Echoes of a Short War: Critical Reflections on Israel’s Attack on Iran

[This roundtable is published as part of a dossier on the June 2025 Israeli war on Iran. To read the dossier introduction and view a complete listing of its contents, click here.] 

Introduction by Nazanin Shahrokni and Arash Davari

The twelve-day war on Iran in June 2025 unfolded swiftly, and yet its repercussions continue to reverberate. The legal, infrastructural, and social consequences of Israeli and American military strikes in Iran demand sustained reflection. The war did not merely destroy sites and lives; it resurfaced longstanding contradictions in public discourse about war, empire, and dissent. It catalyzed not only military violence but also ideological realignments and new fissures within Iranian civil society.

What kinds of public speech about Iran took shape, and which voices were absent? How did statements traverse linguistic, geographic, and political divides? What interpretive frameworks gained traction, and how were they contested or resisted? And how can scholars map and intervene in a discursive terrain where external aggression and internal repression are simultaneously intensified?

Few spaces have brought together interdisciplinary, Iran-focused scholars to reflect collectively on the political and representational stakes of the war. This roundtable does so by convening four interlocutors—Peyman Jafari, Setareh Shohadaei, Kaveh Ehsani, and Maziar Behrooz—into a structured yet evolving conversation. In the first round, each contributor addressed a shared set of guiding questions spanning international law, anti-war discourse, the politics of representation, and historical analogy. In the second round, participants responded to one another, allowing the discussion to deepen through mutual engagement.

Together, these contributions surface the underlying political rifts, affective investments, and discursive tensions the war laid bare. They offer a layered reading of the shifting terrain of critique, solidarity, and strategic action. As media attention moves on, this roundtable insists on the need for critical reckoning—not only with what happened, but with how it was narrated, by 

Arash Davari and Nazanin Shahrokni (AD & NS): While the June 2025 war unfolded quickly, it left behind a dense field of commentary—some urgent, some rehearsed. What discursive patterns emerged in its wake, and what do they reveal about the dominant frameworks through which Iran is understood today? How did representations differ across Persian- and English-language spheres, and with what effects?

Peyman Jafari (PJ): Responses to Israel’s twelve-day war on Iran fractured along three fault lines: the status of international law, the war’s strategic aims and consequences, and the politics of power and agency.

As legal scholars such as Oona Hathaway (Yale Law School), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), UN experts, and Iranian legal analysts have argued, the Israeli-American strikes were a clear violation of international law and Iranian sovereignty, given the absence of an imminent threat. In March, Tulsi Gabbard, then Director of US National Intelligence, publicly confirmed that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Acknowledgement of the war’s unlawful nature was largely absent from Western media coverage. Worse still, governments that champion the so-called “rules-based international order” endorsed Israel’s attack—just as they have enabled its war on Gaza—by affirming Israel’s right to self-defense while denying that same right to both Iranians and Palestinians. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz even praised Israel for doing the world’s “dirty work” on the West’s behalf.[1]

A controversial early statement by Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi and other prominent dissidents effectively held the Islamic Republic responsible for the war by focusing solely on Iran’s enrichment program and omitting any condemnation of Israel’s aggression.[2] The backlash to it was swift. Among the statement’s many critics was Sarvenaz Ahmadi, a feminist translator and children’s rights advocate arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, who called the statement’s failure to condemn Israel’s attack a blow to its authors’ “moral credibility,” noting that Israel—“one of the world’s most blatant violators of nuclear non-proliferation principles”—lacks the “legal [and] moral legitimacy” to critique Iran’s nuclear program. In response, Mohammadi and Ebadi issued a second statementacknowledging Israel as the aggressor. Mohammadi, however, has since returned to her previous stance that Iranians will and must be the agents of change, and that war undermines this agency. 

The “agency and active will” of the Iranian people was invoked in a statement issued on July 17th by “Civil and Political Activists in Iran,” including Mohammadi. It maps out a “third path” that “is neither collusion with the ruling regime nor reliance on foreign powers and military conflict.” The statement refers to a nation “at the crossroads of one of the most perilous moments in its modern history, a convergence of long-simmering domestic crises, regional volatility, and the structural injustice of the global order.” While it elaborates on domestic injustices, it is silent on regional and international ones, such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, of course, is only made possible with the support of the US and European powers.

AD & NS: How would you assess the various political and ethical stakes of drawing or avoiding that connection?

PJ: Let me highlight the stakes by contrasting two fallacies. According to a small and shrinking group, the injustices of the Islamic Republic should be overlooked so as not to play into the hands of Israel and the United States, which they hold responsible for grave injustices such as the genocide in Gaza. According to another and slightly larger group, the injustices of the Israeli regime should be overlooked so as not to be play into the hands of the Islamic Republic. The latter view has led some into an ethical abyss. In the early days of Israel’s war on Gaza, for instance, one of the journalists of Iran International TV posted a video of  himself writing “Women, Freedom, Life” on the wall of a destroyed Palestinian house. 

Underlying these different positions is a debate about the war’s broader aims and consequences, the second fault line I mentioned at the outset. For some, Israel and the US targeted the Islamic Republic, which they see as the main cause of the conflict. Others recognize that the Islamic Republic’s domestic and foreign policies have contributed to the conflict, but claim its root causes lie in Israeli and American ambitions to dominate the region.[3]

To justify their aims, Israel and its allies have downplayed the war’s human toll—hundreds of civilian casualties, and widespread destruction of homes, hospitals, and infrastructure. One of the most chilling moments came on June 23, when Israeli airstrikes hit Evin prison, killing at least 80 people under the guise of “liberating” Iranians. “Viva la libertad,” Israel’s Foreign Minister tweeted.[4]

For Israel and its supporters, such devastation is the price Iranians must pay for “freedom.” Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah, refused to condemn the attacks, instead calling them an “opportunity” for Iranians to rise against the Islamic Republic. Pahlavi maintains close ties with Israeli officials. In stark contrast, four female political prisoners—one facing a death sentence—issued a statement from Evin prison condemning Israel’s aggression and rejecting any reliance on its destructive power. Their response underscored the violent absurdity of bombing Iranians in the name of liberation.

In my view, these contrasting responses illuminate deeper divisions—not just over the war, but over the nature of political change in Iran and its global entanglements. While there is broad agreement among Iranians that the Islamic Republic is authoritarian and unequal, key questions remain: what kind of change is needed—and who gets to drive it? Some advocate reform within the current constitutional framework. Others call for wholesale transformation. The latter position is exemplified by figures such as Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former Prime Minister and leader of the Green Movement, who has been under house arrest since 2009. Mousavi issued a statement condemning the “Israeli and American crimes” while advocating fundamental change in Iran, including a referendum, a constituent assembly, and a new constitution grounded in democracy and national sovereignty. His call garnered broad support among intellectuals and professionals, though critics note it lacks a concrete path forward. 

AD & NS: Can you elaborate on the nature of support for Mousavi’s statement? Were the intellectuals and professionals who supported it based in Iran or in the diaspora? If the former, are there any indications that support reached across sectors of Iranian society?

PJ: Many of the signatories were from Iran and, like Mousavi, intellectuals and political figures who had served in the ranks of the Islamic Republic, tried to reform it and call for fundamental change.[5] The problem with Mousavi’s statement is that it has mainly circulated among elite figures and lacks a strategy for raising popular support among ordinary Iranians by connecting political repression, gender inequality, social justice and the rights of ethnic groups. This is, granted, a daunting task that requires building networks and organizations to write petitions, arrange demonstrations and strikes, and to establish neighborhood and workplace committees. A serious orientation to change from below in Iran must start by addressing those challenges. 

Which brings me to the third and last fault line that has animated debates - the politics of power and agency. As I see it, the central divide among those who desire change is not between reform, even in the radical version proposed by Mousavi, and revolution, but between internal and external agency. Should change come from within, through grassroots struggles, or be imposed from the outside by foreign powers through sanctions and war? 

The Writers’ Association of Iran, five labor organizations, a Baluchi women’s collective, and over 1,700 academics insist on the former. Their statements denounce both the Islamic Republic and the Israeli-American assault, warning that foreign intervention encourages securitization. It strengthens the regime’s security apparatus, fuels nationalism, and weakens internal opposition. Their vision links struggles in Iran to global movements against authoritarianism and empire. In other words, these movements and statements extend criticism of domestic power structures to the regional and international domain, dominated by Israel, US and European powers.  

AD & NS: It seems that, across all three fault lines, discourse about the war traversed a divide between geopolitical critique and domestic accountability. Some critics focused exclusively on US imperialism and Israeli aggression, while others focused exclusively on internal repression, mismanagement, and corruption by the Islamic Republic. Anti-war positions attempted to hold both critiques in tension. We’d like to take a closer look at these anti-war positions in their variety. What do they tell us about Iranian politics today? Based on your research and political commitments, how would you assess the possibilities for critical analysis and political action under these conditions?

Setareh Shohadaei (SS):  As you’ve noted, many of the anti-war positions criticized the domestic and foreign policies of the Iranian state to various degrees. The petition signed by 1,700 academics, to take one example, states that all economic pressures and military operations against Iran severely hinder the vibrant democratic movements of the Iranian people. It is obvious that people cannot fight for democracy, human rights, and civic equality while being bombed and that the right to life precedes all other political aspirations. Under conditions of war most states intensify their repressive apparatuses in the name of national security. This leaves social movements to face new obstacles under threat of foreign aggression: the struggle for life and economic livelihood in war-time, as well as increased domestic persecution and a decrease in popular support as people rally behind the state for security.

In my own work, I study how contemporary social movements (particularly feminist, queer, and trans movements) at times get aligned with imperialist, nationalist, or neoliberal power structures. What I find is that despite how we tend to think of this phenomenon—as “co-optation” or “appropriation” of feminism—more often than not, there is an underlying desire within these movements to identify with structures of power such as empire or capital. This results in an emotional displacement of wrath, on vivid display during the June war. 

For instance, a significant current in the recent Iranian movement of ‘woman, life, freedom’ aligned with US and Israeli foreign policy, active in Western security conferences and liberal think-tanks advocating for ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran. I don’t find these currents to be instrumentalized by empire so much as they are emotionally constituted by and constitutive of a desire for power entirely masculinist in its drive for annihilation and domination. My sense is that many of the anti-war statements about the recent so-called 12-day war, the ones that tried to uphold a ‘tension’ between a critique of empire and a critique of Iranian state policies, subconsciously reproduce an emotional alignment with dominant power structure. These include Mousavi’s statement or the statement penned by Mohammadi and six other seven civil society celebrities calling for an end to “nuclear enrichment and war,” or the statements by grassroots feminist and workers organizers under the banner “no to war, no to the Islamic Republic.” These statements condemn Israeli aggression against Iranian sovereignty as if it were taken for granted, usually stated in one or two sentences. They then quickly turn to condemnation of the Islamic Republic, presented in elaborate detail. The framing suggests the Iranian government is also somehow responsible for Israeli aggression. 

A BBC Persian interview with a group of liberal academics makes the contradictions blatantly clear. They simultaneously condemn Israel’s attack as they reiterate the Israeli state’s position that this is not a war against the Iranian people but against the Iranian ‘regime’—whatever that means. In this liberal 'both-side-ism', we encounter a false equivalence between two asymmetrical parties. When one adopts a position that simply rejects both US empire and Iran, or rather both the aggressor and the resisting victim, it is akin to claiming ‘all lives matter’ in the midst of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. It is no different from those who would condemn both Israel and Hamas. The issue is not that all lives do not matter, or that Hamas or Iran bear no responsibilities, that they cannot and must not be criticized. The issue is that inserting this into a protest against the structural injustice of imperial domination draws a false formal equivalence. It reduces all acts of violence regardless of their scale and history to the same gesture. This effectively disavows the issue at hand, erasing relations of cause and effect in histories of violence and undermining the legitimate possibility of resistance. 

These narratives are based on factually false anachronistic references when they attribute Israeli aggression to Iranian foreign policy, be it Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah or its role in the Syrian war. In actual fact, we know a US plan for the overthrow of the Iranian state has been in the works since at least 2001 (if not in 1980 with the US arming of Saddam Hussein’s invasion against Iran, or even further back, since the 1953 CIA coup in Iran), with the G.W. Bush administration’s plan to attack seven Muslim countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan), a plan that was confirmed regarding Iraq, Iran, and Libya by Netanyahu as early as 2002. This more comprehensive history renders Iran’s activities in the region a defensive reaction to an existential security threat. Whatever criticisms or questions we may have of Iran’s chosen response, we cannot sincerely understand its activities to be the cause or the enabler of US-Israeli colonial aspirations.

The double-condemnation technique in many of the anti-war statements accomplishes an emotional displacement of the wrath of war. The experience of becoming the object of killer-drones and bombs is an incredibly terrorizing, humiliating, and anger-inducing event. To find oneself in a position where people with whom you have absolutely no relation can decide your life or death unleashes emotions inaccessible to most human beings living in times of relative peace.  My sense is that the discourse of double-condemnation deflects the object of this wrath from the aggressor and redirects it towards the victim. It is an anger-management technique that self-suppresses the wish to ‘explode’ on the aggressor, probably because we are too afraid of the consequences. The emotional charge is then released onto something or someone much more accessible, who poses less danger to us. So that while we engage in rational and moral condemnation of the US-Israeli attack, it is emotionally hollowed out and, in its stead, condemnation of the Iranian ‘regime’ is affectively invested. The result is a very dangerous identification of democratic, liberal, and even leftist aspirations to justice with the emotional structure of empire, identifying with the oppressor and redirecting the desire for violence against the oppressor back towards the oppressed self. I say the oppressed self because the distinction between the state and the people does not logically or empirically hold up in times of war. The double-condemnation by Iranian residents speaks as a kind of a suicidal desire, albeit beneath the mask of an anti-war position.   

Under these complicated conditions, political action need not mean blind affirmation of the Islamic Republic, but it does mean that any criticism of the latter would have to be radically decoupled from the critique of blatant war crimes and crimes against humanity by the state of Israel, funded by the US, the U.K. and Europe.

AD & NS: We can all agree that international factors played a pivotal role in what happened, although here the discursive terrain is no less complex. During and after the Iran war, commentators invoked regional comparisons with Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and even post-Morsi Egypt. These analogies were drawn for a range of reasons. Iraq was cited to highlight fears of large-scale US-led intervention justified through claims about WMDs, and the long-term consequences of regime change under the guise of “liberation.” Libya was cited as a cautionary tale about foreign-imposed regime change leading to state collapse, militia rule, and protracted instability. Egypt—particularly the post-Morsi period—was invoked to point out how international actors can support authoritarian consolidation when it aligns with their strategic interests despite democratic rhetoric. What work do these analogies do in your assessment? What do they reveal, and what do they obscure? What lessons can—or cannot—be drawn from them? 

Maziar Behrooz (MB): Comparisons between the war on Iran and past cases of regime change in the Middle East and North Africa must be approached with caution. While surface similarities may exist, political dynamics and internal conditions differ significantly across contexts. What these analogies risk obscuring is a difference in sequencing and social structure. If anything, the lesson from recent cases may be that external military intervention fragments states but rarely fosters democratic transformation. In Iran, where change is being pursued internally, comparisons that flatten these distinctions may be more misleading than illuminating.

AD & NS: How, then, does the Iranian case diverge from other touchstones in the region?

MB: In recent decades, there were three high-profile cases of regime change—Libya, Syria, and Iraq --- each of which followed distinct trajectories. In Libya, a visible popular uprising preceded NATO’s intervention, which led to the collapse of the regime and the fragmentation of the state. In Syria, a mass uprising devolved into a civil war dominated by Islamist factions, backed by regional actors like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Foreign involvement deepened state collapse and introduced long-term foreign occupation. Iraq’s case is somewhat different. The 1991 uprisings in Kurdish and Shi’a regions were brutally crushed—partly with US acquiescence. While the Kurds gained semi-autonomy under US protection, the regime remained intact until the 2003 invasion. Today, Iraq is functionally divided among rival factions, with a weakened central state.

Iran’s situation diverges in key ways. Unlike these other cases, Iran has seen the reemergence of a vibrant civil society that has mobilized through nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. The regime’s retreat on mandatory veiling, for instance, marks a limited but real concession. Yet repression remains severe, and the path forward is fraught. While foreign intervention hastened regime collapse in Libya and Syria, and eventually Iraq, it has so far left Iran’s security apparatus intact. Crucially, these attacks appear to have undermined—not supported—the development of Iran’s civil society. Unlike other contexts where uprisings preceded intervention, in Iran, external aggression has preempted domestic political momentum and complicated the terrain for change.

AD & NS: One indication that Iran’s security apparatus remained intact is found in the widespread surveillance and deportation of 1.5 million Afghan migrants and refugees following the war under the auspices of identifying potential spies. How might a comparative analysis of geopolitical positioning read in relation to domestic political structures complicate analogies between Iran and other cases (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt)? What role do state-society relations play in shaping vulnerability to intervention and the prospects for social change across these cases?

PJ: The state-society complex in Iran is much more complicated and intertwined than what existed in Iraq, Syria, and Libya before they were confronted with foreign interventions. It is useful to remind ourselves that the state in Iran emerged through a revolutionary mobilization that reconstituted a ruling elite whose members were drawn from clerics, merchants, industrialists, professionals, and even members of the lower classes that found their way up through new institutions and organizations, such as the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, state-funded cultural, religious, community, and labor organizations. As various studies have established, one of the key reasons for the durability of authoritarian states is the cohesiveness of their ruling elite and the loyalty of the military and security apparatus of states. Another factor is the absence of ideological and organizational sources for the mobilization of societal discontent into effective opposition. 

The post-1979 state initially comprised a much larger elite, conceived broadly, than existed during the Pahlavi monarchy, or in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. This elite was also more deeply rooted in society through ideological, cultural, economic and social entanglements. During the last four decades, however, the size of the elite has shrunk due to multiple purges, and its connections to society have weakened due to socio-cultural transformations and policies that have alienated large parts of the lower and middle classes.[6] At the same time, while it has shrunk, the state elite became more coherent—through purges of dissenters and confrontations with foreign threats. 

This brings us to the main differences between the impact of military intervention in Iran, and that in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The first difference concerns Iran’s military capabilities. This was, obviously, an extremely unequal war between two nuclear powers equipped with highly advanced weapons, and a country that lacks any of those weapons and has been under continuous sanctions for four decades. Nevertheless, Iran managed to hold its ground and while Israel censored the impact of Iran’s retaliatory attacks, it was recently revealed that they caused extensive damage and hit at least eight strategic and military targets. The second difference, to your question, concerns the nature of state-society relations in Iran. Neither the state imploded nor did society revolt under the pressures induced by military attacks and threats. If anything, the attacks lessened or distracted from, rather than increased, state-society contradictions.

AD & NS: Can you share some historical background to give us a better sense of existing state-society contradictions?

PJ: The generation that participated in the 1979 revolution and built the Islamic Republic emerged more galvanized out of the war with Iraq (1980-88). A new generation was then shaped by Iran’s effective encirclement after the American invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and the economic sanctions and military confrontations of the last two decades. The recent Israeli-American attacks will further intensify the siege-mentality among the elites. This foreign threat is, I believe, the main reason why the fracturing of the elite has been slow and limited despite several confrontations with mass protests. Another reason is that protesters have lacked a strategy to identify and increase elite fault lines.

Iran’s ruling elite have never been passive; different parts of that elite have formulated different, largely unsuccessful projects aimed at creating a new social contract that would replace the populist one of the 1980s. The reforms during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005), the neo-populism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), and the nuclear negotiations of Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021) represent such projects. Rouhani's attempt to create a new social contract through economic growth resulting from a nuclear deal he signed in 2015 was undermined when President Trump tore it up in 2018 and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran. This swung the political pendulum back to the factions around the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards that flexed its muscles by threatening oil flows from the Persian Gulf and allowing its allies to attack American military bases in Iraq. The US then upped the ante by assassination of Revolutionary Guards general, Qassem Soleimani in 2020. During the following years, including the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi (2021-2024), militarization and repression dominated in the face of intensified external threats. The election of Massoud Pezeshkian in 2024 was a response to the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt of 2022, as parts of the elite attempted to find a middle way between the conservative and reformist factions by addressing Iran’s economic problems, moderately relaxing the social and cultural restrictions and starting nuclear negotiations with the US.

AD & NS: Comparisons are never neutral. They frame how wars are remembered, justified, or resisted. They can reveal historical patterns or, as Maziar suggested, obscure critical differences. Likewise, analogies are not only attempts to make sense of unfolding events. They anticipate what may follow and later shape political responses accordingly. How would you describe the geopolitical terrain looking ahead? 

MB: I think the most important revelation from the June war is the gradual collapse of the international legal system set up after the Second World War, and a precipitous return to the international order that existed before the First World War.  Before WW1, older great powers had divided the world amongst themselves, leaving emerging powers such as Japan, Germany, and Italy with few colonial possessions to conquer.  The US was the dominant hegemon in Latin America, France and Britain had divided Africa, and Russia was a massive land empire (albeit a weak one). This was the era of imperialism par excellence.  The result was, at least partially, the First World War, a disastrous event by all measures. After the Great War, attempts at creating a legal framework to prevent another war failed. The US proposed but failed to join the ineffectual League of Nations while the UK and France made sure Germany and Italy were humiliated, so much so it paved the way for the rise of fascism. This resulted in another, even more destructive, war. After the Second World War, the victors established a new world order, with a much more robust legal framework, and a stronger international organization named the United Nations. This framework has been eroding and is being dismantled after the end of the Cold War in 1991. By subverting the UN and international law, the big powers are reverting to the pre-WWI world order. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and US invasion of Iraq, are but two examples of this process, and the June war in Iran is a third.

SS: I would answer with reference to more recent history in the region. We know the colonial agenda for the region has been one of toppling the seven states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan after the invasion of Afghanistan. We also know that by 2025 seven out of these eight states have been toppled, with Afghanistan’s Taliban regaining control of the country in 2021, and Iran still standing despite some 20 years of devastating sanctions and the first round of the war in 2025. I cannot do justice to the study of these eight wars here, but I think we see a paradigm shift in the conduct of war when we compare the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s with the Libyan and Syrian wars that began in the 2010s. The latter were not fought with American or Western soldiers on the ground but by local and regional populations turned militias. They are named ‘civil wars’ despite their international nature.

This shift in the conduct of war by the US, I believe, can be traced back to 2006 and the US military’s turn to a counterinsurgency doctrine, when it realized its miserable disadvantage in asymmetrical warfare in Iraq and arrived at a necessary investment in the “hearts and minds” of local populations. 2006 also marks the beginning of the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran—a first step in the aggressive manipulation of Iranian “hearts and minds.” It was also the year Hezbollah expelled Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, which showed the IDF to be in need of a different strategy as Israeli soldiers were losing on the ground and could benefit instead from swaying Lebanese “hearts and minds.” By 2012, in the aftermath of the attack on Libya and the Syrian uprising, the US was openly arming ‘rebels’ in both countries under various ‘train-and-equip’ programs. Some of these programs included covert operations, such as operation Timber Sycamore in Syria, specifically designed against any kind of revolutionary or rebel takeover of the state. The US was fully cognizant of the fact that most of the Syrian ‘rebels’ were of ‘ideologically problematic’ backgrounds. Its operations aimed at ‘de-statification,’ utilizing local populations by arming them just enough to achieve the fall of Assad but also to sustain internal conflict as long as necessary. The policy shift turned local populations into the protagonists and subjects of war, as it turned the aim of war into ‘controlled chaos.’ 

The attack on Iran emerges against this historical background, however, circumstances in Iran pose a much more difficult challenge for the US On the one hand the IRGC is a more formidable military power than the militaries of any of the hitherto targeted states. On the other hand, as Peyman noted, Iran is the only state on the list that has achieved a popular republican revolution in 1979. It has established more organic and institutionally grounded state-society relations despite the state’s politically oppressive and economically exploitative tendencies. Therefore, from the perspective of empire, the toppling of Iran requires multiple strategies pursued simultaneously. 

These were first outlined in a now famous Brookings Institute policy paper for the CIA in 2009 titled “Which Path to Persia?.” Looking at these “paths” and the actions of the US government since, we now know that US strategies toward Iran include, first, the ruthless targeting of state-society ties through the economic chokehold of sanctions (which began in 2006 in the name of limiting Iran’s nuclear program but corresponded with a strategic turn to ‘counterinsurgency’) and, further, through the ideological apparatus of Western funded Persian language media. Second, they involve infiltration into the Iranian opposition—defined as the reform movement, the intellectual class, and civil society actors ranging from domestic rights groups to exiled figures such as the heir of the ex-Shah—for the purpose of “fomenting a revolution.” Third, the strategies seek to “inspire insurgencies” by arming ethnic minorities, particularly Kurd, Baluch, and Arab populations and other opposition groups such as the MEK. Finally, they pursue sustained military engagement through airstrikes by the US and Israel: “Leave it to Bibi,” as one option in the policy paper suggests.

Thus, we can see that unlike the previous colonial wars of the region, where the US opted for either a sustained military intervention or the instigation of revolutionary civil wars, regarding Iran it will need to pursue both strategies and each in various forms. In addition, as the policy paper suggests, Iran is too strategically important to descend into chaos. If the US does not succeed in toppling the government and installing its own preference in power, then it will likely pursue a Balkanization of Iran into ethnic fragments. All this, however, ultimately depends on how effective the psyops against the Iranian population manage to be in their efforts to turn Iranians into suicidal swarms.

PJ: To Setareh’s point, the main anchors and programs of Iran International TV, which started operating from London in 2017 with Saudi financiers, push Israeli talking points and misinformation and have been given full access to Israeli officials for uncritical “interviews,” including with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Informed observers, including the Israeli military and intelligence journalist Barak Ravid, believe that Mossad uses Iran International for its operations. Its violation of journalistic standards has led many Iranian scholars and activists to informally boycott Iran International, and recently 450 of them issued a call to boycott Iran International in response to its journalists cheering on and justifying the Israeli-American attacks on Iran.

Kaveh Ehsani (KE): I would add to all this that foreign military (and hostile covert) interference has become almost normalized in the region, on par with Central and Southern Africa and Central America, especially in the 1980s. What perhaps differs is the direct and unabashed culpability of other regional players. In Central America, the US was directly behind the violence in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In Africa, France and more recently Russia have intervened to engineer political outcomes aligned with their imperial interests. What I think makes the Middle East different is the degree of intervention not just by imperial powers like the US but also by other regional players like Israel, Turkey, Iran, the Saudis, the UAE, Egypt, and Syria (in Lebanon), all to subvert and tilt the situation, often against each other. The intensity of these interventions and their destructive results have repeatedly subverted popular attempts at democratizing these societies. Look at what happened in Bahrain or Yemen in the wake of their popular uprisings. The military coup in Egypt was embraced by Obama and the US. Similarly, Iran’s experimentation with reformist politics was undermined by credible threats of regime change by US neocons, and the recent US-Israel attacks were openly aimed at overthrowing the Iranian regime. The pattern here is not just one of a region being assaulted by imperial aggression, but rather one where authoritarianism is being consolidated by local, regional, and global imperial actors against any and all grassroots attempts at democratizing these societies. What we should keep in mind is that the first victims of political-military violence are peaceful street protests, the free press, trade unions and social organizations, political parties, and the presence of ordinary citizens - women, young adults, the elderly, etc. from the public arena.

AD & NS: The tensions shaping public debate about the war—between critiques of empire and critiques of the Iranian state—are not just rhetorical. They have material implications for how people experience violence and vulnerability, and the prospects for social and political change. How would you assess the current political landscape in Iran?

KE: The war has brought some clarity and more urgency to ordinary people as well as the ruling elite in confronting hitherto abstract questions such as: What does regime change by foreign military intervention look like and what are its material, human, and ecological consequences? Where do opposition groups inside and outside stand on this issue? How do various factions within the ruling establishment react to such attacks when it comes to dealing with the population? Is patriotism and love of country sufficient to rally the alienated population behind the unpopular regime? What happens if the regime’s leadership is decapitated, how will that power vacuum be filled and by whom? Will it result in civil war, an explosion of vengeance, separatism, etc.? Will the outcome be better than before? Who will rule and how? I think these are floating questions in need of urgent answers!

One needs to consider the ever-shifting dynamics of power in one of the most paradoxical societies in the region: Since at least 2001, the art of survival by the ruling military-clerical establishment has been predicated on keeping social groups and networks fragmented. Any sign of different social actors bonding in alliances has been treated as an existential threat and violently repressed. This paranoid strategy was adopted after repeated electoral losses to the reformists and especially after Bush labeled Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil’ and the neocons adopted regime change as US policy toward the Middle East. Events in Iraq, Libya and Syria confirmed these beliefs. After that all dissent began to be treated as an existential threat. I wrote a lot about this topic in MERIP during that period, so I won’t repeat myself here. In brief, I think the 2009 contested elections signaled a definitive end to the dual nature of the Islamic Republic (republican / theocratic) and the military/security establishment effectively took over.[7] Reformists, technocrats, apolitical administrators and bureaucrats were increasingly marginalized or purged. International sanctions further corrupted the political economy by consolidating the hold of black marketeers and organized mafias associated with the ruling establishment.[8] 

Sanctions have contributed to recurring popular uprisings over consequent price hikes, water shortages, environmental crises, rising grievances by labor, pensioners, and professionals. These explosions of discontent have been treated, in turn, as existential threats and repressed ever more brutally. The ruling establishment kept legitimizing itself by claiming that Iran was an island of stability in a Middle East torn by violence. Against this background, the 2022 WLF movement connected various regional, class, and identity grievances together to an unprecedented level. Although it was violently repressed as well, it accomplished unprecedented symbolic gains, such as many urban women effectively refusing to wear the hijab in public. The regime became aware of the powder keg of popular resentment as never before. 

The Israeli-US military attacks have simultaneously forced two questions into the public domain: For the ruling regime the question is what happens if a discontented population revolts at the same time as foreign attacks? For the population the question is to ponder the chaotic consequences should the regime collapse. Will the regime continue to treat its population as a potential enemy, or will it try to revive the ‘republican’ aspect to regain some respite (if not legitimacy) from potential popular upheavals while it negotiates with its mortal enemies abroad? Will it manage to alleviate a moribund economy hit by sanctions and deep corruption that has been pauperizing the population?

PJ: We’ve see some initial answers to Kaveh’s questions in the two months since the war. Following the June war, we are seeing the contours of a new project around which the elite is coalescing: a continuation of the relaxation of cultural restrictions to pre-empt protests; the creation of a new Iranian-Islamic nationalism that can mobilize wider sections of the population against foreign threats; and, as you mentioned earlier, distraction from economic problems through racism by targeting Afghan immigrants and refugees. These efforts will not turn dissatisfied parts of the population into supporters of the Islamic Republic, but we already see that there has been a rally-around-the-flag effect and a paralyzing fear among the population for war. Once again, Israel and the US have strengthened the Islamic Republic’s elite vis-a-vis the social forces that oppose it.

AD & NS: What long-term horizons—social, economic, political, or ecological—do you think need greater attention? How does your research speak to these less-visible or long-term effects? Are there specific dynamics within civil society, housing, labor, gender, or the environment that are particularly at risk? Or, alternatively, are these aspects of Iranian society undergoing transformations in which we may decipher visions for an alternate future?

MB: As a historian, I hesitate to anticipate any upcoming events.  However, I can add two points to my previous comment. First, Arab secular nationalist states of the previous century have disappeared for the most part. The regional intra-cold war between these states and conservative, traditional Arab monarchies is near an end.  Second, imperialist victors of WW1 set up many of the Arab states in the region. These new countries were intentionally created with diverging, even hostile ethnic and religious groups. The result was the establishment of dysfunctional states, which lacked national cohesion. One reason why military officers took over and established military dictatorships was that these states lacked nationhood. They were states but not nations.  In this context, Iran is very different in that it has a much stronger national identity and a longer history of various components of its population identifying with each other, thus establishing a national identity. This is not to ignore challenges facing Iran as a nation, but to emphasize the bonding of its people.

KE: Let’s remember that against all odds the Islamic Republic has survived for nearly half a century by showing paradoxical flexibility in moments of crisis, which have been legion. But I am not sure the same rational flexibility exists within the remaining ranks of this regime any more. The crises facing Iranian society are no longer solvable through political maneuvers or economic distribution only, they can only be addressed by popular consent and democratic involvement. Band-aids are not sufficient to address existential issues like chronic water shortages, toxic pollution caused by decades of warfare and eco-destructive development projects, hyperinflation, massive unemployment, housing shortages, and the list goes on. Since 2001 we have witnessed a political system that has become increasingly authoritarian in a typical manner. 

But there is a major difference between Iran and other societies under dictatorships: As Peyman mentioned earlier, Iran went through a genuine revolution in 1979, and that sense of political entitlement has become part of the political repertoire of this society. After all these waves of repression, economic and political, the Iranian population remains highly politicized and unintimidated by threats of violence.  

I am not very optimistic that what remains of this ruling regime is able to show the kind of savvy flexibility that has allowed it to remain in power until now. In last year’s election people once again—and perhaps for the last time—came out to elect Pezeshkian as president, because he promised to normalize relations with the world or resign if he was stopped. He has not accomplished much on that front, and the Israeli-US attacks may have made that situation even murkier. Capitulation to Trump’s demands is not an option, given four decades of sloganeering and what such submission would entail. The only hope is to consolidate the domestic front by mobilizing popular support. But by eliminating and delegitimizing the reformists, Khamenei and his allies in power have lost their main conduit to popular support.  

I think regional neighbors fully realize the catastrophe that will ensue should there be a political collapse in Iran. It is true that we are not dealing with rational political leaders with any foresight, integrity, or any commitment to democracy, be it in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, or the US. We live in a world of monsters (to use Gramsci’s wording) where old certainties are gone and what’s replacing it seems to echo Marx and Luxemburg’s warnings of barbarism on the horizon. But, we can either give in to despair about the rise of fascism and ecological collapse, or we can remind ourselves that these are crises caused by unaccountable social and political systems, that can only be mitigated by progressive and inclusive counter movements that challenge authoritarianism, repressive nationalism, and capitalism.  

That’s why I’m highly concerned about the kind of Iranian diaspora politics that calls for foreign intervention to overthrow the Islamic Republic. These nefarious oppositions range from the monarchists, to the MKO, and the dissident liberals and nationalists who have joined them. They don’t seem to have learned any lessons from similar calamities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, and other societies left in ruin after such interventions… or they simply don’t care. People with a foreign passport can always leave when things don’t turn out as they promised, like Kanan Makya and Ahmed Chalabi did in the rubble that remained of post-sanction and post-invasion Iraq. The only hope is the creation of a national consensus spearheaded by mobilized groups in Iran that forgoes the violence of revenge politics and pushes for change through a universal referendum and some form of truth and reconciliation process on the models of South Africa and post-Franco Spain. 

SS: It’s a difficult question to answer, particularly within our contemporary modes of apocalyptic imagination. On the one hand, given that this war really started with the implementation of sanctions in 2006, we can clearly track the trajectory of social effects and expect their continued intensification into the future: increases in corruption, economic disparity, political repression, social insecurity, environmental degradation, violence against women, feminization of poverty, decreased child education, infrastructural failures,  and so forth—in a word, everything that sanctions intend to accomplish as they have historically in Iraq, Venezuela, and Syria. The addition of military violence to this economic and social matrix of violence is a kind of a traumatic overload on an already tortured social body. The war might momentarily divert political attention from previous injuries and bring a concentration of forces around the new wound, but in the end it will likely lead to the worsening of all previous conditions and simply function as another blow towards the country’s sociopolitical death. For instance, we know that gender violence categorically increases with economic pressure and war. Men turn more violent towards women under the humiliation of poverty or existential threat (as in the family dynamics of most military and police forces), and so forth. So, in addition to geopolitical insecurity, war intensifies the already existing social injuries of the sanctions.

On the other hand, we know that the social insecurities of the sanctions have been accompanied by the ideological apparatus of empire persistently absolving the responsibility of the West in the degradation of Iranian society and redirecting social anger towards “the regime.” The media apparatus has been quite successful in constructing an alternate psychic reality for Iranians that is entirely detached from regional and global power dynamics and historical colonial processes. Here, paradoxically, the act of war on Iranians has had the adverse effect of breaking this Western-manufactured fantasy, re-constituting the Iranian psyche back into “the reality principle” of geopolitics. This, I think, is something more than simply rallying behind the state out of fear in wartime. It is more than a temporary shift of attention towards a physical wound. The physical wound of war actually breeches into the psychic hyper-reality so neatly constructed by media that has convinced Iranians their first and last enemy is “the regime.” Now, the psyche finds itself in conflict with its own senses, for it is feeling the US-Israeli war with its flesh, and the body brings it to question the dominant narrative. Like most existential wounds, it marks a moment of awakening, of coming to consciousness so to speak, which is always a first principle in the birth of a new language.

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