Babak Payami
Last week, the Islamic Regime in Iran staged its 47th anniversary spectacle while tens of thousands were systematically killed in a nationwide crackdown, and the internet blackout smothered evidence. This latest link in a long chain of crimes against humanity finally compelled Europe to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, but a label without enforcement is a museum plaque. Some might even read it as forced submission to the outcry of nearly half a million diaspora protesters who filled the streets around the world.
Meanwhile, Geneva becomes the world’s favorite theater, “nuclear restraint” offered as a substitute for moral restraint. A deal that cages uranium while freeing the killers is not diplomacy. It is complacency in the face of crimes against humanity.
The fireworks over the morgue
The Islamic Republic celebrated its 47th year in power last week in a grotesque theater of the absurd. It did so in the wake of mass unlawful killings on a scale that even seasoned observers have struggled to describe, followed by a coordinated militarized clampdown and an ongoing internet shutdown designed to conceal crimes.
Let’s translate the euphemisms.
When a regime turns off the internet, it removes witnesses. When it floods cities with armed patrols after a massacre, it is declaring that the killing was policy, not accident. When families are harassed and bodies are withheld unless relatives sign forced narratives, that is organized coercion with the state seal on the envelope.
All evidence points to a well-rehearsed plan, unleashed simultaneously, in a coordinated fashion, across dozens of cities. Premeditated crimes against humanity.
The reported casualty range itself is a grotesque artifact of the crime. The regime’s propaganda apparatus speaks in “official” numbers. Others, relying on documentation and ground reporting, speak in far higher figures, including numbers that climb into the tens of thousands. The true number may be higher still, because siege conditions and blackout politics are engineered to make counting impossible and grieving punishable.
That is the first obscenity. The second is how quickly the world adapts. It learns to speak about slaughter in the mild language of “tensions.” It learns to call mass killing a “crackdown,” then moves on to shipping lanes and enrichment levels like grown-ups discussing grown-up matters.
Iranian lives become background noise. The oil price becomes the headline. Justice becomes a ceremonial handful of soil scattered over bodies, and then forgotten.
This is not a failure of information. It is a failure of nerve. That potent potion of misinformation, oppression, and blackout turns murder into plausible deniability.
Geneva, or the art of negotiating with blood on the carpet
While Iran’s streets were being turned into killing zones, the world’s diplomatic machinery prepared for another round of US-Iran talks in Geneva. Nuclear limits, carrier deployments, deterrence, and the promise of a “better deal.” The regime’s frame is equally familiar: “zero enrichment” is unacceptable, other files are off-limits, sanctions relief is the prize. Variations on the same theme in the same theater of the absurd.
The Islamic regime’s temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz during live-fire drills as talks began is no side detail. It is the negotiation style in miniature: keep one hand on the choke point while the other hand asks for concessions.
Here is what the public hears, endlessly, like a bedtime story for anxious policymakers:
No nuclear weapon. No missiles. No regional proxies. Only half of the story.
Notice what disappears from the moral ledger: mass murder, executions, hospitals turned into hunting grounds, torture, enforced disappearances, gender apartheid. Those vanish because they complicate the deal. They are treated as externalities.
This is the part where the serious people say, “We cannot mix files.” Nuclear is nuclear. Human rights is human rights. Keep the tracks separate. The same doctrine of decoupling and compartmentalization that has delivered so many corpses over the past six decades all over the world.
Fine. Keep the tracks separate. Then admit what is happening;
There are crimes that disqualify a state from normal relations, and there are crimes that do not. Mass murder via organized death squads can be waved away with the excuse of “foreign influence” without a shred of evidence, while the world obsesses over the precise limits on uranium enrichment.
The regime takes the world for fools, selling the lie that the same Israel capable of operational precision, pager and walkie-talkie sabotage, decapitation strikes against command structures, pinpoint assassinations in the heart of regime’s security apparatus could somehow have unleashed “foreign agents” among millions of Iranian protesters so sloppily that tens of thousands of civilians ended up dead. The story is insulting on its face, yet it is treated as a talking point. Meanwhile, the security state that sends warning text messages to a woman caught on traffic cameras driving without her hijab has produced not a shred of evidence for any of its claims during the massive protests by the Iranian people.
Centrifuges matter more than corpses. Technical parameters are traded for legitimacy, while the boot stays on the throat. That is the bargain. Everything else is marketing.
Europe’s IRGC problem is not solved. It has finally been acknowledged.
On January 29, EU foreign ministers agreed to include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the bloc’s list of terrorist organizations. The European Parliament had been pushing hard for this, demanding the full designation of the IRGC, including the Basij and Quds Force, and urging strict enforcement of restrictive measures.
Good. Necessary. Late.
Europe should have done this years ago, because the IRGC is not a normal institution. It is a parallel state operating in the shadows. It is a security empire with a business portfolio. It is domestic repression and external coercion fused into a single machine, with tentacles in every crevice of Iran’s resources and infrastructure. While the “nepo-oligarchs” roam Qatar, Shanghai, Moscow, and Rotterdam striking deals over cheap oil for luxury imports, their brethren lurk in Central Asia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere, funding, arming, and training proxy militias for the next wave of attacks in an asymmetric war against the “Great Satan.”
But here is the point Europe likes to avoid because it requires effort: designation is not victory. It is the beginning of work.
A label without enforcement is a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a crime scene.
Europe’s IRGC problem has always been two problems:
- The IRGC’s operational footprint.
- Europe’s timid reaction to foreign interference.
Europe’s favorite excuse has been legal complexity, as if the obstacle were metaphysics. The framework exists. The tools exist. The only missing ingredient has been the political resolve.
If the designation is not followed by prosecutions, asset tracing, and the systematic dismantling of IRGC-linked networks across Europe, it will become another European habit: the comforting substitute for action.
Europe has agreed on a word. Now it has to pay the price of acting like it means it.
The 1990s were the audition. Europe failed it.
This is not Europe’s first encounter with the Islamic regime’s state violence. The regime’s transnational assassination record and interference is not an allegation. It is history.
The Mykonos case should have ended the era of illusions. A German court concluded that murders on European soil were ordered through the chain of Iran’s political leadership, via a “Committee for Special Operations.” Shapour Bakhtiar’s brutal assassination pointed to the heart of the Islamic Regime by the time its trial concluded.
Read that again. Ordered. By political leadership. This was not rogue zeal. This was state policy. The domestic situation was not much different. The infamous state sanctioned chain murders of artists and dissidents and the disappearance of many others. Of course the ever more persistent “hostage diplomacy” at every corner when the regime was implicated somewhere in the world.
Europe responded then with diplomatic shock. Then, over time, it returned to business, because business is what Europe does when it wants to call itself “pragmatic.” The bodies became archival material. Tragically, many European leaders took pride in the outcome of said hostage diplomacy without acknowledging how this ill informed strategy only emboldens the terrorist state.
Now, in 2026, Europe has been dragged back to reality by the regime’s mass violence at home and its coercive posture abroad. The question is whether Europe relapses into its old pattern: condemn, designate, then quietly resume trade fantasies. Rinse and repeat.
If it does, the designation will mean nothing. The IRGC will adjust. It will change corporate wrappers, use intermediaries, and keep moving. That is what adaptive coercive systems do. They learn. Bureaucracies learn. Terror states learn. The free world, too, has learned this lesson, at enormous cost, to itself and to the societies it abandoned.
The regime you negotiate with is the regime you normalize
The regime wants two things at once.
It wants sanctions relief and military de-escalation abroad. It wants terror with impunity as governance at home. When timid, guilt-ridden Europeans try to address the terror state, Tehran spits out the usual phrase: “interference in domestic affairs.”
It wants to be treated like a state when it sits in Geneva, and like a divinity when it polices Tehran.
The absurdity deepens when the assembly of nations rewards this overtly murderous entity chairmanships and seats on human-rights bodies, pretending that patronage will make the fangs retract. At every absurd turn, those fangs are only sunk deeper into the veins of its own people.
Commerce as absolution is the regime’s dream. It celebrates to send a message to Iranians: we can kill you and still be courted. It sends a second message to the West: you will eventually return, because you always do.
The more brutal truth is that the West helps write that message. Not intentionally, perhaps. Functionally, yes.
Every time a diplomat says “we must focus on the nuclear file,” Tehran hears: your domestic crimes are manageable. Commit them with impunity while we stare blankly at the shiny nuclear object you dangle in front of us.
Every time a broadcaster frames the story as “both sides escalating,” Tehran hears: we will launder your violence through a pretense of balance.
Every time a European capital whispers “legal obstacles,” Tehran hears: delay is policy.
What do Iranians hear? Bullets. Chains. Torture. Prison. Mourning and loss.
The US-Iran negotiation trap: a deal that preserves the machinery of Islamo-fascism
Assume Tehran gives Trump everything he demands on the security file. No nuclear weapon. Fewer missiles. Less proxy activity.
Even if that miracle occurred, what remains is the regime, with its fangs in the neck of millions of Iranians, not to mention the region. The constitution remains. Clerical supremacy remains. The morality-police logic remains, even if uniforms change and patrol names are rebranded. The prison system remains. The IRGC economic empire remains. Hostage diplomacy remains.
Nothing has changed over 47 years. The only result of Western appeasement dressed up as diplomacy has been an exponential increase in violence and brutality. Before, they denied and obscured it. Now they taunt the world with it, stacking bodies, forcing grieving mothers to identify their children among them, then carrying on as if the world’s horror is just another weather pattern.
In other words, the machine remains.
That is the sentence no one wants to say out loud because it punctures the fantasy of “solving Iran” through technical constraints.
A nuclear deal does not dissolve a theocracy. It buys time. For whom, and for what, is the question.
A deal that stabilizes the regime while Iranians are being buried is not peace. It is the international management of suffering.
It also will not work strategically. A regime that rules by fear exports fear. If it cannot bargain with prosperity, it bargains with disruption: Hormuz, proxies, hostages, assassinations, threats, blackmail. Create risk, then sell the reduction of that risk as “progress.” That is is extortion disguised as diplomacy.
What “results” look like, when you stop pretending
Europe’s decision to label the IRGC matters. The question is whether Europe turns the label into consequences.
Here is what “results” means in practice.
- Enforcement that hurts. Asset tracing and seizures targeting IRGC-linked entities, front companies, facilitators, and financial conduits. Choke the money. Starve the machine. Remove the gears from the machine.
- Prosecutions that embarrass and deliver true justice. Independent investigations and criminal cases where European law allows it, including terror financing, sanctions evasion, and participation in transnational repression. The IRGC thrives on the assumption that Europe will not do hard work.
- An intelligence posture that treats foreign interference as a security issue. Not a community-relations problem. Not an asylum footnote. A security priority. The regime’s reach extends beyond borders, and it uses intimidation and covert networks to silence opponents. Over decades, the network has become more sophisticated, embedded deeper in the democratic system. Call it what it is and deal with it as a security threat.
- No more laundering through culture and commerce. The IRGC’s ecosystem uses conferences, “dialogue” panels, delegations, journalists and embedded apologists in institutions as legitimacy machines. Stop providing the stage. There are not “two sides” between justice and injustice, tyranny and the oppressed.
- The end of the useful idiot economy. There are always Western voices eager to explain away Iranian state violence as “understandable.” It is never understandable. It is deliberate. The only question is whether the West keeps paying the fee for pretending it is complicated.
Now, the US side.
If Washington wants a deal that is not morally grotesque, it has to stop treating mass killing as background inconvenience. When you say help is on the way, mean it like you learned something from history. Not meddling, not boots on the ground, not “Chalabization.” Learn the lessons properly, then stand with the people who have carried the front line of justice and freedom.
A minimal standard would be to tie meaningful sanctions relief to measurable, verifiable changes that matter to human beings, not just inspectors:
Restore internet access. Not eventually. Not partially. Now. Permanently.
End the execution binge and mass arbitrary detentions. Shut down Islamic Republic embassies until independent international monitors can verify an end to executions and the release of political prisoners.
Allow credible international accountability mechanisms and evidence preservation. If scrutiny is blocked, you are not negotiating, you are aiding and abetting concealment.
If the reply is “Iran will never accept that,” then admit the consequence: the deal you are pursuing accepts domestic repression and regional terror as the price of nuclear constraints.
Fine. Make that argument. Say it out loud. Stop hiding it behind fuzzy language.
The democratic world’s favorite lie: stability
The democratic world keeps choosing “stability” as the highest good, like a religion. But stability purchased by feeding a murder state is delayed chaos.
It is also a betrayal of the word “democracy.” Democracy is not just elections and institutions. It is the idea that citizens have standing. That their lives count. That there are checks and balances. That difference and opposition are assumed. That diversity is a feature, not a bug.
When Iranian protesters are killed in the thousands, when victims’ families are extorted into false narratives, when the internet is turned off to conceal a massacre, and the world responds by obsessing over negotiation choreography, the message is clear: people’s lives are negotiable.
That is why the title is literal, not some catch phrase.
The Islamic Republic is celebrating on the corpse of freedom, and the free world is attending the party as a nervous guest, pretending not to smell anything.
Let’s face the reality
Stop pretending this is complicated.
A regime that massacres its own people en masse, shuts down the internet to hide it, hunts the wounded, and escalates executions is not a “partner.” It is a criminal state sponsor of terrorism. Negotiating with it as if it were merely a difficult counterpart, “tough negotiators” is not sophistication. It is surrender with a press briefing.
The world has built a shameful little system: Iranians bleed, and diplomats negotiate. Iranians disappear, and markets adjust. Iranians bury their children, and experts debate “de-escalation.” The Islamic Republic has learned the lesson perfectly. It can kill at home, posture abroad, and still be invited into Geneva as long as it speaks in the language of centrifuges.
That is the moral rot at the center of this moment. That is why Iranians around the world rise in anger.
If you want a deal, then pay for it with something real, not Iranian lives. No sanctions relief while executions continue. No normalization while political prisoners rot. No trade while evidence is being erased. No smiling photo-ops while families are forced to sign lies to retrieve bodies. Make Tehran choose: stop the murder machinery and persecution, or lose the benefits of being treated like a state.
Europe’s IRGC designation is the same test. A label without enforcement is a prop. A symbol without seizures, prosecutions, and dismantling networks is a confession that Europe still wants the comfort of condemnation without the inconvenience of consequences.
Enough. The free world does not get to praise itself for “values” while it treats Iranian freedom as a negotiable item in a security bargain. If you want to call yourself democratic, act like it. If you want to call yourself civilized, stop funding, legitimizing, and stabilizing a regime that survives by making corpses.
There is no stability here. There is only postponed reckoning. The longer you postpone it, the more expensive it becomes, as it has already. And the more innocent people pay the price.
What could change next
Negotiations could produce a narrow nuclear framework that reduces regional temperature while the killing machine continues, rebranded as “internal affairs.” Here, misinformation and posturing costs lives. 800 executions were not stopped, at least close to 400 have happened over the past four weeks alone.
EU designation could become real if it triggers enforcement and prosecutions, or it could dissolve into performative symbolism that Tehran will outlast.
Tehran could escalate coercion if it reads negotiation as weakness, because blackmail has always been its most reliable diplomacy.
Iranians are the true stakeholders in this predicament, but the outcome of their ordeal will benefit the world. After World War II, the free world repeatedly chose covert convenience over democratic principle: Vietnam, coups across South America, the 1953 coup in Iran, and decades of blowback sold as realism. Even the post-Cold War era offered missed opportunities. Let those hard-earned lessons finally bear fruit, as Iran closes the book on the Islamic regime.