A Manufactured Menace
Pulling Back the Veil on Iran & Western Mischief
Let's tell the truth for once by avoiding the uncritical, mindless, regurgitated dogma that feeds so much Western propaganda. Let's tell the true story the West prefers to ignore.
They would have you believe Iran is a rogue theocracy—a mediaeval relic hellbent on destruction, its hands forever stained with the blood of regional chaos. This caricature, repeated endlessly in Western media and political discourse, has hardened into supposed truth through sheer repetition. It's a lie wrapped in selective outrage, a propaganda campaign designed to justify perpetual confrontation.
But let's pull back the veil on one of the world's oldest civilisations—a land of Rumi's poetry and Avicenna's medicine, of Cyrus's charter and Persepolis's grandeur—now reduced to a geopolitical bogeyman in the imperial imagination. Acknowledging Iran's regional ambitions is not to absolve its government of contradictions or hardline policies but to reject the Western narrative that paints its actions in a vacuum, divorced from history and context.
The irony is almost too rich. The same powers that obliterated Iraq on false pretences, reduced Libya to rubble, and fuelled Syria's disintegration now point to Iran as the region's destabiliser. When Iran supports groups like Hezbollah or Hamas, they are "terrorists". But when Saudi Arabia starves Yemen with Western bombs and blockades, or when Israel expands its illegal occupation of Palestine, these are framed as acts of "self-defence" or "strategic partnerships". The unspoken rule is clear: violence is illegitimate only when it challenges Western hegemony.
Let's dispense with the nuclear hysteria. Iran—which has no nuclear weapons and remains under IAEA inspection—is treated as an existential threat, while Israel's undeclared arsenal of 90 warheads escapes all scrutiny. Iran's ballistic missile programme, developed after Saddam's Western-backed chemical attacks slaughtered thousands of Iranians, is "provocative", but the US military bases encircling Iran are "stabilising". This is not analysis—it's the raw exercise of imperial power, where the weak are punished for defending themselves, and the strong rewrite the rules as they please.
The truth Western media won't tell you? Iran's actions are rational responses to decades of foreign interference. The 1953 CIA coup that crushed Iran's democracy, installing the Shah's brutal dictatorship that tortured and killed thousands while serving Western oil interests for a quarter-century. When Iranians finally overthrew this US-backed tyranny in 1979, their revolution's anti-Western character wasn't born from religious fanaticism but from lived experience of imperial domination. The West's arming of Saddam as he gassed Iranian soldiers and the deliberate prolongation of the Iran-Iraq War that killed over a million people between 1980 and 1988 created a generational trauma that fundamentally shaped Iranian strategic thinking. The assassinations of scientists, the sabotage of infrastructure, and the sanctions that strangle ordinary citizens. What nation under such siege would not arm itself?
The economic warfare deserves particular attention. Western sanctions don't weaken authoritarian regimes—they strengthen them. While ordinary Iranians suffer from medical shortages and economic collapse, the Revolutionary Guards profit from black markets and import monopolies that sanctions create. The regime becomes the only lifeline for survival, breeding the very dependency that crushes civil society. This is siege warfare disguised as diplomacy, designed not to change behaviour but to inflict collective punishment.
Critics will call this analysis one-sided, lacking the "nuance" that supposedly marks serious commentary. But decades of measured, balanced discourse have only entrenched the propaganda. Sometimes shattering illusions requires abandoning the polite tone that inadvertently legitimises injustice. Besides, what exactly is this "regional stability" we're supposed to prize? The kind that preserves Saudi monarchs and Israeli settlements? The stability of permanent refugee camps and bombed-out cities? Iran's so-called destabilising actions often challenge arrangements that were never just to begin with.
Acknowledging Western hypocrisy doesn't require the whitewashing of Tehran's record. Iran's government has blood on its hands—the brutal suppression of protesters in 2009 and 2019, the systematic persecution of women, minorities, and dissidents, and the propping up of Assad's war machine as it barrel-bombed Syrian cities into rubble. These aren't footnotes to be dismissed; they represent genuine betrayals of the very people whose civilisation my thesis celebrates. When Iranian women risk their lives chanting "Woman, Life, Freedom", they're fighting the same authoritarian impulses that the regime directs outward.
The 2022-2023 uprising following Mahsa Amini's murder revealed the depth of popular resistance to theocratic rule—millions demanding not just reform but revolutionary change. This creates a profound tension: how do we support a civilisation's resistance to imperial domination while acknowledging that same civilisation's people are simultaneously resisting their own government's oppression?
The tragedy is that external pressure often strengthens precisely these authoritarian tendencies, creating a vicious cycle where siege mentality justifies internal repression. Yet Iran's regional strategy isn't purely defensive either. The "axis of resistance" spanning from Lebanon to Yemen also serves Iranian geopolitical ambitions, projecting power through proxies in ways that sometimes mirror the imperial playbook it claims to oppose. Tehran's support for Assad wasn't just about resisting Western regime change—it was about preserving a crucial ally and maintaining influence. These contradictions are real and complicate any simple narrative of resistance versus empire.
Yet this framing is often dismissed as reflexive anti-Americanism—as if acknowledging empire's crimes is itself a crime. Yes, Iran's support for the Assad regime and Houthis complicates regional stability. Yes, its human rights record is indefensible. But where is the comparable outrage for Saudi Arabia's beheadings, Israel's apartheid, or America's drone wars? The selective moralising exposes the real agenda: not justice, but domination.
Recognising these contradictions doesn't invalidate the broader argument—it deepens it. A civilisation's struggle against domination can coexist with its government's failures. The Persian people's resistance to foreign interference doesn't depend on their rulers' virtue, just as America's founding ideals weren't negated by slavery or Native genocide. What matters is understanding that imperial pressure often strengthens the very authoritarian tendencies that betray a people's aspirations. This is the cruel irony: the siege mentality created by external threats becomes the excuse for internal oppression.
Perhaps the future lies not in defending the current regime but in imagining an Iran freed from both imperial pressure and theocratic rule. A democratic Iran—one that honours its civilisation's pluralistic heritage while rejecting both Western domination and religious authoritarianism—could transform regional dynamics entirely. Such a vision requires supporting Iranian civil society against both external sanctions and internal repression, recognising that true independence means freedom from all forms of tyranny.
If we can survive the current turbulence intact—the convulsions of a fracturing empire—we may witness the birth of a new Middle East. Already, Iran and Saudi Arabia negotiate without Washington's permission, their China-brokered détente signalling a tectonic shift: the Global South rising to fill the space where Western diktats once reigned supreme.
Let's be clear. The manufactured hysteria about Iran was never about nuclear weapons or terrorism. It was always about punishing a nation that dares to resist—that remembers its history, refuses to be a vassal, and exposes the hypocrisy of an order built on double standards. Behind the "axis of evil" rhetoric lies the real crime: Iran's unforgivable sin of independence.
As the old world order crumbles, the veil lifts to reveal an unpalatable truth: the so-called "rogue states" were often just nations that wouldn't kneel. And in their defiance, they held up a mirror to the empire's decay. The story of Iran is not one of mindless aggression but of a civilisation that remembers—and will outlast—its would-be conquerors.
In the end, empires fall. Civilisations endure. And sometimes, if we're fortunate, they also evolve.