Gary Sick. Courtesy Columbia University.

Fariba Amini: How do you see Trump’s internal and foreign policy agenda in the coming year?  

Gary Sick: Compared to chaotic time of Trump’s last administration, he may be better prepared this time. This is a good sign, but history is not linear. It doesn’t go in one direction. In this particular case, I think it was the combination of having gone through the pandemic and the worst inflation that people remember very clearly—showed the government of the United States did not handle the right way. There was a tremendous demand for change, and that was not only true in the United States, but throughout the world. It is a grand movement following the pandemic and economic problems. So, in all of the world, we have seen changes in governments, people coming out of nowhere, and people who previously believed unelectable suddenly finding themselves supported by the populace for somebody different who will shake things up.

Trump, as an agent of change, stands for truly challenging the government, our history and background, and the kind of things we grew up with. He is prepared to challenge all of those. That’s an enormous undertaking and hugely impactful, because he actually changes the way the United States leads many other countries in the world, changes the whole security balance in the world. One can imagine that he got a second chance to decide what he wanted to do in his first administration. I hope he does not, but he may. If he does, it’s going to mean that the United States is heading into a perilous security position.

For many years, NATO has essentially become part of the institution of stability in terms of military security. If he changes that, or if he wants his generals to have personal loyalty to him, that’s not how the US government works, and it’s not how the US Constitution is written. But he seems prepared to try. He is accurately reflecting the views of the people who voted for him. They want to shake things up, challenge the status quo, and change the way things are done because they don’t believe the current system is working. They don’t think about the consequences; they just say let’s shake things up and see what happens. He has these big ideas.

My guess is that he has two years to get all of his big ideas done, and at the end of those two years, we’ll have a new bi-election, with a very real chance that the Democrats could take control of either the House or the Senate, or both, because a lot of people are not going to like him — even the people who supported him. He makes changes in Medicare, for instance, in Social Security. A lot of Americans rely on that, and they are going to take it very seriously. So, he has these two years and will bring people whose sole expertise is their love for Donald Trump and who will do what he wants to do.

The next two years are going to be absolutely chaotic, and really, we are going to see if the people who voted for Trump will be happy with the kind of program he may come up with. So, I expect a lot of crazy ideas, maybe some good ideas. I think at the end of the fourth year, he’s going to say, I need to get all the things done that I should because people want me to do this. He may try to effect a third term. I think that is going to be very much in his mind, if not already, I think that will be the case at the end of the fourth year. He will be convinced that only a part of his program is enacted, and he still has a huge amount to do. We will see.

Fariba Amini: Trump has been boasting that within 24 hours of his presidency he will end the war in Ukraine. Do you think a Trump administration can resolve the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine?

Gary Sick: It’s far from clear what he would come up with. My guess is that he is talking about what he won’t be able to do. Basically, he might agree to something that is substantially suicidal. Trump’s advice is basically to make a deal with the Russians in which Vladimir Zelensky gives up territory. That is not going to go over very well in Ukraine, so Zelensky knows that his life is on the line.

At a certain time, he was a great buddy of Netanyahu, who doesn’t want to see the war end. I don’t think he is going to solve that. It is not clear that there is a solution, because from the Palestinian point of view, there should be at least a minimum recognition of a two-state solution. But the government of Israel is simply not thinking about that. The Israeli people don’t like Netanyahu and his politics and are unhappy with the way the war is going, but there is no opposition, or the opposition is so weak that Netanyahu is able to simply keep on going. Of course, Netanyahu, among other things, tries to stay away from jail, and as long as he is prime minister, he is free from going to jail or facing charges of corruption. So, under such circumstances, it’s difficult to see how this is going to end.

Basically, Israel is still fighting in Gaza, but it really cannot get rid of all the people who are Hamas supporters. Hamas is not very popular in Palestinian circles and in Gaza these days, but basically, people like the idea of challenging the Israelis and showing that they are not invulnerable. That is the question of deterrence. Israel sees this as a case where they have to prove that attacking Israel is very costly, and they thought they had done that. But if they think they’ve solved it this time around, they are wrong. They have probably put themselves in a position where this war in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon is going to be long for some time to come.

Fariba Amini: Since October 7, 2023, more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.  The numbers may be even higher with many lying under the rubble.  Many civilians have also been killed in Lebanon.   How do you see the future for Israel, for Gaza and Lebanon?

Gary Sick: The reality is that Israel thinks that the solution to its problems includes basically wiping out a lot of people. If you look at the Israeli strategy in Gaza is exactly the reverse of what the laws of war would require. The laws of war say that if you locate two Hamas members in an apartment building, you want to get them, but if there are 150 civilians in that building, you have to back off. You can get in on foot and find those two men, but you shouldn’t just bomb the building because there are civilians in the way. The Israeli strategy up to this point has been exactly the reverse.

Where there is suspected Hamas leaders at any point in any situation, their answer to that is a bomb, which is indiscriminate and kills a gathering of civilians in a refugee camp, around hospitals, or schools. If you have a huge group of civilians, that should mean that you don’t bomb, but in Israel’s case, they decided to kill a large group of civilians where there is one or two Hamas people in that group. The answer to that is a bomb and that’s what’s going on. So, the number of civilians, women and children, who have been killed is unbelievable and incredibly high. Whatever you want to call, you can call it, but the reality is that they have reversed the laws of war in conducting the campaign in Gaza. In Beirut, they were bombing apartment buildings where leaders of Hezbollah are located.

Israel is going to have to face the outcome of this war with a real loss of dignity and support from a lot of people. You see that in the American capital. A lot of Americans, including actually a lot of American Jews, are in awe of what Israel has been doing. There are also people who are in favor of how Israel is handling it, but it has changed a lot of people’s attitudes towards Israel in a way that was hard to imagine a year or two ago. We don’t know how he is going to deal with it. As far as I can tell, as long as Netanyahu, who wants to continue the war, is the prime minister, with people around him who want to use means that are extremely deadly for a lot of civilians, this war is just going to go on. I don’t think that until Netanyahu changes his mind, or Israel is led by somebody else, the circumstances will change. I don’t think there is any answer to this situation as long as the people who are involved remain in power.

Fariba Amini: Why does the U.S. administration continue to arm Israel while we know that thousands of civilians have been killed with the weapons we’ve sent them?  

Gary Sick: Israel of course insists that it is taking precautions, but they assert that Hamas officials and fighters are taking refuge behind civilians which means that a lot of civilians are killed. Israel asserts that the number of casualties is far smaller than the Gazan Ministry of Health numbers and that the percentage of “terrorists” killed is much higher, but they offer no details. It is my impression that the USG accepts much of the Israeli rationale, at least for purposes of arms sales. Theoretically US arms provide a bargaining leverage that can be used to pressure Israel for greater attention to civilian casualties, but that lever never seems to be used in practice. The Israeli/US position is not very convincing and is contradicted by virtually every neutral source.

Fariba Amini: Do you think a war on Iran is inevitable?

Gary Sick: Trump is the one who is to blame for this. He is the one who walked away from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal] that was agreed to by the Obama administration. His argument was that it was a bad agreement and that he would now be able to put maximum pressure on Iran to keep them from expanding their nuclear facilities. Of course, exactly the reverse happened. When he walked away from the JCPOA, the Iranians waited for almost a year to see if he would change his mind. He did not.

So, they began responding, and from a situation where it would have taken Iran almost a year to get enough fissile material from enriched uranium to build a bomb, it became a matter of days or weeks. He’s going to put pressure on Iran to stop their nuclear program and reverse it. Whether he comes to admit that his policy is derailed, I don’t think so, and I think his answer is to put pressure back. That’s not going to work, but that’s his approach. It’s hard to see how anything is going to come out of it.

Iran has not made the decision to build the bomb, but it has made the decision to create enough material for a number of bombs in a very short period of time. Israel may want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but the facilities that Iran has built, with all the centrifuges, are deep in the ground. They are very difficult targets, and the Israelis have the capacity to hit them, but they’ve been cautious about going after very ambitious targets. So, when Trump comes in January, we’re going to face a new world.

I don’t know what that is going to look like, but from everything we know from the past, he is not going to do a deal with Iran. He’s going to impose new sanctions on Iran and put more pressure on Iran, and I think we’ve seen enough examples of that from the Bush administration onwards. But putting pressure through sanctions on Iran would not change Iran’s policies or their nuclear capability. Now, for better or worse, Iran has the capacity to decide to build a bomb and do it very quickly. We can’t do much about that. That is very much because of Trump’s policy of walking away from the JCPOA.

Fariba Amini: I always thought the decision to walk away from the nuclear deal was made in Tel Aviv and not Washington. What is your take?  

Gary Sick: Do you mean the decision to walk away from the JCPOA? I think Israel is quite happy with that, but I don’t think they are the ones who made it happen. Netanyahu was pushing Trump to walk away, so indeed they were satisfied with that. But I think he already believed that; he didn’t have to be persuaded. It’s almost as if he wanted Iran to have a bomb. This is not just true of Republican administrations; this was true of Democrat administrations, except for Obama, who worked out the JCPOA.

Fariba Amini: Turning to a different subject, now that you have retired from running Gulf 2000, after thirty years: how did you come up with the idea?  And what is its future?

Gary Sick: Let me give you a very brief description of my experience with Gulf 2000. Basically, I worked for the Ford foundation, then I quit and decided to work for myself. George Perkovich at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, VA, called me in about 1992 and said that he did not believe that the Persian Gulf was getting the scholarly attention it deserved. He asked if I had any suggestions. I asked him for a small grant and spent a few months researching various possibilities.

One of the things I learned was that scholars in various Gulf countries seldom talked to each other. I proposed a series of conferences consisting almost entirely of scholars from each of the Gulf states. He agreed and gave me a grant to cover conference costs.  I called the project Gulf2000 since I thought it would probably end in a few years, and that seemed suitably forward-looking. We did hold a series of conferences, mostly in Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean countries that built a personal relationship among regional scholars and produced a series of scholarly books consisting of the papers written for the meetings.

The internet and email emerged during this same time, and the members of our group began communicating with each other via this new form of communication. I opened up the project to other regional scholars, and within a relatively short time, scholars from all over the world began to use it. At the turn of the millennium, we renamed it G2K, and it became a useful virtual meeting place for Gulf experts, with a membership of about 1,600, which was supported by a series of major foundations via grants to Columbia University, where I taught.

By the time that G2K moved from Columbia to the Sage Institute in Virginia in September of 2024, it had more than tripled my original estimate of its sell-by date and was still going strong.

Later, he taught at Columbia University and for nearly 30 years ran the website Gulf 2000 which has been a thoughtful forum for discussions regarding Middle East politics for its members- analysts and commentators alike.  

He is emeritus member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch and serves as founding chair of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East.

He has authored three books among them, October Surprise:  America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.

He is now retired. 

Gary Sick. Courtesy Columbia University.

Fariba Amini: There are Iranians as well as Americans who believe in conspiracy theories. They are convinced that the Iranian revolution was a byproduct of the meeting in Guadaloupe or that it was Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy that brought about the revolution in Iran.    You said in an interview that while Jimmy Carter was president, the Shah and his aides were not worried about a revolution and that they claimed they had everything under control. You were at the White House while telegrams were coming from Tehran about the deteriorating circumstances. What do you say to these people?

Gary Sick: First of all, the Guadaloupe meeting [4-7 January 1979] was the very end of the revolution, not the beginning. It was after most of the revolution had already taken place, and demonstrations were still going on, Khomeini’s presence in Paris and then in Tehran, etc… The Guadaloupe meeting was an attempt by Western leaders, Carter and a handful of others, to literally decide what happened in the revolution and where it would lead. I’ve never heard that theory that the Guadaloupe meeting was the cause of the revolution, it was the effect of revolution. The quotation you were quoting was not the quotation by me, it was by Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA and then was the ambassador to Tehran. He went to Iran in the middle of 1978 to seek for himself what was happening and what was going on, and because of his background he had access to everybody he wanted to talk to, including the SAVAK, the military and the Shah himself.

I talked to him sometime after he had come back. He said these were not nervous men, they were not thinking about whether they should flee or what would happen with the revolution. This was in the middle of 1978 and the revolution was underway, but the people around the Shah did not really believe that was going to happen. As far as they were concerned, they stayed very much where they worked, this was their view, and it was wrong. But this was the same view that was true in the United States as well, because the CIA had briefings and white papers that were produced in July and August, which said that Iran was not in a revolutionary, or even a pre-revolutionary, agitation. That was wrong too, very wrong.

The people who were closest to the situation starting with the Shah but going down to his lieutenants and the American intelligence service, all believed that the Shah was in control and that the people who were in the streets were in effect going to be defeated. Why were they so wrong? Well, they were wrong because there was an assumption in their view that the Shah oversaw what was going on and in fact would be able to end it, by taking firm action, cracking down on the demonstrators, putting people in jail, all variety of things he could do, including changes in the government itself. What took them by surprise was that the Shah was not prepared to take a firm action, and in fact actions came hesitantly and they were inconsistent. He would be up one day and relaxed the next day. So, people who were watching what was going on expected him to take a very firm action to end the demonstrations and that didn’t happen.

There was a mess probably not because of how the Shah acted but because of how the military acted. They cracked down and shot people, but there was inconsistency, because he pulled back and did not continue with the crackdown. He imposed martial law in November, but it was incomplete, because in fact the martial law that he imposed he put the chief of staff of the arm forces in charge of the military government, and he was a pussycat, he was not a tough guy. The tough guys, the army generals who could crack down in a variety of ways, they were doing any good, because the Shah was not taking their advice. He was not doing what they suggested, and the Shah had this incredible vision of himself as his almost umbilical relationship with the Iranian public. He said on many occasions that a king does not shoot his own people. Well, he was wrong. That’s not true. Kings shoot their own people all the time and in various circumstances, but the Shah was not prepared to crack down and start shooting people all the time. As a result, all those people who, in summer 1978, believed that the Shah had taken total control were wrong. They were wrong, because they were wrong about the Shah, not because they were wrong about what was going on in the streets.

Fariba Amini: Was the Shah’s decision to leave due to his illness?  Or did he not want to leave a legacy of violence vis-à-vis the people?   He wanted to leave, knowing that he would never return, in hopes that his legacy would be that of a benevolent monarch.

Gary Sick: He was ill, and I think he didn’t have any expectations. In fact, if you go back and see the timeline, when he was first diagnosed, his doctors’ assessments, and judging from the past, the survival rate was about five years. If you think about it, it was exactly five years from the time he was diagnosed until he died. I don’t know if he fully understood that, or he believed it but he was fading in a significant way. Maybe he thought he knew all well, but he kept it as one of the great state secrets. Absolutely, no one was supposed to know. He had a potentially fatal disease that affected him in an essential way he couldn’t have expected. Perhaps he realized that he had a very serious disease and that it would be fatal. He was aware of every stage that if this fact became public, it would mean that states all around the world would change their views. They would begin to think about what would happen to their relationship with the Shah and who to deal with when the Shah was gone. He did not want that to happen because it was going to weaken his ability to negotiate. So he kept that as a very tight state secret.

I can tell you that the United States government, with all its different activities, did not know with any certainty what was going on with the Shah, and the first time that it knew for sure was when the Shah was in Cuernavaca, and he looked like he was dying. They brought doctors from New York to look at him. He wouldn’t tell them what his problem was, and they thought it was a tropical disease, like malaria or something of that sort. But he wouldn’t tell them, and it was one of his doctors from France came to see him, then he met with Americans who were taking care of the Shah and told them everything about the fact that he had diagnosed with lymphoma and that he was seriously ill, that he had not wanted them to do any kind of operation on him. Keeping that secret while he was on the throne made sense.

After he left Iran keeping that secret was less and less important or useful or necessary, but he kept that anyway. I think he had just come to believe that it was not something he wanted anybody to know, anywhere in the world. And they did not until his doctors finally said what was going on, and then he needed to go to a hospital for emergency treatment, after which he came to New York and Jimmy Carter made that decision to bring him to New York. He could have gone to several other places. Probably he should have. Carter was very reluctant to do that. He had all his advisors gathered at a meeting in one room in the Whitehouse. He went around the room, and they all said they thought they should bring the Shah to the United States for treatment.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. Public Domain. Via Get Archive.

Fariba Amini: Why was President Carter reluctant? 

Gary Sick: He realized that if the Shah went to the United States the Iranians would react very badly to that. You remember 1953 when the coup took place. The Shah fled to Rome, stayed there for a while and then came back, and reestablish himself on the throne, after the coup taking place. So, Iranians remembered that the Shah had left Iran and used that a basis to come back and reclaim his position on the throne. Carter was absolutely correct. He knew that Iran, both elite and popular, would believe that the Shah going to the United States after a long time in Egypt, Morocco, and the Bahamas, then ending up in Mexico, and that Carter inviting him to the United States, was the first step to regaining the throne. He was right. That was exactly what the students who took the hostages all believed. When Carter was meeting with his advisors, they said, for political reasons, that the Shah was a friend of ours and keeping him out would reject that part of our background. Carter was in the middle of an election campaign and his advisors said from a political point of view let bring the Shah to the United States for treatment and Carter ended up that meeting by saying: “Ok. I hear what you say. Let the Shah come in, but what are you going to tell me when they take our people hostage in Tehran? He predicted that.

Fariba Amini: It seems that Iranians always like to blame “others” when it comes to anything that’s gone wrong in our history.   How do you see this?

Gary Sick: Basically, a lot of people were hurt badly by the Shah’s departure and the revolution. They lost money, property, their lands, their culture and history. You have a lot of very important people living in Los Angeles. Are they going to be happy about this? Of course not. When I speak to some of these groups, I say: “Did you stay there and fight for the Shah?” No. They all ran.

You can blame Jimmy Carter if you like, but the people who are really to blame are the people who were around the Shah. They are looking for an excuse. For somebody who wants to believe that Jimmy Carter invited the Ayatollahs to take over, if they really believe that you’ll never persuade them, because it’s a very convenient argument, which means that they are not to blame, but somebody else is. I don’t blame them necessarily, except to say that it’s not true. There’s nothing else to be said. Jimmy Carter did not spend all his nights and days thinking about how to get rid of the Shah; he had a lot of other things to do at that time.

Fariba Amini: Jimmy Carter was involved in the Camp David accord at that time, and so Iran was not on his priority list, right?  

Gary Sick: Camp David is absolutely an example, but he was also involved in Panama Canal Treaty, negotiations with the soviets, and a whole range of issues that were earth-shaking and very important. He didn’t know what to do. The Shah did not ask for help at all, and did not say, would you come and do this for me? He never said that. He never asked for a solution. He had plenty of solutions, however. The military had been working out every day. In fact, there were several formal presentations made to the Shah to put an end to the revolution and street riots led by revolutionaries, clerics and others. The military said, we know who these people are; let us arrest them and hold them so that they are not able to direct the revolution and get them out of the way, and the remaining people there would break up. We’ll make sure to break up demonstrations so that they never occur, and don’t have to shoot everybody to do that. But you have to be present. You must have military forces. Let us in fact break up demonstrations that are taking place.

The Shah was unwilling to do that and turned them down. SAVAK had an approach quite like this, but he turned that down. He was unwilling to take hard action. He had a very equipped army. He had money and he was well equipped, but he didn’t use them. The one exception was Zhaleh square, where the troops there opened fire. That was not on the Shah’s order, but they took it upon themselves to begin shooting, and it was a horrendous outburst in Iran. Zhaleh square event was one of the turning points in Iranian revolution. So, they did shoot people during this and reaction in Iran and elsewhere was very strong and very negative. For whatever reason, either because of the Shah’s attachment to the idea of kingship or the fact that he thought it was against his principles, he was reluctant to take that kind of action.

Andrew Cooper, in his good book The Fall of Heaven, for the first time got permission from the queen and basically interviewed all the people who were in the court at the time, gathering their views about what the Shah was saying, including people who had dinner with the Shah in the palace and what they were thinking at the time. One that came out of that is that he understood better than the people around him how serious the situation was. He was, in fact, smarter and better informed than most people believed. However, he misunderstood that you don’t need to tell everybody. But people like Rafsanjani and others, who were running the revolution on the ground, if they had been arrested and taken away from the whole thing, could have had things sorted out. He was given the opportunity and the suggestion, but he didn’t do it.

I think there are huge unanswered questions about what was going on, because the Shah had all the instruments of coercion he could have used and didn’t have to tell anybody to do this, but he refused to do it. Basically, he sat back and let the revolution take its course without taking very strong actions to stop it. I don’t have answer for that, but I do think that it is the real unanswered question about the Iranian revolution.

US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Tehran, November 4, 1979. Public Domain. Courtesy Picryl.

Fariba Amini: We are now in the aftermath of an election in this country.  Trump has won and Harris lost but not by a great margin.  What do you think went wrong?   Why did the d democrats lose the elections? 

Gary Sick: I don’t pretend to be an expert on US politics that is not my principal subject, but I follow them just like everybody else. On this subject, the Democrats are in the midst of carrying out a full scale post-mortem of the election, which I think in the end will turn a few key issues. I see two things that I think are important, one is inflation after the COVID pandemic already because of tremendous amount of spending to stop the pandemic. So, prices went up, and people saw that every time they went to the grocery store or whatever they were doing. They were trying to buy a house; they felt that they saw it, although Biden did everything pretty much according to the book. All the councils by his economic advisors and all his actions were very carefully designed to stop the inflation, which they did. The inflation quit going up, but the prices didn’t go back down.

If you want to criticize the Biden administration, you would say, I can’t abide these price increases. There was a tremendous amount of anger and disappointment that Biden should have made prices go back down. Once it goes up, it almost never comes back down. In fact, there won’t necessarily be deflation. So, that was one thing, and I think there are various explanations for how the Federal Reserve and other forces have combined to save the U.S. economy. You can still make these arguments, but people saw prices go up when they went to the grocery store. That was the fact that the Biden people didn’t succeed. Second thing was that people were looking for some kind of inspirational change and inspirational programs. Biden and Kamala Harris had a very difficult time trying to make their points.

The number of votes Trump got in this election were not that different from his performance in 2016. There is a narrow difference between the two, but it led to Trump being re-elected. That has to be seen as a failure as far as Democrats are concerned, because they didn’t really hold on to their base. They still won around 50% of the votes, but it wasn’t enough to win the election. Those two things—first, inflation, which people saw every day and was much on their minds; and second, instead of rejecting the Democrats and voting for Trump, what many of them did was simply not vote at all—really made a huge difference. I am sure there are lots of other explanations, but these are the two things that strike me as the obvious facts, as far as I’m concerned—the two principal things that led to the Democrats losing. We did discover that, essentially, the whole idea of Trump being a threat to democracy turned out to be an argument that fewer people cared about or were worried about, as compared to, for example, prices in the grocery store. One is theoretical, and the other is practical in daily life.

To be continued . . .

I told him, but if Iran is attacked, Iranians will all suffer to no end.  

The lines spoken by that man have always stayed with me.  

For nearly four decades, Iranians have lived under oppression, tormented by corruption, mismanagement, and the burden of sanctions.  

Yet, I believe most Iranians do not want their county to be attacked much less destroyed. Yet, there are those who want regime change at any expense.

Perhaps some “L.A. types” or some monarchists are rooting for it.  In fact, in recent weeks, some in the Iranian diaspora have been calling for direct attack.   

As history shows, foreign intervention does not ensure the well-being of the citizens of those countries involved.

Look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.  Life is not better, nor is democracy in full swing in any of these countries. 

In 2006, the Bush administration allocated some $75 million for regime change in Iran.

Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the US would “actively confront” Iran and called for an extra $75 million to fund anti-Tehran propaganda and to support opposition groups inside and outside the country.

  There were many willing Iranians who accepted funds and worked towards that goal.  NGOs too were involved in this initiative, among them the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Tavana, Freedom House, Iran Wire and various others in and around the Beltway. 

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) received a good chunk, close to a million dollars.   A few Iranian “analysts” were and are working for this entity. 

“Azadi Tower under Attack,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

In 2007, John Mearsheimer, the Chicago professor who co-authored a book on the Israeli lobby, described FDD as part of the Israel lobby in the United States.  

In addition to making money out of the “regime change” gravy train, there are also those who seek money by suing the Islamic Republic.  Many names come to mind, even some progressive Iranians.  

According to Mr. Hooman Fakhimi, a lawyer in California who has tirelessly investigated these lawsuits.  Nearly 200 billion dollars has been filed in judgement against the Islamic Republic in various courts by individuals and organizations from victims of 9/11 (!) to those whose families were directly or indirectly harmed.  Many of these lawsuits are spurious.  Even Ukrainian nationals have entered the fray, presumably because Iran has sold drones to the Russians in its war on Ukraine.   

Mr. Fakhimi acknowledges that if all these lawsuits succeed, “It could bankrupt Iran.” 

The Israeli regime under the war-monger Netanyahu has been itching for a war with Iran for years. Remember him showing maps and graphs at the UN every year?

Additionally, most mainstream U.S. media,  mainly CNN and MSNBC warn us daily of an upcoming surprise attack on Iran.

It is as if we are watching a war game on play station.  But this is no child play.  It is the real thing as we witness the human tragedy unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon.

Is Iran next?

As an IDF spokesman said recently, “Iran is next.”

Israel has destroyed Gaza and is now in the process of destroying Lebanon.  The excuse is Hamas and Hezbollah. Many in the Israeli government are now openly spewing the idea of annexing and appropriating the occupied West Bank, the Gaza strip and parts of Lebanon. 

War is always destructive.   Look at Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon.

Far from bringing about regime change, an attack on Iran will only strengthen the current rulers in power.

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. -Mahmoud Darwish

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A few days before the invasion of Iraq by American forces under G.W.  Bush, on March 16, 2003, a young woman from Seattle, Washington, who had gone to Rafah, in Gaza to help Palestinians halt the demolition of homes died under the bulldozer of the Israeli army.  

Her name was Rachel Corrie. 

She was 23 years old. She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) 

Her parents fought the judiciary system in Israel for two decades to no avail.  The court rejected their appeals, and no one was prosecuted.  It is the usual case in Israel, the only “democracy” in the Middle East.

On May 11, 2022, the renowned Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while reporting at the Jenin refugee camp and having reported from the occupied territories for nearly 25 years, was shot in the neck by IDF while reporting for Al Jazeera.   It took more than a year for the Israeli officials to admit that their army was responsible for her death.   Was anyone put on trial for her murder?  No. 

She was wearing a blue vest with the word Press on it.  An Israeli solider shot her just below her helmet.  While her funeral was being held, all kinds of barriers were set to prolong the procession.  She was finally laid to rest in the Mount Zion cemetery in Jerusalem where she was buried next to her parents.  She was a Roman Catholic.

On September 7, 2024, a young woman also from Seattle, this time a Turkish American aged 26 had gone to the West Bank for the very same reasons.  She was shot in the head by the Israeli Army.

Her name was Ayşenur Eygi.

She was also a volunteer with the ISM and had recently graduated from the University of Washington.  She and others including many Jewish activists had been demonstrating against an illegal outpost called Evyatar, an offshoot of the settlement of Beita. 

She had arrived there only two days before her untimely death by a gunfire of an Israeli soldier. Jonathan Pollack, an Israeli peace activist, participating in Friday’s protest was an eyewitness. He held her bleeding head before the ambulance arrived.  She died at the hospital.

She, like Rachel, had a full life ahead of her. 

Not only did these women want a better world but they also put their aspirations into action. They could have had a career like so many others but instead they took a different route: To be instrumental in making a change in this very unjust world of ours. 

Rachel had been born into a middle class, peace-loving family.

Ayşenur was born into a Turkish American family. She resisted and struggled for the right of a people whose livelihood and land were being stolen by settlers, guarded by the most immoral army in the world.

She was shot to death like countless others since and before October 7. 

The Americans and the Israelis did nothing to secure justice for any of these women. 

 In another part of the Middle East, on 16 September 16, 2022, a young woman named Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish name Jina, went to Tehran with her brother and friends to have a good time.  She was twenty-two.   She was stopped by the morality police and taken to a van by force.  She was interrogated viciously for not having the right hijab and was hit hard on her head.  She was taken to the hospital and a few days later, after going into a coma, she was pronounced dead.  She was not political.  Her only sin was that her attire was not to the liking of the authorities.   What followed later after her shocking death was the largest uprising in Iran called Woman Life Freedom, perhaps the largest feminist movement in our time.  

Photo by Inimafoto A: https://www.pexels.com/photo/plate-with-a-slogan-woman-life-freedom-14413071/

In the Middle East and elsewhere, women have proven that they will take to the streets and encounter the oppressors to fight for freedom whether for others or themselves. 

It will not be the last time nor the only time.

Just like a century ago,  Mary Harris Jones—aka “ Mother Jones ” who was also called “the most dangerous woman in America”,  walked miles to fight for freedom and the rights of workers,  these young women also took their fight to the streets of Jerusalem, Rafah, the West Bank, Tehran and elsewhere to prove that women will not be stopped — not by guns, by bulldozers nor intimidation.

In our household, Mosaddegh stood tall. His photos were everywhere.     I knew how much my father admired him and looked up to him.  Still, until I read more about the man, until I read his works, I didn’t realize how much he had impacted my life and that of others.

Secularism is a casually used term.  But what does it really mean?  Mosaddegh, believing in the separation of state and religion, grasped its essence.  He also believed in the rule of law.  In those times, the rule of law meant nothing in Iran.  He advocated a free press even if that free press criticized him.  He was an educated man who wrote his thesis at the university of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, which in 1914 was published as Sources of the Rights of Muslim.   (Sources du droit Musulman) in 222 pages.

Mosaddegh came from nobility—he was a member of the Qajar dynasty—but he went against that nobility. He not only advocated democracy but went against his own tribe.

He stood up to corruption.  He stood up to power and thus became the target by Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah.

He was imprisoned by Reza Shah and later by Mohammad Reza Shah.  Both men feared him. 

One of the few politicians of Iran who stood up to corruption, he also stood up to the British rule.   He believed that the U.S. would support him in his effort to nationalize the Iranian oil.   Alas, the Americans didn’t.  

A British politician said, “Our policy, was to get rid of Mosaddegh as soon as possible.”

After the Coup, Anthony Eden, the then British foreign minister, on his yacht in the Mediterranean said, tonight I can sleep easily.   

Mossadegh and his lawyer, Nosratollah Amini in Ahmadabad

Mosaddegh believed in his people.   He was tried for treason, spent 3 years in a military prison and then spent the rest of his life exiled in Ahmadabad.   

Seventy-one years ago, on 19  August 1953, a coup was organized against him by MI6 and the CIA and their paid Iranian agents.  After the Coup,  the men and the many unknown women around him who went to prison included my own father. They were all individuals of high integrity.  A rare phenomenon these days. 

May his ideals and ideas become an inspiration for future generations of Iranians who wish to build a nation based upon the rule of law and democracy in their country.  

Before America went to war in Iraq in 2003, the argument was that Saddam had chemical weapons.  The lies were spread by the Neconservatives, including Netanyahu.   At that time, the then secretary of state Colin Powell — who later apologized — went before the UN and showed (non-existent) evidence that the Iraqi government had compiled weapons of mass destruction. It was all a hoax.    After the invasion, the U.S. military found no stockpiles.  

In 2002, Israel also claimed that every suicide bomber was paid $25,000 by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime.  None of it was true.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu has made many false statements throughout the years about Iran. Iran is an obsession for him.   Not that the Islamic Republic is not guilty of many wrong doings however the truth is that more Iranian officials were assassinated by Israel than Iran ever dared to do so vis a vis Israel.    Nuclear data was stolen from Iran.  No doubt it was the work of Mossad. 

On January 3^rd, 2020, General Soleimani was assassinated by the U.S. on Iraqi soil on the orders of Trump.  But Trump didn’t act alone.  The decision was made in Tel Aviv.

All the while, the Trump administration, upon the advice of Netanyahu, got out of the nuclear deal.   It was a setback for peace in the region. 

Now Netanyahu comes before the U.S. congress while thousands protested his presence.  Many hostage families left the chambers in defiance of his lies.  

In the last nine months, forty thousand Gazans have been murdered and the people of the world including many Israelis and many Jewish Americans have demanded a cease fire to no avail.  

The lying PM whose premiership is held by a threat lied again.

He insulted American protestors as “useful idiots” paid by Iran.  The absurdity of this claim is so far-fetched that even a few American media outlets mocked him. 

He has zero credibility.  

The Islamic Republic may have engaged in many dubious acts against its own citizens, but who is Netanyahu to cry wolf when he and his “humanitarian” IDF has been engaged in a genocide against unarmed civilians, killing babies and children, women, and innocents. 

The Palestinians of Gaza are left with nothing.  Nowhere to go, no home, no schools, no hospitals, no universities, no mosques, no churches. Only rubble after rubble which according to various estimates, it will take a decade to remove the rubble.  

All the while, his right-wing fascist government glorifies this attack and shows no willingness to make a deal for the release of their hostages.  

The world is outraged while this clown shows his face in U.S. soil and spews lies about an Iranian hand in the recent protests just like when he did about the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons or when he claimed that in Iran nobody wears jeans!   Thousands in Iran posted their photos with their jeans.

This last performance by Netanyahu is most probably the very last even if many in the U.S. congress who are paid by AIPAC loudly clapped and gave him standing ovation. 

A shift in the U.S. policy towards Israel is necessary as we see it happening before our eyes.  The farcical notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East has crumpled with this assault on Gaza.

 Maoz Inon, an Israeli who lost his parents in the kibbutzim on October 7 was involved in the DC protests alongside his Palestinian friend who had also lost his brother at the hands of Israeli interrogators ( Inon’s family did not seek revenge).   He said Bibi’s brother died in courage, but Bibi will go down in history as the one who could not even defend his own people on October 7.   They were busy grabbing land for the settlers.   

It is time for him to go away and for the American lawmakers to show real spine and not invite war criminals to address them.

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Eye Video: “Unpacking Netanyahu’s Lies Before Congress”

The 2024 presidential election took place after the former President and warden of Evin prison, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter accident. In Iran, nobody believes things happen as “accidents.” But nothing points to foul play in this case.

Out of the original six candidates, two became the final contenders: Said Jalili, a hardliner who had been involved in the nuclear negotiations, and a new guy, Masoud Pezeshkian. The latter’s name means doctor, and indeed, he is a heart surgeon. Unlike Raisi, who had a 6th-grade education, Pezeshkian is a heart surgeon and also speaks several languages, including Kurdish, Azeri, and English. The turnout was very low this year. As people have been losing faith in the outcomes of elections, fewer and fewer go to the polls.

Born in Mahabad, in the eastern Azerbaijan province in 1954, Pezeshkian received his doctorate degree in medicine at the University of Tabriz and later specialized in heart surgery at the University of Tehran’s medical school. At the onset of the Revolution, Pezeshkian was a member of the Council of the Cultural Revolution, which purged many secular individuals from universities. He served as Minister of Health during the second term of President Khatami and had a noncombatant function in the Iran-Iraq war. After his military service, he returned to Tabriz and continued to practice surgery, eventually becoming chancellor of the city’s medical school. He was a candidate in the 2021 presidential elections but was disqualified by the Expediency Council.

In 2024, he finally succeeded, being elected as Iran’s ninth President with 53 percent of the vote in the run-off election. While even some reformists did not go to the polls, ex-President Khatami was among those who voted for Pezeshkian. The Islamic Republic finds new players and new “moderates” to lead the country, but the president has limited power and acts only in accordance with the Supreme Leader’s wishes.

CTV News Video added by Informed Comment: “Nader Hashimi: Why Pezeshkian’s win may not bring ‘dramatic change’ to Iran”

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a political scientist who follows the presidential elections in Iran closely, wrote,

“This election was different because the first-round results marked the lowest voter turnout rate in any presidential election since the revolution, signifying serious discontent. The only other time when presidential elections went to a second round was in 2005, where fewer people took part in the second round. This time, however, some 6 million more people (10% of eligible voters) came out to vote in the second round, and they overwhelmingly voted for Pezeshkian.

“This indicates that despite their overall dissatisfaction, a segment of the public can be persuaded to change its mind when the stakes are too high. This election marked the narrowest margin of victory for the eventual winner over the runner-up (9.3%). This signifies the fact that we have a polarized public in Iran. After all, Jalili won at least 13 provinces (out of 31) in both rounds of the election.”

Whether Pezeshkian, with his narrow powers, can deliver anything remains to be seen.

In 2009, Iranians lost their faith in presidential elections when their votes were stolen. And since then, hopes for change have faded. Two years ago, the Women, Life, Freedom movement was violently crushed. Sanctions, mismanagement, wars in the periphery, and corruption have paralyzed the very system that promised the world but delivered economic malaise and the political isolation of the country. Pezeshkian has promised reform and reform of the system. In a televised speech to the nation, he shared the problems Iranians experience in their daily life.

Can Pezeshkian save the Islamic Republic? Will rapprochement towards the U.S. finally happen? Not as long as Ali Khamenei is alive.

While all eyes were on Gaza and the genocide taking place, an event in the mountains of Iranian Azerbaijan changed the news.

The death of President Ebrahim Raisi and his entourage, including the foreign minister Abdolahian,  after a helicopter crash in the mountainous region of northern Iran will leave no vacuum.  At least that is what most analysts say.   In fact, as long as Khamenei is alive, no real changes will take place.

As all things indicate, there will be some mourning by a segment of the population and then life goes on and business as usual.

Raisi was just a puppet as his deputy who will be an interim president is the man behind the scenes having enormous economic leverage and close to the supreme leader’s confines.

Raisi was 63 when he died.

Raisi was fifteen when the Iranian Revolution happened.  He soon joined the ranks of the Islamic revolutionaries and rose up in status and found an opportunity to become a prosecutor at the age of 20.   He was not alone in this rapid accession to power. 

The infamous Death Commission was comprised of all young men, some clergy and some not.   They oversaw the execution of some 4000 political prisoners, some of whom whose sentences had finished, waiting to be released.  Their families, waiting for their beloved, only got a bag of their belongings instead of welcoming them.

Iraj Mesdaghi, who was one of the former pollical prisoners, released later, has written extensively about those days, the cruelty of the guards and the role of Raisi. He recounts: “There was a young man who was from Karaj, Raisi knew him from his days as the prosecutor in that city; his name was Kaveh Nesari. He had been hit hard on the head and didn’t even know why he had been arrested. As a result, he had epilepsy and could barely walk. He was condemned to death. Another prisoner lifted him up and carried him to the gallows, all under the watchful eyes of Ebrahim Raisi.”

“Thousands mourn at Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s funeral procession” | Al Jazeera Newsfeed Video

Young men became members of the Basij militia and Revolutionary Guards paramilitary at the beginning of the Revolution.   They represented perhaps a segment of society who were uneducated and deeply religious.   What Raisi represented was exactly the ones who were marginalized during the Pahlavi era.   They did not belong to the intellectual elite who had very little connection to the masses of people in the rural areas. 

In many ways, we can compare them to a large portion of Trump supporters.  

Raisi and his ilk came to power when nationalists and leftists and all others were undermined.  The taste of power and greed for money overwhelmed them to the extent that holding on to it meant the oppression of others.   Oppression of women under Raisi became even worse.  The gasht ershad or the morality police,  which had been non-existent during Rouhani came into full force, thus resulting in the incident that took the life of Mahsa.

When Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman was taken, beaten, interrogated harshly, and went into a coma and died a few days later, all Iranians and the world reacted.   She was not the only one.  Dozens of women, young and old were taken into custody, raped and murdered.  The feminist movement, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi came into being.  The world responded.  Eiffel tower was lit with the slogan.   Women, Life, Freedom.

I remember visiting Iran in 2017 and 2019.  I saw many young women with little hejab or not at all.  No one said anything and no one did anything.  Things changed with Raisi’s presidency. 

The men of the Islamic Republic have used every measure to silence women.  Sometimes women of their own league are also involved.   This was the case with Mahsa; her interrogator was a lumpen accompanied by his female interrogators.

The harsh measures taken during Raisi’s term, even with his populist image (going to villages and spreading “good-will”)

Included more suppression, more executions, more torture, and more strangulation of the Iranian society.  

The economy under Raisi sank.  It was not just the sanctions but mismanagement and corruption.  

Whether anything new will happen, it is hard to tell.  Iran is always unpredictable.

On Friday morning, Israel launched missile strikes on military bases near the Iranian city of Isfahan.

A desperate Netanyahu, seeing Western support for his total war on Gaza collapsing, began this tit-for-tat cycle by launching an assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April 1^st 2024.   The Israeli government knew what they were doing.  Netanyahu was baiting Tehran into a reaction, which he got.

Iran responded with a missile and drone barrage on April 13. Almost all these projectiles, however, were shot down by the United States, since Iran had openly telegraphed its intentions.

The context for this exchange of strikes is the Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu’s government has killed more than 34,000 people.  The numbers are not clear, since the ones under the rubbles of Gaza cannot even be calculated.

14,000 children.

Today, Gaza is worse than Dresden after the war.  

Hamas, of course also committed atrocities against the Israeli population on October 7. Over 600 innocent, noncombatant Israelis were killed, alongside more than 400 Israeli military personnel.  Many of the civilians were peace-loving people, who disagreed with their own government’s punitive policies toward the Palestinians. The response of the far-right wing Netanyahu government, however, has been vastly disproportionate.

Another issue between the two countries has been Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program to create fuel for its reactor. Netanyahu fears that it can easily be militarized, and had created a spectacle at the UN showing off Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities.   

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuted him, insisting that Iran has no military nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s charges obscured the imbalance of power between the two countries. Considering that Israel has 300 nukes, Iran, which has none, can be wiped off the map in a matter of minutes.

The IAEA’s assurances notwithstanding, the Israeli government under various Israeli administrations has assassinated nuclear scientists inside Iran. 

Israel, with the help of the expatriate Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization, which was until recently on the US State Department terrorism list, also stole nuclear data from Iran.

Then, Trump came along, and he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, to which Iran had scrupulously adhered, mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program for promised sanctions relief that was never granted.

The decision to rip up the deal was made in Tel Aviv, not in Washington. 

Now, Mr. Netanyahu  has a last chance to get his allies to rally behind him when both his support at home and internationally has dissipated. Since the war in Gaza has not gone well and has isolated his regime, his government, a very right-wing government, is looking for alternatives.

CNN Video: “Israel has attacked Iran, US official tells CNN”

The Islamic Republic has been been building deterrence by supporting the various groups in the Middle East, whether Houthis, Hezbollah or Hamas.

Several IRGC commanders were assassinated, including Ghassem Soleimani. 

The shadow war has continued.  Hezbollah launched missiles at the territory of Israel.   Houthis fired on cargo ships in support of Gaza. 

In his most recent speech at the UN, the Israeli ambassador compared the regime in Tehran to the Nazi regime.   How can an educated person even compare the two?  The Nazi regime eliminated millions of Jews and others. 

Iran has the largest Jewish community after Israel.  Khamenei is no Eichmann, despite what Netanyahu keeps alleging.

We, as Iranians and Iranian Americans wish for a better Iran without the rule of the clerics.   But not at the expense of the disintegration of Iran.  There is no question that has been Netanyahu’s wish. 

Many years ago, at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I remember the notorious Michael Ledeen had invited non-various actors from different ethnic minorities of Iran. Those speaking on their behalf did not even represent the Iranian minorities.  At the end of the conference, where Paul Wolfowitz was also there, (the one who advised Bush to go to Iraq) all the speakers said we want a united Iran.

It was a total failure. 

To this day, Iran has been a united nation and Iran is a nation state. 

Iranians want a regime change but not by the help of any foreign entities, but rather with their own volition.

No war is going to solve anything.   We are all united against a war on Israel or the Israeli nation and on Iran and the Iranian nation.

We need clearer, sounder voices to come to the fore.

 In the words of the great Sufi poet of Iran, Rumi,

“Out beyond the idea
of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”

We are for peace.   But those in power in Israel and in Iran do not want peace. 

They are itching for war.