US-Iran conflict: not just optics

The wartime assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei in a US-backed Israeli attack in Iran has produced a significant surge of emotion in many parts of the world, including Pakistan.

As a historian, it is no part of my vocation to romanticise any government in the world, including that of Iran. Governments are always characterised by elements of corruption, oppression, law-breaking and untruth. That's why I have never been able to believe in systems that place religious scholars at the permanent helm of government. I feel such arrangements compromise these scholars' independence as moral and social guides, binding them too closely to the inevitable compromises, failures and economic or political missteps of state power.

Having spent a considerable amount of time in various parts of Iran across multiple decades as a student and as a tourist, I've had the opportunity to sit in classrooms, attend conferences, study the Persian language, interact with locals and live in their homes. Iran's culture is thus a deeply familiar one for me, not just historically through Persian inheritance, but also in the modern and contemporary context, and my interactions with this culture have all been after the time of the Islamic Revolution, which predates my own birth.

I have tasted both the joys and comforts of living in the society that has evolved in post-Revolution Iran, and also the constrictions. This makes it impossible for me to either idealise it or demonise it. Historically speaking, revolutionary regimes — communist or Islamist - tend to intervene deeply in citizens' everyday lives and make extensive use of propaganda to promote conformity, driven by a paranoia of foreign interference that, while extreme, is often well-grounded.

While Western liberal democracy and market capitalism are often presented as the only political and economic systems to have proven viable in the modern world, have alternative models - whether communist or 'Islamist' - ever been permitted to evolve and develop in genuinely 'neutral' conditions, free from Western intervention?

After the Bolsheviks seized power, through a coup, in Russia in 1917, for example, Western backing of the anti-Bolshevik White Movement enabled the new regime to portray domestic political opponents as counter-revolutionary proxies of foreign powers, thereby helping to legitimise enduring political repression. Even more significantly, in countries such as Italy and Indonesia, US-supported political interference obstructed the electoral success of socialist movements that might potentially have come to power through purely popular support at the ballot box.

Thus, in the modern era, alternative political and economic models have rarely, if ever, been allowed to compete with Western liberal democracy and market capitalism on an even-playing field. Any account that attributes their failure to inherent or "natural" weaknesses should, in fairness, reckon with this historical context.

Iran's education levels and human development indicators are higher than all major countries in South Asia, and much of the Middle East and Central Asia. But its economy has struggled under prolonged Western economic sanctions, restricted access to global trade and investment, high inflation and structural challenges. Freed from these intense external pressures, could the Islamic Republic of Iran have had greater scope for political and economic development, making both political protest and repression less vociferous and intense?

Of course, would the circumstances that led to Iran's Islamic Revolution - a system which has no political precedent in pre-modern Muslim history - have arisen at all if the US and the UK had not toppled Mosaddegh's popular, anti-imperialist government in an undemocratic coup in 1953 in order to restore the fiercely pro-Western monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose brutal and repressive policies alienated vast swaths of society, including religious leaders, and paved the way for revolutionary upheaval?

As it is, fear and resentment of Western-backed subversive activity has remained great in the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout its career, adding to curtailment and repression in everyday life. We now see before us a clear realisation of this well-founded fear in the assassination of Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. As analysts have aptly pointed out, this attack on Iran by the US and Israel is not to defend the rights and civil liberties of women, or indeed anyone else, in Iran. It is simply to contain the substantial and meaningful support that Iran - perhaps more than any other country in the world - gives the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Ultimately, Khamenei's reign and his life have been brought to an end not by local dissenters objecting to his mode of governance, but by a foreign, US-Israeli operation in direct violation of international law. And this method of assassination is precisely what has angered and embittered countless people around the world. It is evident that in theory the same method of assassination could have been carried out against the leader of any country that provides the most effective military support to Palestine, regardless of whether his/her regime is liberal-democratic, communist, or 'Islamist'.

I try to resist what I perceive as a masculinist radical impulse to exalt any sort of intrepid anti-imperialist warfare at the moment it results in physical martyrdom. Heroic narratives too easily obscure human cost and moral ambiguity.

However, one thing should be clear for anyone with eyes to see: the stark divergence in the character and bearing of leadership in Iran and the US at this particular moment in the history of their mutual conflict. There can be no deeper contrast in political persona.

On one side stands a figure who embodies the worst excesses of rapacious, individualistic Western capitalism: an ignorant, uncouth, decadent, oafish rich brat. On the other stands a leader shaped by deep scholarly and cultural attainment and long-nurtured ideological commitment, in the service of a political dream and social vision, whatever one may think of its tensions or practical viability. Trump appears as an absolute caricature, when placed besides Khamenei.

There can be no denying that the balance of dignity and idealism in this comparison is clearly weighted on one side.