It’s important to listen to the voices of Iranian people. 


In the days since Trump ordered the assassination of a leading Iranian government official, General Soleimani, almost everything I have read on the topic in the U.S. media has been written from a U.S. perspective. 


Whether the argument is in favor of or against Trump’s act of war, there is a shared assumption that the U.S. government and military have a right to be in the Middle East, determining whether people live or die. The only issue is how governments and militaries will respond among themselves to the most recent provocations.


We rarely see any context. We rarely see the scope of the U.S. role and how it affects the lives of real people in Iran. We don’t see how they have suffered from U.S. aggression—from the 1953 coup d’état to the recent abandonment of the nuclear treaty and the crippling economic blockade enforced by the United States.


The reality is that countless Iranian lives have been upended, made excruciatingly more difficult, or been completely destroyed by what our country, the United States, has done.


The U.S. government and military have acted lawlessly in the Middle East and dehumanized an entire people to justify their actions.