We have been here before. For those who remember the lead-up to the Iraq War, the last week has been unnerving. Ever since Israel launched unprovoked airstrikes in the middle of the night on June 12, American politicians from both parties and the media have parroted many of the same lies that we heard in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Just as disturbingly, the voices of actual Iranians are being ignored as pro-war politicians and the media instead advance a fantasy: that the Iranian people, like the Iraqis before them, long for the United States to liberate them from their oppressive rulers.
Perhaps the most popular lie is that Iran is on the brink of having a nuclear weapon, a talking point that can be traced back to at least 1992 and one that U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency alike have both dismissed. But the most nefarious lie is this: The Iranian people want bombs falling on their heads because the bombs will free them from the terrible regime that has ruled the country since the 1979 revolution.
This too is not a particularly new take. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, freeing Afghan women and girls from the Taliban’s oppressive rule was a major selling point to convince the American public that U.S. troops should remain in the country. First lady Laura Bush said at the time that the “fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights of women,” and Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney wore a burqa on the House floor while praising the U.S. invasion shortly after it began. Two months later, a Time cover story titled “Lifting the Veil” speculated on how different the lives of Afghan women would now be after they had been liberated by American troops. (Not much different, it turns out; the Taliban returned to power 20 years after the invasion and quickly reinstated most of their oppressive mandates.)
In 2003, Americans were told the same thing about the people of Iraq: They wanted us to bomb them because they were desperate to be freed from the iron rule of Saddam Hussein, who had led the country as a dictator since the mid-1970s. When asked if Iraqis would welcome the invasion, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proudly replied, “There’s no question but that they would be welcomed.” In the 2003 State of the Union, President George W. Bush dedicated a not insignificant part of his address to the cruel methods in which Saddam Hussein’s regime forced confessions from prisoners—a note that was bitterly ironic as the United States embraced torture as an anti-terror strategy. Addressing the Iraqi people directly, he claimed, “Your enemy is not surrounding your country—your enemy is ruling your country. The day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.”
It is one thing to have believed those lies then. The country was still reeling after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a trauma that the Bush administration relentlessly and cynically leveraged as it pushed the invasion of Iraq, which had no connection whatsoever to either 9/11 or Al Qaeda. It is quite another to believe them in 2025.
Already, we are hearing the same rhetoric as before. “Let’s remember, the Iranians literally throw gay people off buildings,” Farah Griffin said this week on The View. “[Women] are not doing well in Iran,” added co-host Sarah Haines. “They are not educated, they can’t own property,” she claimed, seemingly ignoring that women in Iran have a higher literacy rate and attend university at higher rates than men. “They can’t go out of their houses,” she said again, simply making things up.
This twisted logic—in which people ignorant of the reality of life in Iran spout half-truths at best as a means of justifying regime change—is the norm not just on chat shows like The View but in cable news coverage as well. Iran is depicted again and again as backward and bigoted while Iranians themselves are typically presented as possessing only one characteristic: They are an oppressed people crying out for liberation. It’s an implicit call for regime change that has been repeated countless times over the last nine days.
Politicians, pundits, and current and former military and intelligence officials may insist that we will be greeted as liberators and that the people of Iran need only a nudge to rise up against their rulers. It does not take much effort, however, to see that they are lying: Civil rights leaders and dissidents inside and outside Iran are posting their opposition to the war for all to see.
On Monday, Iranian rapper and dissident Toomaj Salehi, who has been in and out of prison since advocating for the end of the Islamic Republic during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, slammed Donald Trump after his horrific warning that the 10 million residents of Tehran should evacuate the city immediately. “‘Evacuate Tehran’ is nothing more than a populist slogan meant to later claim: ‘We didn’t intend to kill Iranian civilians; they just refused to leave the war zone,’” he wrote.
“But how are over 9 million people—without fuel, often without enough savings to relocate, and with no second home in another city—supposed to evacuate Tehran? If your intention is to kill the people of Iran, at least have the honesty not to hide the burden of that responsibility.” (Since Salehi made that post, the Islamic Republic has once again arrested him.)
The same day, Nobel Peace Prize laureates Narges Mohammadi and Shirin Ebadi and filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof—all of whom have served time in Iranian prison—published a letter in Le Monde demanding “the immediate halt of uranium enrichment by the Islamic Republic, the cessation of military hostilities, an end to attacks on vital infrastructure in both Iran and Israel, and the stopping of massacres of civilians in both countries.”
“This conflict not only obliterates infrastructure and takes civilian lives—it poses a dire threat to the very foundations of human civilization,” they wrote.
“The violence is accelerating at a devastating pace, and the scale of destruction already resembles that of a months-long conflict,” Mohammadi also warned in Time magazine this week. “The growing fear that Israel may attack the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities adds terrifying uncertainty to the war. Millions of Iranian citizens have fled their homes. Amid crushing economic hardship and soaring inflation, they are unable to afford basic daily expenses and have sought refuge in other cities.”
Mohammadi, who lives in Tehran but fled the city after Trump’s warning, acknowledged she could be arrested again for speaking out.
“I know that war won’t bring democracy,” labor journalist and activist Sepideh Qolian, who spent two years in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, told The Atlantic. “The life that we wanted is the mirror opposite of the terrible events that are now happening.” Another anonymous activist put it more simply: “I can’t think about activism under the sound of drones and missiles, can I?”
It is not hard to imagine the myriad of ways that this war can go wrong. In fact, it already has. The Washington-based group Human Rights Activists News Agency, which tracks human rights violations in Iran, estimates that Israel’s strikes on Iran have killed at least 639 people and injured another 1,329, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Even if the U.S. maintains its current position providing tactical assistance to the Israeli military without sending American bombers, fighter jets, or even soldiers into the country, that number will continue to increase. Should the U.S. become more involved, it will increase substantially—while inviting a military response from Iran, endangering American soldiers and perhaps even civilians.
25 year old Parnia Abbasi, an English teacher and poet, was killed along with her parents in Israel’s murderous attack on residential areas in Iran pic.twitter.com/IzhhDayf52
— Alexander Jabbari (@yakabikaj) June 13, 2025
Despite media descriptions of the strikes as targeting nuclear and military sites, the attacks have hit critical infrastructure like water pipelines, gas fields, and oil refineries, a hospital, an airport, and even many residential buildings. In one video, a woman screams because a corpse from next door flew straight into her apartment after a bombing. Doctors say they are at their limit with the “bloodbath” they are currently facing, working back-to-back shifts as hospitals are completely overwhelmed with the number of injured as airstrikes continue. In Tehran, thousands fled after evacuation warnings from the United States and Iran. At first the concern was for the millions who couldn’t flee and would remain in Tehran, but even those lucky enough to escape to the north are already being bombed.
The Iranian people are trapped, between the bombs that could kill them at any moment and a regime that never cared much for their lives to begin with. As of this writing, the Islamic Republic has shut off virtually the entire internet for more than 48 hours, cutting Iranians off from much-needed news about what is happening in their country as war escalates. And yet, even if those bombs somehow eliminate the regime, it’s clear that the Beltway elite has no idea what the human toll will be—or what comes next.
This war is not about picking sides. There is no one to root for here. There is no rooting for Israel or its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who sickly advocated for regime change in Iran using the chant “Woman, Life, Freedom,” despite being responsible for the deaths of more than 28,000 women and girls during the genocide in Gaza these past 20 months. There is no rooting for Donald Trump, who certainly does not care about Iranian lives as he amasses power for himself while bulldozing over virtually every marginalized group in the country. And there is no rooting for the Islamic Republic, which has killed Iranians it simply disagrees with for more than 46 years.
None of those leaders are listening to the Iranian people, who are begging for the bombing to stop.
The post The Iranian Voices Missing From the “Regime Change” Debate appeared first on New Republic.
