An Anguished Debate Among Iranians
By Nahid Siamdoust. There is no precedent in the modern Middle East — or for that matter anywhere — for a war producing a quick and clean democratic outcome, as the architects of this one implied in their promises. The complete dismantling of a functioning state, however brutal and however widely despised, without any credible plan for what follows, will not produce democracy by miracle, but ruins by design. The division that has emerged — between those Iranians who will not support a war on their own country and those who have, through suffering and desperation, arrived at support for the war — is real and painful and will not be resolved easily.


