The Islamic Republic and the Breaking of Iran
Free Newsletter Day: A Revolution That Turned On Its Own People
A note to my readers: The U.S. is in a new conflict or war with Iran. (President Trump has called it a war, and—to quote Annie Lennox—who am I to disagree?) Though it might blow over in a few days or weeks, it could also last for years, altering not only Iran and the Middle East but our country as well. For this reason, I’ve decided to dedicate this Tuesday newsletter to an overview of how we got here. I think it’s worth it—and hope you do too.
Kareem
The Islamic Republic and How We Got Here
Before I get into this story, I need to say something about where I’m coming from as a Muslim man. My introduction to Islam, the way I learned it and lived it, has nothing to do with the version that dominates today’s headlines. It wasn’t about chanting hatred, smuggling drugs, stripping women of their rights, or promising heaven through destruction.
The Islam I grew up with is about love, peace, and harmony. This is the Islam I connected to, not these fanatics.
The story of The Islamic Republic begins the way many tragedies do: with hope disguised as justice.
On December 31, 1977, at a New Year’s Eve state dinner, President Jimmy Carter praised Iran as “an island of stability.” One year later, Iranians poured into the streets against a monarchy that had grown distant, corrupt and violent. The Shah’s police force, SAVAK, had broad powers to suppress opposition, using its vast surveillance network to control universities, unions and even Iranian communities abroad, and the Iranian people had had enough. They wanted a voice that felt like it belonged to them.
Into that moment stepped Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a cleric who played the Islam card with the poor and the pious, who promised freedom from tyranny and independence from foreign powers. This was strange, in that Iran had a very fine working relationship with both the U.S. and Russia. Still, many believed they were trading one form of oppression for a more righteous order. What they got instead was a new kind of cage.
From the beginning, the Islamic Republic defined itself by measuring itself against the United States. The takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 was not just a stunt; it was a founding ritual. Fifty‑two American diplomats and staff were held hostage for 444 days. The regime used them as props in a morality play about imperialism and resistance, broadcasting the images of blindfolded Americans to cheering crowds. That crisis shattered any remaining trust between Washington and Tehran and set the tone for the next four decades: the Islamic Republic would build its legitimacy by manufacturing enemies and then claiming to stand bravely against them.
As the new regime consolidated power, it created the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an ideological army believing that the U.S. is the great Satan and that our death is their ticket to paradise. The IRGC would become the long arm of the revolution, reaching far beyond Iran’s borders. In Lebanon in the early 1980s, Islamic Republic helped nurture and arm Hezbollah, a militant group that would become its most important proxy. In 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. Another bombing hit the U.S. Embassy that same year, killing dozens, including American personnel. U.S. investigations and court rulings later tied these attacks to Hezbollah, which had been backed, trained, and funded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. For the families of those Marines, the revolution in Tehran was no longer an abstract geopolitical shift: it was a hole in their lives that would never close.
The pattern continued. In 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel and wounding hundreds. Years later, U.S. indictments and intelligence assessments pointed to Saudi Hezbollah, again linked to Iran’s IRGC, as responsible. The Islamic Republic had found a way to hurt Americans without ever firing a shot directly under its own flag. It preferred shadows: proxies, militias, deniable operations. But the funerals in the United States were real.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran saw an opportunity and a threat. American troops were suddenly on both its eastern and western borders. The IRGC’s Quds Force moved quickly to shape the battlefield. They supplied Shi’a militia with money, training, and a particularly deadly weapon: explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs. These were sophisticated roadside bombs designed to punch through armored vehicles. U.S. military reports and later public statements by American officials attributed hundreds of American deaths and thousands of life‑altering injuries in Iraq to Iranian‑supplied EFPs and training. Young Americans who thought they were fighting insurgents in Iraq were, in many cases, facing the long reach of the Islamic Republic.
Even outside active war zones, the regime’s hostility toward the United States has been a constant drumbeat. Plots to assassinate diplomats, cyberattacks, harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf, rocket and drone attacks on bases housing American troops in Iraq and Syria—these are all part of the same strategy: keep pressure on, never fully cross the line into open war, and always maintain plausible deniability. The Islamic Republic has made a habit of treating American lives as expendable pieces on a regional chessboard.
But if the regime has been ruthless toward Americans, it has been even more brutal toward its own people.
In the early years after the revolution, the new rulers moved quickly to eliminate rivals. Former officials of the Shah’s government were executed after show trials. Leftists who had helped topple the monarchy were imprisoned, tortured, or killed once they outlived their usefulness. In 1988, near the end of the Iran‑Iraq War, thousands of political prisoners were executed. Many were young people who had been arrested years earlier for handing out leaflets or attending protests. Human rights organizations estimate that several thousand were killed and thrown into unmarked graves. Families were never told where their children were buried. The message was clear: the revolution belonged to the clerics, and dissent would not be tolerated.
Over the decades, the Islamic Republic built a system of control that reached into every corner of life. Women were forced to wear the hijab by law. Morality police patrolled the streets. Journalists, writers, and artists who stepped out of line were arrested. Ethnic and religious minorities were discriminated against and persecuted. Iran’s prisons became synonymous with torture, rape and forced confessions. Executions, often after unfair trials, became a grim routine. By many measures, Iran has consistently ranked among the world’s top executioners per capita.
And yet, despite the fear, Iranians have never stopped resisting.
In 1999, students took to the streets after a reformist newspaper was shut down. Security forces and plainclothes thugs attacked dormitories, beat students, and arrested hundreds. The protests were crushed, but a new generation was on a mission to face arrest, torture, rape and execution but to continue the fight.
In 2009, millions of Iranians poured into the streets to protest what they believed was a stolen presidential election. The Green Movement, as it came to be known, was one of the largest mass mobilizations since 1979. People marched peacefully, chanting “Where is my vote?” The regime responded with beatings, mass arrests, rape, show trials, and killings. The death of Neda Agha‑Soltan, a young woman shot during a protest, was captured on video and spread around the world. Her face became a symbol of a generation betrayed.
In 2017 and 2019, protests erupted again, this time driven by economic hardship and anger at corruption. In November 2019, demonstrations over a sudden hike in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was ferocious. Security forces opened fire on protesters in multiple cities. Reports from journalists and human rights groups, citing sources inside Iran, suggested that more than a thousand people were killed in a matter of days. The government shut down the internet to hide the scale of the crackdown. Once again, the regime treated its own citizens as enemies to be subdued, not people to be heard.
Then, in 2022, the death of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the custody of the morality police ignited something deeper. She had been arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly.” Her death became the spark for the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. Women burned their headscarves in the streets. Schoolgirls chanted against the Supreme Leader. Men joined them, recognizing that the fight for women’s freedom was a fight for everyone’s dignity. Again, the regime responded with live ammunition, mass arrests, rape and executions. But something fundamental had shifted: the fear barrier, at least for many, had cracked.
The regime’s contempt for human life was also on display in the skies above Tehran in January 2020. In the tense hours after Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, a Ukrainian passenger jet, Flight PS752, took off from Tehran’s airport. Minutes later, it was shot down by two missiles fired by the IRGC, killing all 176 people on board, many of them Iranian citizens or people of Iranian origin. IRGC’s plan was to blame the U.S. for shooting down the plane, but there was no satellite or in-ground evidence to back up their accusations.
When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.
The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.
Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.
A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.
And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?
Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well.
Whether or not we intervene, the fall of a regime is never guaranteed. The Islamic Republic has spent 45‑plus years trying to convince Iranians that they are weak and isolated, and trying to convince the world that it is strong and permanent. The courage of ordinary Iranians, students, workers, women, retirees, ethnic minorities say otherwise. Every protest, every act of civil disobedience, every refusal to bow quietly is a reminder that the regime’s power is not the same as legitimacy.
The rise of The Islamic Republic is a matter of historical record. Its fall, whenever and however it comes, will be a matter of human dignity finally catching up with power. I’m sorry that this administration made the choice it did: I think it’s anti-democratic and therefore anti-American.
But I hope the Iranian people finally have a say in their own destiny.
Jukebox Playlist: Bob Marley, War
When Bob Marley recorded “War” for his 1976 album Rastaman Vibration, he didn’t write a single word of the lyrics. Every line came from a speech Haile Selassie I delivered to the United Nations in October 1963, a direct address to world leaders demanding an end to racism and colonial rule. Selassie laid out conditions: meet them, or there would be war.
What I find remarkable is the structure of the argument. Every time Marley sings “war,” he delivers a ruling, the way a judge reads a verdict aloud. He calls out Angola, Mozambique, South Africa by name. These are real places where real people were living under colonial rule and apartheid in 1976. For Marley, a Rastafari believer who regarded Selassie as a holy figure, singing these words was both a political act and an act of faith. I put it on this playlist because some songs age gracefully. This one ages with urgency.
TO BE GOOD, YOU MUST DO GOOD. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER.
Great Post re Iran Kareem, however I do think it is important to also remind all of the USA/ GB CIA Coup in 1953, overthrowing the democratically elected President of Iran…The US did this as paranoia vs Russia and to get 40% of Iran’s Oil… We installed the Shah in Power and his excesses and cruel “dictatorship” led to Khomeini etc….
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days
What strikes me are the parallels between the Iranian and Trump regimes. Both drew upon religion, perceived and manufactured foreigners threats to gain control, and both employ brutality and repression to maintain it.