RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was like yesterday. Nearly 50 years to the day, on Dec. 31, 1977, the Shah held a state dinner for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Watching on television from my family’s middle-class home in western Tehran, I was eager to hear Carter’s speech. Having visited the U.S. as a curious tourist the previous summer, I had learned a few things about the American political system.

In the middle of the speech, Carter toasted the Shah, saying Iran was “under your majesty, an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” At that, I turned to my uncle beside me, who was back in Iran after years of living in California, and asked, “Where is he talking about? Americans, with their embassy and all its personnel, really don’t know what is going on in Iran?”

Though my uncle abhorred the Shah as much as anyone, he was also keenly aware of the brutality that the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, used in crushing anyone who expressed such sentiment. That evening, he tried to assure me that the president of the strongest country in the world definitely knew things that an Iranian teenager did not, and that the Shah was irremovable. Our heated argument ended without resolution after my father intervened.

That autumn, I had witnessed anti-government demonstrations by university and high-school students. As an ordinary young Iranian nothing could stop my yearning for freedom. I will never forget the first time I heard the chant “down with the Shah in the streets of central Tehran. Though the Pahlavi dynasty appeared invincible after 57 years of iron-fisted rule, it was doomed less than 14 months after Carter made his remarks.

As an anti-mullah activist, I closely follow developments in Iran, and international policies towards it. It’s clear that Western leaders remain prone to the same faulty assumptions today as they were in 1977.

Despite the visible mistakes made in dealing with the Shah before the 1979 revolution, these errors have been repeated in handling the mullahs’ regime over the past 45 years. Just as Carter labeled the monarchy an “island of stability,” many experts in the U.S. and Europe continued to relay the view that the theocratic dictatorship is here to stay, and that regime change is not feasible.

Somehow, that sentiment has endured in the face of upheavals that directly mirror those which preceded the Shah’s overthrow. The fall of Assad in Syria has robbed the Iranian regime of a key ally and revealed it to be much weaker than many assumed.

And that weakness was largely already revealed by at least four nationwide uprisings since the end of 2017. The latest of these, in 2022, was widely described by international media as a major challenge to the ruling system since its inception. Yet recognition of that fact has hardly moved the needle in mainstream policy discussions regarding Iran’s prospect for a free, democratic future.

In reality, the organized, pro-democracy opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI)/MEK) and the “Resistance Units” affiliated to it operating inside Iran and throughout the Iranian diaspora has been growing significantly. The democratic coalition of opposition has been gaining international recognition and substantial majorities in several Western legislatures have adopted resolutions recognizing the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) as a viable democratic alternative to the clerical dictatorship.

This is to say that compared to the months preceding the 1979 revolution, the Western world is better positioned to adopt policies that reflect the realities on the ground in Iran. And in contrast to that time, there is a well-defined plan to what will come next when the Iranian people finally rise up and throw off their current oppressors. NCRI president-elect Maryam Rajavi has outlined a roadmap for regime change and a ten-point plan for transitioning to a secular republic governed by the rule of law, ensuring gender equality, individual freedoms, and peaceful international relations.

It is time for Europe and the U.S. to align their policies with the mullahs’ growing instability and the strength of the pro-democracy resistance. The Iranian people, along with their organized resistance, will overthrow their oppressors as they did in 1979, but this time without merely swapping one dictatorship for another. The pressing question is how much longer the people of Iran, and the region must endure the mullahs’ malign conduct before achieving their ultimate triumph.

As the mullahs rush to acquire nuclear weapons, Western powers should support Iranians’ democratic aspirations by imposing strict sanctions on the regime and holding it accountable for human rights violations and its export of terror. Nelson Mandela famously said, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” The process of regime change in Iran has already begun, transforming the impossible into a realistic possibility.

Shahin Gobadi is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.