Babak Payami –
I should begin by putting a simple fact on the record: I am not a violent person. I do not romanticize war. In my world, militaries would be museum exhibits, like shackles and guillotines, reminders of a barbarism we outgrew.
Yet sanity is not the world we live in. Violence remains a fact, and refusing to understand a fact does not make you ethical. It makes you unprepared.
Democratic societies are built around the wager that power can be bent without blood: a free press, freedom of expression, an official opposition, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, and governments that come and go without the country collapsing with them. It is a beautiful wager. It is also the one the Islamic Republic has spent nearly half a century trying to disprove.
Iran forces a harder question. What do you do when the state you are confronting does not recognize persuasion, compromise, or shame? What do you do when human life is expendable material and truth is an enemy to be hunted? What do you do when a ruling apparatus is a death cult, armed with a divine mission and a police state?
Even the 1979 revolution, despite whatever one thinks of its outcome, was largely a civic uprising, not an armed conquest. In its mass character, it was labor strikes and street demonstrations, not a military campaign. Millions moved. The old order weakened. The structure collapsed. But a minority inside the coalition arrived with a different doctrine. Its logic was not “win the argument.” Its logic was “control the street.” It treated violence as politics, early and without hesitation. The government at the time was caught off guard; despite perceptions, it lacked the mechanisms, and the culture, to play the game being set up in militant networks across the region.
A concrete marker of that doctrine sits in the historical record like a scorch mark. In August 1978, the Cinema Rex fire in Abadan killed hundreds behind locked exits. Its authorship has been contested for decades. That, in itself, is instructive: when truth becomes disputed terrain, murder gains leverage. What matters here is the method, not the argument. Terror was deployed as politics, and the public was manipulated through blood.
The Islamic Republic was forced on an unsuspecting public. From that point onward, the pattern hardened. Each turning point was met by force. Every retreat was tactical. Every concession was a trap. The regime learned that violence works, and applied the lesson with increasing ferocity, year after year, decade after decade, domestically and regionally. It exploited liberal appeasement. It exploited the West’s reflexive discomfort with moral clarity in the name of “context.”
The side effect was not accidental. Civil society was dismantled by infiltration and capture, by pseudo-NGOs fed by state privilege, and by persecution and assassination. What could not be controlled was destroyed. What could not be destroyed was replaced with an imitation designed for misdirection. By the 1990s, the doctrine had evolved from defense to projection. Vast resources were dedicated to exporting loyalists, recruiting sympathizers, building alliances under convenient banners, and cultivating credulity in universities, media organizations, and even government agencies in the West.
With that doctrine came the rotating theater of “reformism,” the regime’s most successful export product. It failed because it was designed to fail: conditional, reversible, tolerated only so long as it never touched the core of power. Cosmetic change applied to a system whose purpose was unchanged. Two factions in rotation, one function in common: preserve the Islamist stranglehold.
International engagement failed for a simpler reason. It treated a theocratic security state as yet another Third World government. It assumed brutality was excess, not design. It assumed diplomacy could be compartmentalized from ideology, as if the ideology were wallpaper rather than architecture. Over nearly forty years, the West was outwitted not only by the regime, but by its own habits: fear of “taking sides,” addiction to process, and a preference for managed ambiguity over moral consequence. All that further exacerbated by jingo-liberal self-flagellation of misplaced guilt.
Meanwhile, Iranians tried. They organized when they could. They voted when it mattered. They protested when it became unbearable. They paid for each attempt in arrests, torture, exile, and death. With every attempt, the language sharpened. With every turn, the regime escalated, never yielding to a changing generation, never accepting its failure to govern.
And still, a striking fact persists. After 47 years of an Islamist project leeching the country’s resources, something in Iran did not die. The young generation overwhelmingly rejects the state narrative. Religion has lost its spell as a social authority. The regime survives by raw coercion, and by spending Iranian wealth on regional proxies while the country itself decays. We are now looking at a failing state that remains upright for one tragic reason: it has no shame in spilling blood.
So why is Iran still trapped when other peoples eventually broke their rulers? Because there is an elephant in the room, and it has been ignored long enough to rot the floorboards.
The Islamic Republic is not merely authoritarian. It is what I call an apartheid Islamo-Fascist state: a theocratic fascism with a constitutional skeleton built to defeat popular sovereignty. It coerces consent domestically when it can, and imposes Sharia by force when the mask slips. Internationally, it flatters Western vanity with fashionable postures while it pursues power with prisons, guns, and telecom switches against its own people, and with insurgency, terrorism, and interference against its neighbors.
The modern world has grown rusty on dealing with fascism as a governing system. It prefers to treat fascism as a European pathology that ended in 1945, apartheid as an anomaly forgiven with a handshake, and theology as a private matter. All three assumptions collapse in Tehran.
Iran’s system is not a deviation from its constitution, or an abomination of its theology. It is the constitution in motion, fused with the machinery of Twelver Shiism. When supreme authority sits above elections, above law, above oversight, and claims divine legitimacy, the state has no rational incentive to yield. Power is not a contract with the people. It is a mission. That is why violence is not merely a tool. It is the grammar behind the language of a death cult.
Now comes the part Iranians must own, not because the regime is their fault, but because the future is their responsibility alone.
Iran has not only been crushed by the regime. It has also been weakened by the chronic failure of its political class, inside and outside the country, to build a living democratic culture and fill the void with unity in diversity. Elites, parties, factions, and self-appointed leaders have too often been behind the times, trapped in old feuds, nostalgia, and narcissisms. The price of that failure is not theoretical.
It produces two lethal problems.
First, a mature political culture that could hold differences without collapsing into tribal war might have prevented Islamo-Fascism from seizing power in the first place. Democratic discourse requires investment in ideas, institutions, and the discipline of pluralism. A grassroots infrastructure diverse not only in ideas, but also in function. In Iran’s case, that infrastructure must acknowledge an age-old national identity defined by diversity. This inherent diversity is a feature, not a bug to be cured. When the infrastructure is weak, the most ruthless faction wins, even if it is a fringe minority.
Second, the same void will haunt the day after the regime falls. If a democratic opposition is not credible, organized, and rooted in society, collapse will not automatically produce national interest, let alone democracy. It will produce a vacuum. Vacuums attract opportunists, foreign patrons, armed factions, nostalgic restorations, and professional revolutionaries who love the word “people” but despise actual people. And if the past is prologue, Islamism, when defeated, morphs into insurgencies determined to sabotage change.
You can defeat a regime and still lose the country. You can remove a tyrant and inherit the machinery of tyranny. If Iranian agency is not built before the fall, the ruins will become a marketplace for malicious actors after it. The shattered splinters of a defeated Islamo-fascism are no less dangerous than the regime itself. We learned that lesson in Iran’s neighborhood, which was far less malignant.
One thing is clear, and it has become clear at a very high price, not only for Iranians but for the world, especially the Middle East: this strain of theocratic rule that I call Islamo-Fascism will not cede power without violence, no matter the pressure, no matter how bold the writing on the wall.
So the difficult question, in its clean form, is this: must Iranians bear the blood price alone, or does the international community have an obligation to act in ways that reduce the cost without hijacking Iran’s independence?
This is where Western trauma about intervention enters, and it should. From Far East Asia and Latin America to Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya, the record is full of cynicism, incompetence, sabotage, and wreckage. But scars are not an argument for paralysis. They are an argument for sophistication.
The objective is clear: the Iranian people have the right to end a regime that rules by terror. The question is method: how to weaken a violent state while strengthening the society it has tried to dissolve.
Between the two stupid lies, “non-violence is always sufficient” and “the only alternative is invasion,” lies a spectrum of legal, economic, and informational measures that can break the regime’s coercive advantage while reinforcing Iranian agency: isolating the security apparatus, targeting assets and networks, prosecuting perpetrators, cutting off surveillance and repression technology, supporting secure communications, documenting crimes for future trials, and refusing to normalize regime officials, or their apologists, as legitimate participants in civilized discourse. None of it works without a dogged focus on the agency of the real stakeholders: the Iranian people.
And yes, a brutal truth hangs over all of this. Fascistic systems with total control do not negotiate themselves out of power. They exit by collapse, fracture, or defeat. In Iran’s case, after nearly half a century of escalation, the logic points in one direction. If the regime is forced to yield, it will not be through persuasion, and it most likely will not be without armed confrontation.
There is another argument, and it is uglier. Western credulity, and the routine sidelining of Iranian pleas, for short-term political or economic advantage, made the free world complicit in the longevity of this disaster. A regime that exports terror and imports concessions is not “contained.” It is enabled. Repairing that damage is an overdue responsibility.
This is where the United States enters, whether it likes the script or not. America has the military capacity to tilt outcomes. It also bears historic responsibility, from the 1950s coup to the later cycles of accommodation, including cash transfers to Tehran presented as policy “pragmatism.” The only question worth asking is whether it can act without replaying its own worst failures. Nor should it become too comfortable with the quick helicopter special ops in between stock market bells.
So let us be specific about what “military might” can mean here, and what it must not mean. It must not mean a crusade, an occupation, or an outsider-run regime-design workshop. If force has become unavoidable, it should mean disciplined, bounded coercion aimed at halting the regime’s capacity to kill, export violence, and survive on impunity, while protecting civilians and preserving Iranian agency. It can include credible deterrence against mass slaughter, enforced pressure on the regime’s external terror infrastructure, hard interdiction of weapons flows, and the denial of the tools that make repression efficient. It must be paired, from the start, with civilian protection as the standard, accountability as the rule, and no blank cheques for anyone’s revenge.
That discipline is not only for outsiders. It is also for Iranians. If the seemingly inevitable day comes when force enters this equation, the political work must already exist: a democratic minimum program, unity in diversity as practice, not a slogan, credible civilian leadership, a plan for transitional justice, and a refusal to trade one form of sacred certainty for another. Without that, even victory becomes a trap. The solution cannot be found in social media and its metrics; it can be built in Iranian society, by those who have survived one massacre after another for half a century.
Here is my verdict. If you hide behind historical guilt to justify present indifference, you are part of the problem. If you justify pseudo-diplomatic shortcuts with violence, or with the theater of negotiation, you compound the problem and the expense of more innocent blood. If you want to reduce the blood price and prevent the next catastrophe, you help the Iranian people while you constrain their tormentors.
The Islamic Republic has turned politics into a hostage situation. It kills, it hides the evidence, then demands that the world call it “complexity.” That is organized coercion with a press office. There are no two sides to a story written in blood for so long.
Maybe, and only maybe, the world will use this historic chance to demonstrate that moral seriousness is not a slogan. Maybe this is the time when the people of Iran, and those who claim to stand with them, rise to the occasion and prove history wrong. Even if war becomes unavoidable, it can be bounded by law, restrained by conscience, anchored in Iranian agency, and directed toward a single outcome worth the risk: a democratic Iran, and a region that finally has a chance to breathe in peace.