Opposing the war does not mean excusing the Iranian regime
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
On December 28, 2025, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shut their stalls after the rial fell to a record low against the dollar. Within days, their strike had metastasized. By the fourth day, protests had reached Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Hamadan. Merchants, students, and ordinary wage earners joined them in the streets. The protests reached all 31 provinces.
Their complaints were concrete. Inflation had passed 42 percent, food prices had risen 72 percent in a year, and the rial was trading at roughly 1.4 million to the dollar, according to Euronews. Britannica notes the currency had lost nearly 90 percent of its value since 2018, and proposed wage increases covered only about two-fifths of inflation.
These were not protests about ideology. They were about rent, groceries, medicine, and daily survival. Many Iranians sensed a clear difference between their hardships and the priorities of their rulers. The government had spent heavily on regional military power, security, and surveillance while cutting needed subsidies at home. That is why protests that began over prices for goods in marketplaces became a broader challenge to the clerical system governing Iran since the 1979 revolution.
The government answered as it had many times before, but with greater force. Beginning on January 8, 2026, security forces opened fire on crowds across the country. The government itself acknowledged more than 3,000 deaths. The Human Rights Activists News Agency documented more than 7,000 protesters killed and more than 50,000 arrested. Internal Health Ministry estimates put the toll far higher. Amnesty International found security forces frequently fired at protesters’ heads and torsos. By mid-January the streets were empty. Popular grievances had not been resolved. However, dissent was a deadly endeavor.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched air strikes killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and igniting a regional war. Whatever spirit of protest remained from January was suffocated underneath air raids, blackouts, and calls for national unity.
There are clearly serious grounds for opposing the illegal, unauthorized war of choice in Iran. Critics have questioned its legality, its human cost, and its strategic logic. Amnesty International called the attack unlawful. Those arguments deserve a reckoning.
But in some quarters, opposition to the war in Iran has slipped into something else. Some now treat the Islamic Republic as a victim and a symbol of resistance worth defending. That conclusion is wrong. It does the Iranian people a grave disservice.
The Iranian regime surviving the bomb strikes is the same regime that massacred its own citizens six weeks earlier. Its character did not change with the circumstances. The Assembly of Experts named Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as Supreme Leader. This was a signal hardliners remained firmly in charge. Citing what it called “wartime conditions,” the government stepped up its repression. Amnesty International documented more than 6,000 arbitrary arrests and at least 39 politically motivated executions. Amnesty International also recorded an 88-day nationwide internet shutdown and the seizure of assets from more than 750 alleged “traitors.” Among those executed was an 18-year-old protester. The judiciary executed two more men arrested during the January 2026 protests.
This is nothing new. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has combined clerical authority with coercion power. It has imprisoned dissidents, persecuted religious and ethnic minorities, and enforced compulsory veiling. It has crushed one protest movement after another, from the 2009 election demonstrations to the 2022 uprising after Mahsa Amini died in custody. In 2025, before the war began, it executed at least 1,639 people, the highest number recorded since 1989. Brutality is not a departure from how this system works. It is how the system works.
Holding both views at once is neither contradictory nor unusual. One can believe the February 2026 attacks by the United States and Israel were a mistake, or even criminal, and still recognize the government in Tehran is theocratic, violent, and illegitimate in the eyes of many of its own people. In fact, consistency demands it. A principled objection to war rests on concern for human life and dignity. That concern cannot be set aside when the lives in question belong to Iranians killed by their own government.
The people who filled Iran’s streets last winter were not asking for foreign bombs. They were asking for an economy they could live in and a government that answered to them. Opponents of the war honor that demand only if they recognize the regime that failed to fall is a theocracy that continues to oppress.
