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Joshua Scheer
When Washington and Tel Aviv escalated military pressure on Iran, many in the West appeared to assume the same old script would unfold: rapid destabilization, internal collapse, and a population ready to welcome outside intervention. But according to Professor Behrooz Ghamari, that assumption misunderstands both Iranian history and the political consciousness shaped inside the country over decades of conflict, repression, reform, and resistance.
Speaking on Useful Idiots, Ghamari — a former political prisoner once sentenced to death by the Iranian state — offered a perspective rarely heard in mainstream Western coverage: that opposing authoritarianism at home does not translate into support for foreign military intervention. His argument is rooted not in loyalty to state power, but in the belief that external war destroys the very civil society capable of producing internal change.
Ghamari’s own life complicates every easy political narrative. In the 1980s he spent years on death row inside Evin Prison after being arrested for Marxist political activity against the post-revolutionary government. Yet decades later, after surviving imprisonment and exile, he rejects the idea that bombs dropped by foreign powers can deliver liberation.
His argument is blunt: trauma should not become political strategy.
For Ghamari, the central mistake in current Western thinking is treating Iran as a static authoritarian structure rather than a society shaped by constant internal contest. He describes Iranian political life as a triangle: a strong state security apparatus, a highly active civil society, and persistent geopolitical pressure from the United States, Israel, and their allies.
That triangle, he argues, explains why Iranian politics repeatedly produces contradictions outsiders fail to see. Repression exists, but so do openings. Protest movements have repeatedly forced adaptation. Newspapers flourished during reform periods. Universities became centers of debate. Women’s movements pushed visible social changes that, even when unofficial, altered everyday reality.
He points to the Women, Life, Freedom uprising as one example: the state responded harshly, yet over time public enforcement of compulsory dress codes weakened significantly in many urban areas. In his reading, this was not revolution, but it was social movement pressure changing lived reality.
War interrupts that process.
Instead of empowering reform, Ghamari says military escalation pushes society backward, strengthens security institutions, and weakens the civic networks that generate long-term transformation. In his words, outside intervention can erase decades of gradual political development in a matter of weeks.
The interview also focused on the human cost now unfolding inside Tehran. Ghamari described a city living in contradiction: neighborhoods functioning normally by day while missile strikes hit nearby districts without warning. Shops open. Streets move. Then entire blocks are shattered.
One of the starkest images he offered was environmental rather than military: oil falling from the sky after refinery strikes. According to accounts he relayed from contacts in Tehran, blackened rain, polluted air, and smoke-darkened skies are becoming part of daily life. For him, these are not side effects — they are long-term forms of destruction that outlast headlines.
He links that damage to a wider historical memory: from depleted uranium after the Iraq wars to environmental scars left across earlier US campaigns in the region.
Politically, Ghamari argues that Western strategy continues to misread Iranian response. Rather than producing immediate collapse, outside attack often deepens national resistance, even among citizens critical of their own government. That dynamic has repeatedly frustrated expectations of quick regime change.
His conclusion is not that Iran’s internal contradictions disappear under war, but that they become harder to resolve democratically.
The paradox he presents is difficult for many audiences: someone brutalized by the Iranian state warning that foreign military pressure will make internal freedom harder, not easier.
That is precisely why his perspective matters.
From the March 13 episode featuring Behrooz Ghamari, one conversation stood out — and somehow we almost missed it. A friend of mine, someone who grew up with Behrooz and was politically active alongside him, told me: “If you really want to understand Iran, don’t ask me — watch this interview and read his work.”
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