The Biggest Lie About Iran

The Islamic Republic didn't spend 45 years preparing for peace. It spent 45 years preparing for permanent revolution, war, and bloodshed.

photo: Sina Drakhshani/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I do not support the removal of the Islamic regime of Iran because I am “pro-war.” I support it because I oppose the war that regime has waged since 1979, against the United States and its Western allies, and against its own people.

The regime’s internal repression and its war on the Iranian people has been documented at length, including the imprisonment of dissidents, the execution of protesters, the systematic brutality directed at women and minorities. If that record is unfamiliar to you, I would urge you to acquaint yourself with it.

When Ruhollah Khomeini’s clerical revolutionaries seized power in 1979 and renamed the country the Islamic Republic of Iran, they were not founding a conventional state. Iran’s pre-1979 history, including the Shah’s repression, the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup, and decades of Cold War manoeuvring, shaped the revolutionary atmosphere. But what emerged was not merely a reaction. It was a regime built to export its ideology across the region and into the wider world.

Rooted in velayat-e faqih (“absolute authority of the jurist”) — a foundational doctrine in Twelver Shia Islam — the regime fused clerical rule with state power and cast itself as the vanguard of a wider Islamic mission. And revolutions require enemies, preferably ones that can be blamed for everything indefinitely.

The United States, in the revolutionary imagination, embodied the arrogance, materialism, and dominance of the Western order the regime existed to defy. It was cast as “the Great Satan,” the principal enemy. Israel became its regional expression, denounced as “the Little Satan.”

Opposition to both was central to the regime’s mission. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” became the ideological language of the state, which makes diplomacy with such a regime something of an uphill exercise. War was built into its DNA.

It began in November 4, 1979, when Islamist students loyal to Khomeini seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding American diplomats hostage for 444 days. In the early 1980s, the regime’s allies in Lebanon carried out a suicide car bombing against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including Americans.

Months later, a coordinated truck bombing targeted U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 service members, one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces before 9/11. During the Iraq War, militias aligned with the regime killed hundreds of U.S. service members using Iranian-supplied weapons and tactics.

Since then, the pattern has intensified: arming Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel, cultivating militias in Iraq and Syria, backing the Houthis in Yemen, striking Gulf oil infrastructure, harassing and mining commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, launching ballistic missiles at U.S. bases, plotting assassinations in Europe and North America, and abducting foreign and dual nationals to use as political hostages.

The regime has carried out cyberattacks against Western infrastructure, placed bounties on former U.S. officials, deepened military cooperation with Russia by supplying drones used against Ukrainian civilians, sold discounted oil to Beijing in defiance of sanctions, and helped build the parallel trade and financial networks designed to weaken the West.

Its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, illustrates the scale and reach of this network. During the Lebanese civil war, Western journalists, diplomats and aid workers were kidnapped and held hostage for years by Hezbollah-linked groups.

In 1994, Hezbollah operatives carried out a truck bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Argentina, killing 85 people. In 2015, British security services uncovered a Hezbollah explosives cache in North London containing three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, enough material for a major bombing campaign.

Alongside these campaigns sits another front: information warfare. Iranian state media and affiliated networks have long worked to discredit the United States and Israel internationally, pushing narratives to inflame opinion abroad and fracture Western support for confronting the regime. Through satellite television, multilingual media outlets, coordinated online campaigns, and networks of sympathetic organisations and activists, the Islamic Republic has invested heavily in shaping the political atmosphere beyond its borders.

This was not simply a propaganda effort but another theatre of the conflict — a long campaign aimed at Western public opinion. If missiles and militias targeted physical security, this front targeted legitimacy, working to convince audiences abroad that the regime’s enemies were the true aggressors.

The speed with which unverified claims from regime sources are repeated in Western media suggests the strategy has been remarkably effective. The war in Gaza has demonstrated how powerful this front can be. The conflict has been fought largely through images, narratives, and emotional mobilisation.

Even though Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated on February 28th, and even if the regime falls, the ideas it spent decades cultivating represent a war that is only just beginning. For more than 40 years, the Islamic Republic invested not only in militias and missiles, but in ideological alliances and narratives designed to reshape opinion inside Western societies. Some of its most consequential successes have taken root within Western institutions, including the universities that shape future leaders. There is no military strategy for that front.

Both strategies were designed to operate globally.

For 45 years, the regime has exported instability and forced the United States into a pattern of containment, missile defence, and retaliatory strikes.

We are already implicated in ways we barely notice. Heightened airport security feels routine, a legacy of the airline hijackings pioneered by Palestinian militant groups in the 1960s and 1970s, some of whom later trained Iranian revolutionaries. Expanded surveillance authorities, permanent counterterror budgets, naval patrols safeguarding shipping lanes, intelligence operations tracking proxy networks — because they emerge gradually rather than through a single unmistakable event, they become normalised and effectively invisible.

This is what a slow war looks like.

Our legal and diplomatic frameworks were built around visible aggression: armies crossing borders, attacks already underway, threats that cross a clear threshold of imminence. They have much less to say about incremental hostility sustained over decades, such as proxy networks and calibrated escalation that remain just below the threshold that would justify decisive response. The result has been a strategy of management rather than resolution. A slow war is simply not something our rules were built to recognise.

Revolutionary regimes do not experience conflict in the same way. Military confrontation gives way to legal, political, and diplomatic manoeuvre, then back again when the opportunity returns. Ceasefires are not necessarily conclusions but intervals. What Western governments interpret as de-escalation can function as time to regroup, rearm, and prepare the next phase.

Within Western legal and diplomatic frameworks, the default response has been to wait — wait for formal imminence, wait for undeniable proof, wait until the threat crosses a legal threshold no one can dispute. In this case, waiting has meant 45 years and counting.

Managing this escalation drains interceptors, carrier groups, intelligence bandwidth, and political attention. Iran funds and arms militias, violence escalates, the U.S. and Israel respond, and the region remains permanently combustible. It keeps America locked in reactive crisis management in the Middle East while adversaries like China consolidate power in the Pacific.

The confrontation with China over Taiwan will come to a head eventually. When it does, the United States cannot afford to have one hand permanently tied down by Tehran’s proxy network and manufactured crises. Every missile fired at a militia warehouse, every carrier group repositioned to the Gulf, every emergency deployment to contain escalation is capacity diverted from the Indo-Pacific.

The Islamic regime is not merely a regional menace diverting American attention and draining resources. It operates as a central disruptor within a broader anti-Western axis, perpetuating instability across the Middle East. Removing the regime as a chronic source of escalation would eliminate a pressure point in China’s long-term strategy.

The status quo is not peace. It is managed escalation governed by thresholds that were never designed for slow-motion aggression. Calling disruption of that cycle “pro-war” while accepting decades of proxy conflict is a curious definition of restraint. And yet, in Western capitals, crowds gather under banners that read “No War with Iran,” as though this confrontation began just a few weeks ago.

It should not need saying, but it does: This is not a war against the Iranian people. It is a confrontation with the regime that rules them. Challenging the Islamic Republic is not an assault on Iran. It is a response to a regime that has waged war in its name.

What unfolded beginning on February 28th with the joint U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran is unprecedented in scale and precision: the largest and most complex air operation in Israel’s history, targeting senior officials, regime infrastructure, and military assets. It is the culmination of decades of calibrated escalation.

Opposing decisive action against this regime as “warmongering,” while offering no plan to confront or dismantle it, is not a peace strategy. Multiple U.S. administrations (including that of Barack Obama) pursued negotiations, concessions, sanctions relief, and back-channel diplomacy. The regime used those openings to continue funding proxies, expand missile capabilities, and further destabilise the region.

Arguing for the end of a regime that manufactures endless conflict is not “pro-war.” It is an argument for breaking the cycle that has dragged America into Middle Eastern confrontation for nearly half a century.

Some argue this is not about strategy at all, but about U.S. President Donald Trump, and that he does not care about human rights. Perhaps he does not. But geopolitics is not reducible to personality. States act for multiple reasons at once: deterrence, credibility, bandwidth, competition with China. If weakening a regime that brutalises its own people happens as part of that calculus, it is still a good outcome for those living under it.

For those who argue the regime should be left intact to avoid war: For nearly half a century, Americans and Israelis and their allies have been targeted directly or through proxies. If preserving the status quo is the alternative, what exactly is the plan?

There are serious discussions to be had about execution, sequencing, and how to avoid a vacuum that devolves into another Iraq or Afghanistan. Escalation, regional spillover, and failure are all possible. I only wish those were the discussions dominating our online discourse. Instead we get black-and-white slogans and the confident geopolitical expertise of people who had never previously expressed an opinion on Iran until just a few weeks ago.

But the existence of risk is not, in itself, an argument for inaction. Violence will occur either way. The question is which outcome it serves. For the entirety of its existence, the regime has shown no capacity for reform and no intention of abandoning the strategy of proxy conflict that has kept the region permanently volatile. If the objective is to end that cycle, postponement cannot be the plan.

The present moment, with the regime under visible pressure and its networks degraded, may not present itself again soon. Strategic windows rarely remain open for long, and when they close, they often do so for a generation.

If we want real stability absent from perpetual war, the possibility of normal relations with a future Iran, and an end to the cycle of proxy war, we have to be honest about the obstacle.

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