Iran Must Win This War

A few months ago, a good friend asked me whether women could attend university in Iran. This wasn’t the first time that I’ve been amazed by the misunderstanding of even the most basic features of Iran’s internal politics, particularly relating to issues of gender and equality. Women in Iran have faced and challenged patriarchal laws and formal restrictions in everyday life over the past few decades; they also account for more than 60 percent of university graduates. The question, from a highly educated person who views dominant political discourse in the United States with scepticism, did not surprise me.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the US and its allies have succeeded in creating a near uniform public consciousness about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and Islamist politics. This conception gained more civilisational overtone after 9/11, and in the years since has thrown, without discrimination, the Islamic Republic, Saudi Wahabis, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and fringe Jihadi groups in North Africa and South Asia into the same basket of anti-modern, reactionary political formations.

As the US and Israel telegraph an imminent return to war on Iran, the continued absence of a meaningful anti-war movement in the West demands explanation. I believe that this hegemonic, vilifying view of the Islamic Republic has something to do with it.

The ‘Campist’ Distortion

It’s hard to make a counter-factual case, and I have no doubt that there are many reasons at work to explain this absence, without any of them being the determinant factor. It could be exhaustion from the brutality wrought on earlier movements for Black lives, against the Gaza genocide, and in the US, anti-ICE mobilisations. It could also be a general organisational weakness of the left and its inability to forge a meaningful international solidarity. It could simply be the changing character of social protests, from real feet on the ground to social media outbursts, signing petitions, and virtual campaigns.

But it’s also the case that the Islamic Republic of Iran often stands alone in global politics as the illustration of a one-dimensional ‘evil’ state, particularly in reference to gender politics. This designation turns the Islamic Republic into an irredeemable entity; engagement only perpetuates its draconian repression against its own people. As a result, the opposition to war has largely been articulated from the perspective of ‘no to war and no to the Islamic Republic.’ By centering the realities of repression in Iran, this view sidelines the question of sovereignty and imperialist expansionism by dismissing the Iranian state’s resistance against the war as a ‘hollow anti-imperialism.’

Those who advocate a categorical condemnation of the war without linking that anti-war position to the promotion of regime change in Iran are often accused of ‘campism’. As Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra caution us, ‘campism’ is one of the primary obstacles to a ‘liberatory internationalist politics.’ It is, they claim, an ideologically motivated position that reduces the political terrain to binary oppositions in which the enemy of our enemy is construed as our friend. In the conclusion of their analysis, Hardt and Mezzadra lean on Iran to make their case, treating the acceptance of Iran’s support for the Palestinian cause as the prime example of the campist folly: ‘Rather than supporting Iran or its allies, even rhetorically, an internationalist project should instead link Palestine solidarity struggles to those such as the ‘woman, life, freedom’ movements which challenged the Islamic Republic. In short, the struggle against the war regime must not only seek to interrupt the current constellation of wars, but also to effect broader social transformation.’

One of the destructive aspects of war is the imposition of a binary condition on realities that are far too complex to be comprehensible through the dichotomy of friends and foes. Wartime alliances are not pacts of friendship. They are simply agreements between parties to oust the imminent threats of annihilation. That agreement does not make them friends or strategic allies; it allows those under attack to survive. If Iran is providing arms to the Palestinian resistance to fend off the Israeli genocidal war, do ‘anti-campists’ suggest that the Palestinians should reject that offer and instead build solidarity with ‘women, life, freedom’ and other protest movements that challenge the Islamic Republic? Where is the urgency in this fantastic formulation? Bombs, missiles and tanks foist the binary of life and death on an entire population. When society itself faces annihilation, the anti-campist yearning for ‘broader social transformations’ seems disturbingly disconnected with the realities of war and destruction.

There is nothing new about the idea that capitalism, in essence, is a war regime. Resistance to colonialism, fascism, racism, sexual oppression, imperialism, authoritarianism, and many other forms of state brutality has always been built with provisional alliances. At the same time, the prohibition of killing political and military leaders of another country is categorical, it does not depend on what kind of leader that person was or what type of country those militaries protect. So why is this different? Why is it that an anti-war mobilisation, which would entail a categorical recognition of the Islamic Republic’s right to defend its sovereignty, poses a particular problem for many progressive political currents in the West? In fact, we’ve seen this all before.

Patterns Repeat

On 15 February 2003, more than a month before the invasion of Iraq, a coordinated day of protests was held across the world. In more than 600 cities, an estimated six to ten million people marched around the world, in the largest anti-war protests in history, to condemn American warmongering and its neo-colonial project of redrawing the map of the Middle East.

The American post-9/11 response to ‘terror’ was a project long in the making by a number of neo-conservative strategists. The invasion itself happened after years of United Nations Security Council sanctions on the country, including Resolution 661 which was adopted in 1990 in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions severely impaired or even destroyed Iraqi health, education, and utilities infrastructure, killing an estimated half-a-million children before the first bombs were dropped. General Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, later revealed that as early as November 2001, US strategists were ready to set the rest of the plan in motion: attacks on seven countries in five years. Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Libya, and most importantly, the high prize, Iran.

A week before the invasion, I participated in a workshop in Washington, DC to discuss the Iran situation with Congressional and State Department staff. In the minds of the organisers, the invasion of Iraq had already succeeded, and what remained was to figure out the shortest route from Baghdad to Tehran. ‘Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran’ was not a mere shibboleth, it was the core of a policy of regime change that motivated the Bush administration. Going to Baghdad turned those boys into wounded men very quickly and the Iraqi quagmire rapidly buried the dream of shortcuts to Tehran. Later, the same hawks working in the first Trump administration encouraged the president to pull out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement signed between the Islamic Republic and the Obama administration and attempted to bring the Iranian government to its knees through crippling sanctions and embargos.

The Bush administration tried its best to enact its military campaign within the frame of international law, even if that was based on pure fabrications and lies on the question of weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 plot, and Saddam Hussein’s relations with al-Qaeda. But their efforts to legitimise their action with the UNSC’s blessing failed to deter a growing anti-war movement that saw with utmost clarity the insidious nature of that war. Hussein’s atrocities and the brutality of his regime against the Kurds, Shi’ites, other dissidents, and neighbouring countries never informed the discussions about the necessity of organising against the war. No one ever seriously claimed that mobilising people against the impending war meant supporting him.

But despite Iran’s accommodationist policies, a growing number of voices laid responsibility for averting a new frontier in this neocolonial war on the shoulders of the Islamic Republic. In an ‘anti-campist’ turn, organising against war with Iran became contingent upon an anti-Islamic Republic position.

In 2003, the International Committee for a Transition of Democracy in Iran (known as the CITDI) issued a statement calling on the Islamic Republic to hold a referendum in Iran with the intention of founding a ‘secular parliamentarian republic’ based on respect for ‘the principles and values enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, and its other ensuing democratic proclivities. The CITDI, whose membership included luminaries such as Samir Amin, Noam Chomsky, Costa Gavras, Edward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Harold Pinter, proposed that ‘in order to avoid a further extension of the disastrous conflicts in the region’, all democratic forces in the world ought to be mobilised and lend their support to their Iranian counterparts to bring about a ‘preemptive peace’. By refusing to relinquish power, then, the Islamic Republic would be responsible for igniting another war in the region.

A State of Exception

A similar position was articulated more recently through an open letter in The Guardian to Iranian political prisoners, signed by influential intellectual forces in the US and Europe. While condemning the American and Israeli attacks on Iran, the letter reiterates that the path out of these unfolding atrocities is to transcend this ‘dual oppression’, the ‘evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on your heads in the name of freedom’.

There is an underlying assumption here that had the Islamic Republic been a secular, democratic state, these US and Israeli wars of aggression would not have happened. But the reason that the US and Israel intend to destabilise the Islamic Republic has nothing to do with its repressive domestic policies. Let us not forget that George W. Bush called Iran the ‘axis of evil’ during the administration of President Mohammad Khatami, one of the most reform-minded post-revolutionary governments in Iran. The same Khatami government that, according to James Dobbins, the chief American negotiator at the Bonn conference for a transitional government in Afghanistan, was primarily responsible for toppling the Taliban regime and making the transition possible in Afghanistan after 9/11.

Since 1979, the single most important reason for the United States hostility toward Iran has been its sovereignty. The ultimate objective of the current war and the sanctions that are crippling the Iranian economy is to redraw the pre-1979 map of the Middle East with Iran as the central client state of the US and its European allies.

This is not only a national matter, but an important juncture in the history of imperialism. In the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Western powers plan to revive the old colonial ventures and exercise their unbridled power around the world. Israel has its eye on Turkiye and Pakistan, while the US, in no uncertain terms, desires the end of socialist Cuba and the domino-effect it will produce in the region. Cuba remains standing today, in part, because of Iran’s remarkable resistance to American and Israeli aggression.

Yet despite the stakes, the nature of the Islamic Republic has constantly been at the centre of conversations of anti-war mobilisations, to the exclusion of basic acts of opposition. The Iranian people have been forcefully and unremittingly engaged in a politics of social justice and civil liberties over the past four decades. These movements have made tangible progress and have suffered setbacks against a state that at times accommodates demands of those movements and at other times uses its repressive apparatus indiscriminately to remain in power. The same people, as they have shown during the recent months, care deeply about their nation’s sovereignty. Calling the Islamic Republic ‘evil’ in this context confuses Manichean rhetoric for political analysis, creating a state of exception that holds the Iranian state just as responsible for the war as the imperialist aggressors.

An anti-war movement has the potential to throw a spanner in the works of this neocolonial force. We in the West can realise solidarity with Iranian people, and with other peoples around the world, by stopping our own governments from executing their destructive colonial ambitions. It is clear that Iran must win this war if we are to exit from an era defined by the terrorising unipolar dominance of the US and lay the foundations of a new world order. We need to recognise this pivotal historical moment and play our role in its transformative politics.