‘Of Course Iranians Want Change. The Question Is, What Kind of Change?’

As bombs rain down, Babak Rahimi, a scholar of the Middle East, challenges the US press to convey the “messy” reality on the ground. 

In the days since the United States and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Reza Pahlavi—the son of the country’s last shah—has been omnipresent. He’s made multiple appearances on Fox News; he’s been interviewed on 60 Minutes; he’s written an op-ed for the Washington Post. With the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the message that Pahlavi has been pushing for years—that he is uniquely qualified and positioned to lead an Iran free of the Islamic Republic—is finding new resonance, at least in the US media. But the idea that there are only two possible futures for the country—Pahlavi and freedom or the Islamic Republic and repression—is dangerously reductive, as Sina Toossi recently argued in The Nation: “In Washington, the discourse often reduces Iran to two caricatures: the ruling elite in Tehran and the exiles who promise that pressure and war will bring about regime change. But inside the country, a third current has always existed. It is anti-authoritarian and anti-war at the same time. It rejects both domestic tyranny and foreign intervention. It demands self-determination through nonviolent civic struggle.”