Since just over a week ago Israel and the US began their furious attack on Iran, I have been patiently hearing and reading wild accusations from “the left” and “left-wing feminists” about their supposed indifference towards the fate of Iranian women fighting against the US regime. ayatollahs and even about the supposed defense that the left and “left-wing feminists” were making of this same regime.
This defense, say and write those who lead such diatribes, would be proven by the fact that the left and left-wing feminists are, unlike the Iranians who fight against the regime, criticizing the operation that the US called “epic fury”. The Internet was filled with cartoons in which Western leftists explain to Iranian women why they should be against the intervention and they sarcastically respond something like “yes, you must know better than me and mine what is best for me.”
There are undoubtedly Iranian women and men applauding the attack, and there are undoubtedly Iranian men and women calling for it, begging for it. A few weeks ago, an Iranian woman living in Portugal told me this: “We need international military intervention.” Who should intervene? “The whole world. Because what is happening inside the country is a genocide.” When we talked about the USA and Trump and what he had said — that he would intervene if they started killing protesters (which, as we know, happened, and in thousands, with estimates of up to 40 thousand opponents being murdered) —, she didn’t hesitate: “We want Americans to intervene in Iran. When you don’t live under that oppression, it’s easy to say that the US and Trump are bullies. We want the regime to fall, we want help, any help. We just want the serpent’s head to be cut off.”
When I wanted to know what, in her opinion, would happen or should happen if the US intervened (we didn’t even discuss what kind of intervention could have the result she wanted, that is, what it would mean to “cut off the serpent’s head”), she replied: “That’s a lot of questions, I don’t know. They’re very complicated questions.”
Like so many Iranian women inside and outside Iran, this young woman will certainly have celebrated the news of the death, on the first day of the bombings, of the hated Ali Khamenei, the Shiite cleric who had held the position of supreme leader of Iran since 1989, and felt this death as the longed-for beginning of the end of the regime. After so many decades of horrible repression, of relentless persecution of those who fight for democracy, freedom and a secular regime, of the bloody crushing of successive revolts, the annihilation of the main face of the barbaric religious nomenclature that subjects the country could not fail to be received with joy. But, in addition to causing satisfaction — yes, we can derive satisfaction from the death of a tyrant under whose orders countless human beings were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and executed —, is this death the “cutting off of the serpent’s head” that my interlocutor desires?
It is too early to say, but the election, this Sunday, of the assassinated leader’s son to take his place leads us to believe that the answer is negative. Whether the regime can survive the successive waves of bombings that are destroying the country’s infrastructure is not possible to predict, just as it is not possible to understand what plan, if any, the US has for the outcome of its intervention (Israel’s seem much clearer: destroy the country and fragment it into territorial/ethnic units, so as to disappear as a regional potentate, and the rest be damned).
Hearing Trump acknowledge, with priceless candor, that the people he would count on to do something like what he is doing in Venezuela (eliminating Maduro and leaving the regime intact, keeping the president’s kidnapped lieutenant in power so that she can do what he says, namely giving him access to oil) were all killed at the same time as Khamenei — look at the bad luck — or the elusive Peter Hegseth“Minister of War”, to deliver childish and empty abjections, which bully schoolboy or sly movie villain, such as “death and destruction fall from the sky every day”, “this was never supposed to be a fair fight, we attacked them when they were on the ground and that’s how it should be” and “this war is not like the politically correct wars of the past, there are no stupid rules of engagement here” (in reference to the rules of war that prohibit, for example, the attack on civilian targets, but also to International Law in general), certifying that the objective was never to change the regime, no is certainly likely to reassure neither Iranians nor the world at large.
What it seems is that Trump thought it was a good idea, given the number of internal problems he has faced, from Epstein’s files to ICE crimes, take advantage of the Israelis’ ride to give a show of warmongering “the american way”, as if all this were an action film to watch with popcorn — in fact, a few days ago the White House published a video to glorify the intervention that intersperses images of the attacks on Iran with excerpts from superhero tapes. It is not surprising that he has reflected much on the how, much less on the why and the why: he has the power and uses it as he pleases at each moment, especially since this time, in his second term, he knew how to surround himself with people as ignorant and crazy as he is.
It is therefore highly doubtful that anything positive will result from such an epic apparatus of stupidity and barbarity as the one the American government presents at this moment. And it is not the fact that many Iranian women and men desperately wanted foreign intervention and took to the streets celebrating it that changes the sad reality.
The very courageous people of Iran, the very proud Iranian nation, the brave feminists who have faced and continue to face decades of oppression deserve to triumph — they deserved it with each revolt bathed in blood, each time they believed, as so many outside the country believed, that victory would not escape. He will not, however, be an autocrat who has done nothing but destroy democracy in his country, and has already admitted that he does not care if the Shiite fundamentalists maintain power as long as he is the one who chooses who stays, nor, certainly, the evil Netanyahu, who brings them freedom. I wish they were — I wish something good could come out of all this evil, such heartless hubris.
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