were apparently attended by millions in more than 200 cities. These are protests where the attendees knew they were risking their lives. The government then actively tried to hold and encourage counter demonstrations. Compared to what came before, they were tiny. To Iranians, it's no longer really the question. Most are against the government, and those who still support it are not going to change.

Iranians now widely think of the conflict, not as pro-Islamic Republic factions and anti-Islamic Republic factions, but rather as the people, the overwhelming majority on one side and the government with their state apparatus and the military on the other. One person I interviewed put it comprehensively. If five Iranians with different backgrounds sit at the same table, they may have major political disagreements. One might be a Republican, one a monarchist, another might want democracy and secular government and so on. But the one thing Iranians agree on right now is that the Islamic Republic must go.

In that conflict in Iran between people and government, there's been a more or less complete breakdown in relations. No discussion between people in government happens anymore and both sides have more or less completely dehumanized the other to the government. Anyone against them is illegitimate. They're not Iranians in any kind of legitimate way. They're Zionists or puppets of Zionism or Americans or puppets of the US. They're terrorists and heretics and must be dealt with accordingly. It was put bluntly recently by the head of the judiciary. Those who make statements against the Islamic Republic from inside are the voices of the Zionist regime in the United States. Meanwhile, to Iranians, the government and its militias act in such inhuman ways that they're insane. They're animals. The regime is a monster, someone told me that shows mercy to no one. You can investigate yourself why, especially since the protests. People there feel the way they do. The details have been widely reported mostly in Persian media, but you can find them to give you a tiny vignette in hopefully an abstract enough way. After the protesters were shot at, they ran. But dispersing them was not enough. Many protesters were actively chased, even hunted. The last thing many of them would see in their lives would be a man standing over them with an axe.

The widespread mood in Iran is to speak of the fall of the Islamic Republic not as a question, but as an inevitability. It will happen. It's only a question of when and at what cost. Iran does not have a happy history of intervention. It was precisely the promise of freeing Iran from foreign influence that propelled Ayatollah Kumeni into his successful role as the leader of the 1979 revolution. But the unprecedented scale of their recent protests, coupled with the unprecedented severity of the crackdown that broke them, is causing Iranians more and more to turn to intervention as a solution and even struggle to see an alternative. Most people I talked to now support an intervention and even actively want it. But it's still a subject being debated in Iran, and not everyone agreed.

Most people now agree on a limited precision strike to weaken the regime, someone told me. Of course, I don't believe this is the right way, they said. But most people sounded more like this. I think all the things that people could do have already been done. Unarmed people cannot do anything further against this barbarian regime. That's why, in my opinion, the intervention of a foreign power is needed for this collapse. Or as another person put it, I mean, how can I not say it? It would save so many lives. They massacred us on Thursday and Friday and are still killing us in different ways right now. They take out shotguns and rifles on us and we have nothing. They bring people from other terrorist groups to murder us and we have nothing. Yes, the Islamic Republic will be destroyed eventually. US interference will cause less lives to be lost doing that. How can I not want that? That's the thing. I don't think Western civilians can imagine a government so bad that you would welcome war coming onto them, but it exists and we're living in it. Virtually everyone who said that wasn't naive to the risks as one person put it. Finally, we know that foreign interference is a gamble and it might not work out in our way and those doing the interference look out for their benefits, but mostly people prefer it because how can you stand against snipers and bullets and chemical gases with bare hands.

Although Iranian political opinion is diverse, they united behind a leader, the exiled crown prince Resa [ __ ]. Iranians have conflicting ideas about him as a person and conflicting ideas about the future of Iran should he resume power after the fall of the Islamic Republic. But Respocalyp is not in Iran. He can speak freely. All Iranians know him. He can speak and all Iranians with access to the internet can hear and act. It was his call for protest on a certain time and on a certain day that allowed Iranians to act in a unified way, creating the mass demonstrations weeks earlier. Respath has a plan to create a transitional government for Iran, which will then theoretically hold a referendum and let Iranians vote for the government they want. Iranians are united in the belief that he is their only and therefore correct option to lead them through the present moment. He recently spoke in Munich on intervention, a stance from what I can tell that was either supported or at least not opposed by most Iranians. This is what he said. >> They are asking the world to intervene. We are asking for a humanitarian intervention to pro to prevent more uh innocent lives being killed in the process. We need to have that support and have an equal opp equalized playing field so we have a real chance as unarmed citizen to overcome this repressive regime.

Iranians culturally are an expressive people. They've historically been a culture that emphasizes beauty, fashion, aesthetics, a sensual way of being. Poetry is something of a national sport in Iran woven into their way of speaking, their way of thinking. It's a sight of Iranians, of Iranian culture, developed over thousands of years of history that in the last 50 years or so has been repressed. Over and over, people tried to express to me how it felt. One person tried explaining to me the sense of crushing paranoia she felt, having to be so careful all the time to not say the wrong thing to the wrong person, the wrong person that could even unwittingly pass it into the wrong hands. Hands that can kill Kill You. She expressed herself by referencing a poem. I am bitter. The nightmare of my being has dissolved into poison. I'm afraid of everyone but you. All of them, knowingly or unknowingly, are spies. Their hands are the noose and yet they kiss you.

Iranians over and over tried to express to me the sensation of their life force being crushed, creating this flatness, this bleakness, this sense of not even daring to hope things will be better. A man told me there's a word in Persian that describes it that doesn't fully translate but gives you an idea. He translated it as soul eroding. Someone on the opposite side of the country described the feeling at length again beginning by quoting a poem. Never has anyone risen so violently against their own death as I have risen against life. I don't know what will become of me and people like me. I don't know how many of us will attend the 40-day memorials of how many others. This time of year, I was always in love with life, waiting for the green thick with yellow of early spring. Now, so often and for no clear reason, I cry over being unprepared for a task, not having a medication or seeing a photograph. I think about this a lot. What if I stayed behind somewhere I shouldn't have and everyone else passed on? I don't know. I only know that those of us who seem to have taken a thousand years to find one another must come to each other's aid. Because beyond life itself, I am sickened by dying in this space.

Listen to the euphoria in the voices of these Iranians as they pull down a statue of Wasam Solommani, the Guard Corps commander killed BY THE US. THIS IS WHEN THEY HOPED THAT THE protests were working before they were crushed. But when and how does this factor into a conversation about intervention? We might say it's too abstract, too unquantifiable. But then does the emotional life of a people, the cultural life of a people really carry no weight at all?

Iranians over and over told me they felt their options were reduced down to almost nothing. That they felt stuck, anxiously waiting, waiting for something. Those who did want to act felt reduced down to small acts of defiance. Acts so small that they'll never make headlines. For example, women more and more are going in public without a hijab. I think the hijab has been solved in the head of us Iranian women, a teenager told me. Or has been almost solved and is taking its steps. I see my old grandmother going out without a hijab or my own mother who used to be so afraid. In my mind, it may have been solved in our head, but not in society and in this government. At any moment, we could be arrested and imprisoned for it. Even these small acts are dangerous. Women in Iran fare badly in prison and know it. Being arrested for even a relatively small infraction is dangerous. It's really scary, someone told me. Really, really scary. I have to be scared every day in my life. Every time I leave my house without anything covering my hair, it's a gamble. The West doesn't understand the amount of courage you need for every little act of defiance here.

I spoke with a business owner, a woman in an especially religious city. She doesn't wear a hijab at work. So far, legally speaking, things were fine. Though she sometimes in her own store gets verbally reprimanded for it. Right before publishing this piece, I checked in on her. Her response is worth reading at length. "Are you doing okay over there?" I asked. "That's nice of you," she said. "Yes, we're surviving and waiting in horror and sorrow. We can't continue living under this regime. For example, tomorrow I've been summoned by a government body because of not observing the proper hijab. And I don't know whether they're going to temporarily shut down my business or refer me to court and issue some other kind of sentence. And we can't pin our hopes in a war either or on someone like Trump to bring about change for us. At the cost of more deaths than we've already seen and at a price higher than we've already paid. No matter which direction I look, continuing life feels harder than today for us. Are you going to keep going out without a hijab? I asked. I don't know, she responded. I'd encourage you to read the rest of what she said. For the sake of keeping things calm, I'm not going to read it out loud.

Iranians expressed to me over and over a sense of powerlessness, of voicelessness. They're up against the Supreme Leader, a seemingly gentle old man, smiling, commanding the world's attention, assuring us Iran is fine. They're up against journalists who Iranians widely, if not overwhelmingly, believe are failing them. Failing to report their stories or even actively harming them. They call BBC Persia, for example, Ayatollah BBC. They're up against propaganda videos all over the internet. Videos that shouldn't even be allowed on it, showing cameras walking through Iran, assuring us things are fine. Iranians are struggling to be heard. they cannot figure out how to do it. In what format, in what fashion can they get through to us? Do we really want to take the time out of our day to listen to some anonymous person, some garbled voice, not a leader, not connected to any organization telling us political life is bad in Iran? Should they risk their lives hoping we'll listen?

To do what I can to be a mouthpiece for them, I want to read one more quote. This was written as part of an open submission for the Guardian. As far as either of us can tell, the Guardian never published it. I've spoken to the person who wrote it for weeks and now consider her a friend. To humanize her, I can tell you she's a researcher. You'll hear her volunteer other basic details about herself. But she and I cannot tell you her name. You cannot hear the sound of her voice. Her life literally depends on us not showing you her face. The best I can do is read her words for her. This is what she said.

So this is where we are now. We have tried everything. Nonviolent resistance, emails to anyone who might have helped. Small demonstrations, then mass protests. We took to the streets, screamed ourselves horse, took bullets, were blinded, were wounded too many times to death. People were arrested, tortured, hanged. Families of those who were killed were harassed, punished, humiliated. And this did not happen over a few days for the world to watch and then move on. This has been going on for years. Now we Iranians are standing at the edge of despair, not knowing what option, if any, is left. For me personally, I'm a woman life freedom supporter, a feminist, what you might call a leftist, a PhD student, an only daughter to parents who would not survive my loss, a friend to some of the most sincere and courageous people I've ever known. And I no longer believe that we, as a nation, can do anything on our own to bring this dictatorship down. I am anti-imperialist. I despise anyone who bombs innocent civilians in Gaza. I reject monarchy and the fascism it inevitably brings. And yet, despite all this, I do not believe we stand a chance, not only of overthrowing this regime, but of surviving it. The Islamic Republic has been the most disastrous and murderous force ever imposed on Persians. I say this fully aware of our history of Gangaskhan, of Alexander the Great. This regime has surpassed them all. What I wished to experience in my short life in this homeland was not radical or excessive. I wanted democracy, secularism, equal human rights for all ethnicities, genders, professions, a simple life with economic stability and basic human dignity. If that future requires the diplomatic removal of Hamina himself, then so be it. If it requires reform that leaves no trace of Islamic sovereignty over my country, so be it. And if as a last resort it requires a war that destroys not only these murderers but us as well, then so be it. I would rather face total annihilation with the possibility that our children might rise from the ashes than continue this slow, suffocating death under the boots of tyrants. Yes, we could become Libya. We know this. But look at where we are now. We have no imagination left for hope from within. the chance of internal change is close to zero. Can we honestly say the same about foreign intervention or regime change from outside? At the very least, those options have not yet been tried. I would rather die attempting this low chance solution so that my fellow countrymen, women, and children might live free than die slowly while watching everyone I love be dehumanized, hollowed out, and turned into grieving shells. We are not asking for much. But if the price feels too high for every other country to pay, then imagine the cost we are already paying for the world's refusal to step up for the sake of humanity. Cuz after all, you all adore Satti for saying human beings are members of a whole. In creation, they are of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain. The last part, if you didn't know, is about an 800-year-old poem which is inscribed in the entrance of the UN building.

So where does that leave Iran in intervention? There was a famous influential formulation that came from the 19th century from the philosopher John Stewart Mill. He argued that freedom cannot be given to a people by a foreign power. If a people want freedom, they must first struggle for it themselves. There are cases where intervention might be warranted, but a people must first prove they're willing to brave labor and danger, as he put it. Mills philosophy still seems to be shaping our intuitions on intervention today. But back then, there were no surveillance states. There were no bureaucratized systems of mass control. Unlike Iran, the people in Mills time were armed. for that matter.

To prepare for this piece, I spent some time reading through the history of intervention, at least the history of its thought. As far as I can tell, the concept of totalitarianism does not factor in with any major thinker or any major conversation at all. When we're considering if a country needs an intervention, it seems totalitarianism itself does not factor in. But if totalitarianism prevents a people from meeting the criteria for intervention, maybe it should. Perhaps the formulation could be simple, perhaps one factor among many. And perhaps it could go something like to the extent that a government represses its population, it discredits it.

That being said, an intervention is a serious thing. It seems something like the open heart surgery of politics. It's not something done lightly or eagerly. It puts the population in question at existential risk. What are the intentions of the intervening countries? Will the intervention actually bring improvement? It's the thing that seems best done when all better options are exhausted. One might conclude, myself included, that Iran has not done enough. The crisis needs to be more clear. Its people must prove even more willing to brave labor in danger. But what does that look like? How could that happen? What more can Iran really do? I don't have the answers today, but hope to bring awareness. Perhaps the least we can do is look more closely, pay closer attention, and ask ourselves the question, is the world failing Iran?