Iran : The Will Of The People

"Trump should know that intervention by the U.S. in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of U.S. interests."

"The people of the United States should know that Trump began the adventurism."

"They should take care of their own soldiers." 

Ali Larijani, secretary, Supreme National Security Council, Tehran

 

"Any interventionist hand that gets too close to the security of Iran will be cut."

"The people of Iran properly know the experience of 'being rescued' by Americans: from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza."

Ali Shakhani, adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Protests were also reported in several other provinces, including Kermanshah - AFP via Getty Images

 

As the street protests throughout Iran against the theocratic regime of the Islamic Republic grow ever more vehement in a chorus of declarations that Iranians will no longer tolerate being governed by a religious dictatorship that has made a misery of their lives for almost half a century, with widening public participation in rallies approaching two weeks of aggravated and totally fed up Iranians excoriating their rulers, officials lash out at external interference as the cause of the riots. Not the years of repression, persecution, forced sacrifice and risk of imprisonment under a version of Shi'ite Islam that exemplifies theocratic Fascism.

 

There was an attempted rebellion -- the Green Revolution in 2009 -- that failed to accomplish its goal, another in 2019-2020 of Bloody November when thousands were killed and yet another in 2022 spurred by the murder of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini, killed in police custody whose casual hijab insulted the strict dress code the morality custodians religiously police, none of them were quite the equal of these current street protests, in dedicated numbers, outright hostility to the regime and calls for the death of the Supreme Leader, as well as attacks by ordinary Iranians on members of the IRGC.

 

This time, Iranians were initially responding to the economic straits they face with rising prices and a failed currency. As the days went on repeating the protests on a wider scale, not only in major cities but smaller towns, country-wide with more agitated and angered citizens deciding it was now or never to express their rage against the government machinery that has turned their country into terror central, produced a strained internal economy while financially supporting the regime's terror proxies abroad, the regime struggles to contain the will of the people it thought it had completely broken.

 

MAHSA / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty

 

President Donald Trump has warned Iran that should it "violently kill peaceful protesters", the United States "will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go", he wrote on his social media site. Statements that enraged the regime, happy to attribute the chaos that now reigns and the resulting threat to the regime's stability to an outside source, in the hopes that they might persuade the population that there is an existential threat from the United States, in concert with Israel -- to produce cohesion and solidarity against their nation's enemies.  

 

Much too late for that, however; it is the regime itself that Iranians view as their enemy, and it is Israel and the United States toward which they look for assurances and empathetic support, despite this past summer's brief attacks by both against their government's nuclear and rocketry programs that have made Iran an outlier, supported by Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. And now that Venezuela is out of the picture, Cuba's future is in doubt, and Russia's source of drones and China's source of oil for which they are both reliant on Iran, is in jeopardy

 

Israel's 12-day war on Iran to disrupt its nuclear program and the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites saw Iran attack the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar; Laranjani's reference to the event failed to stir a U.S. response, other than Mr. Trump's placing the country on notice, should a massacre of protesters take place. In a desperate move to bring the protests to a halt before complete destabilization rules the day, President Masoud Pezeshkian signalled his willingness to negotiate with protesters, but the protests have no leader, they are massive, spontaneous kinetic reactions to a half-century of repressive, violent governance.

 

And they are the voice of a people who will no longer tolerate conditions under which they have been forced to live. They want their lives returned to what can only be considered normal, and they want their country to shed itself of the forces that have demanded they enslave themselves to an ideological fundamentalist that is alien to their history and heritage. What the government can offer them is nothing at all that would appeal to reason, since it is an unreasonable expectation that they would now withdraw their demands for freedom, liberty from coercive dictatorship.  

 

In videos from Mashhad, protesters can be heard chanting "Long live the shah"  X

"Though the grievances that fuel these and past protests are due to the Iranian government's own policies, they are likely to use President Trump's statement as proof that the unrest is driven by external actors."

"But using that as a justification to crack down more violently risks inviting the very U.S. involvement [that] Trump has hinted at."

Naysan Rafati, analyst, International Crisis Group