Iranian American Scholars Denounce U.S.-Israeli Attack, Warn Regime Change Efforts Will Backfire

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. and Israeli war on Iran has entered its third day. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, more than 550 people have been killed in Iran since Saturday. The dead include Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in an airstrike targeting his compound. A number of other top Iranian officials have been killed, including Iran’s defense minister, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. Iran says an Israeli airstrike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab killed 165 people, mostly girls. Nearly a hundred others were injured.

Iran has retaliated by launching missiles targeting Israel, as well as U.S. allies, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus, where an Iranian drone hit a British air base. In Saudi Arabia, the country’s largest oil refinery was forced to halt work after an Iranian drone attack. Israel is now threatening to reinvade Lebanon after Israel and Hezbollah exchanged rocket fire on Sunday. At least 31 people have been killed in Lebanon. Israeli authorities say 10 people have died in Israel since Iran began launching retaliatory strikes.

President Trump launched the attack on Iran without congressional approval or the backing of the U.N. Security Council. In a video message Sunday, Trump again pushed for regime change in Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I once again urge the Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian military and police to lay down your arms and receive full immunity or face certain death. It will be certain death, won’t be pretty. I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment, to be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country. America is with you. I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise. The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help.

AMY GOODMAN: During his remarks, President Trump also confirmed three U.S. soldiers had been killed, and he said there would likely be more. U.S. Central Command announced today that a fourth U.S. service member has been killed.

Earlier today, three U.S. fighter jets were shot down over Kuwait in what CENTCOM has described as a, quote, “apparent friendly fire incident,” unquote. All six aircrew ejected safely.

The U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on Saturday came a day after the U.S. and Iran held indirect negotiations in Oman. Following the talks, Oman’s foreign minister said, quote, “A peace deal is within our reach.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke to Al Jazeera Sunday.

ABBAS ARAGHCHI: [translated] Well, Iran has been always open to diplomacy, and I think we have a very good record of that, contrary to Americans, that their record is very bad and very negative. You know, this is the second time that we negotiated with Americans and they decided to attack us right in the middle of negotiation. … Well, if their goal is change the regime, that is a mission impossible. You know, the demise of the leader doesn’t mean that — you know, regime change or the change of the political system in Iran. No, we have a very well-established political system. We have a very rich constitution. And based on that, all, you know, state institutions are in place. They are doing their job, their function.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Philadelphia, Golnar Nikpour is associate professor of modern Iranian history at Dartmouth College, author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran. And here in New York, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, the author of several books, including Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran, a memoir about his years on death row in Evin Prison called Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, and his latest book, just out this year, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Ghamari, let’s begin with you. You were on death row in the Evin Prison in Iran for, what, more than three years.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You are now observing what has taken place this weekend. There was a big piece on you in Haaretz in Israel a few days ago that talked about your warning about taking out Khamenei and this possible strike that we’re seeing today. Respond to what has taken place over the weekend.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: This was — first of all, thank you for having me here.

I think one of the most important lessons that we are learning here is that these attacks are causing much suffering for Iranian people, and it’s destroying the space in which Iranians were struggling for social justice and civil liberties. This is exactly the opposite of what Iranians wished, and this destruction is causing tremendous harm to Iranian people.

AMY GOODMAN: As we’re speaking. Defense Secretary Hegseth is holding a press conference at the Pentagon, he and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. American forces are hitting Iran, Hegseth said, “surgically, overwhelmingly and unapologetically.” And then he went on to attack the media. Can you talk about the significance? Well, the opening shots were against a girls’ school in southern Iran, but now, between Israel and the U.S., hundreds of attacks on Tehran and other places in Iran.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes, the first wave of attacks happened at the office of the supreme leader, which caused him and the top echelon of Iranian military and defense apparatus to die. And I think that was a moment that Ayatollah Khamenei, who decided to remain in his office and remain defiant to American threats, and it was very clear that he cared about his own legacy rather than trying to run away or hide in any bunker. Many of his advisers told him that it’s not safe to be in his office. And the story that I’ve been reading in Iranian press is that he refused to leave his office, and he said that if 90 million of Iranians have shelters to go to, “I will go to shelter after them.” But he remained in his office and became a martyr for his revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: Which is very interesting. We were talking on Saturday in a special broadcast we did with your colleague, professor Ervand Abrahamian, who said this is an 86-year-old man who’s dying of cancer, and now he has been martyred.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: That’s right. That’s right. And he always remained defiant. I mean, people who believe in his mission, believe in his ideas, now are celebrating the fact that he remained — up to the last moment of his life, remained defiant, and he wanted to follow the path of Yahya Sinwar of Hamas. And that kind of legacy is very, very important for him and his followers. And we saw that hundreds of thousands of people in Tehran and cities around the country and in the region poured into the streets and mourning his death.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve been imprisoned at the notorious Evin Prison, on death row. This was in the 1980s.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: ’80s.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet you warn against the toppling of this regime. Why?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Because I think that for — in the past 40 years or so, there were so many important events happening inside Iranian society. Iranian society, decade after decade, showed that they are capable of transforming their own society. Issues of social justice remain very prominent in Iranian society. Iranian women were very, very active in changing the conditions of their own life inside the country. And the Iranian labor movement was very strong. Iranian students always were very strong. And I thought that at this moment toppling the government without having a clear alternative only would damage those struggles that people have struggled to maintain throughout these past 40 years, would diminish. And I’m very pessimistic about the possibility of a regime change in Iran without having a clear idea of what is going to replace it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to professor Golnar Nikpour of Dartmouth. If you can respond to what has taken place over this weekend, what is happening in Iran right now, that you are hearing — you’re the author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran — and who the leadership possibly is? President Trump — soon after the hundreds of attacks were taking place on Iran, and then Iran retaliating throughout the Gulf and against Israel, as well, President Trump said to The Atlantic magazine that he was willing to talk again.

GOLNAR NIKPOUR: Yes. First of all, thank you so much for having me, Amy. I appreciate it a great deal.

The situation in Iran, as you’ve noted, is quite dire right now. There have been innumerable military attacks across the country, over 550 reported killed so far. As mentioned, a great deal of the upper echelon of the leadership has been wiped out, including now former supreme leader having been killed, Ali Khamenei. A three-person leadership council has been created to manage the day-to-day affairs of the state as it decides on a new leader, and that includes current President Masoud Pezeshkian, a important conservative cleric Ayatollah Alireza Arafi and Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, who is chief justice of the country. It’s also quite clear that Ali Larijani has been incredibly important in managing the day-to-day affairs of the country. So, the leadership structure that remains is trying to promote an idea of stability, promote the idea that there is an internal, systematic effort to replace those who have been already killed with the next in line and to sort of stabilize the system, both actually and in its presentation.

So, that’s the situation that we’re in internally in the country, but it’s quite a devastating attack on the infrastructure of the country, both in terms of the state infrastructure and civilian infrastructure. We’ve already gotten reports of hospitals being hit. And as you mentioned, the sort of opening salvo and the most devastating attack launched so far was against a girls’ school in southern Iran, in Minab, where well over a hundred people have been killed, mostly children.

So, yes, you know, I very much agree with Professor Ghamari-Tabrizi that this is a situation that creates a kind of code red internally in the country, wherein we’re not seeing something like, you know, protests on the streets, because people are concerned with avoiding the sure death of bombs falling. And I had reports yesterday from some contacts in Iran that people are using old bunkers or old facilities that they had used during the Iran-Iraq War to shelter in Tehran from the bombardment. But everyone is, as far as I can tell, using makeshift sort of efforts to stay out of harm’s way.

Of course, the internet has been cut by the Iranian government again, which means that there is a trickle, rather than a flood, of information, and that there is a great deal of misinformation that people are being subjected to from malign actors on the internet. So, one of the things that we have been trying to do is get a sense of what is really happening in the country.

And I’ll conclude by just saying that one of my own concerns — and I’m sure that this is something that Behrooz would echo, as well, having had this experience himself in the 1980s — but as a scholar of prisons and prisoners, I’m quite worried about what the situation is inside of Iran’s prisons. There were some reports from political prisoners in the country saying that there was limited access to food. This is a captive population, so if bombs are falling, they are captive to where they are, and they’re also going to be sort of privy to whatever the authorities in Iran choose to do, as well, including any sort of retaliation that they may choose to undertake. So, that’s something I’m keeping my eye on right now. There hasn’t been any specific news out of prisons beyond some worry about food being limited, but there is a concern about this population.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask professor Behrooz Ghamari about this comment of the reporter Jonathan Karl, who said, “President Trump told me tonight the U.S. had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. Trump told me,” Jonathan Karl said, “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody we were thinking of, because they’re all dead. Second or third place is dead,” he said. So, I wanted to go through who some of the possible candidates are, and maybe you could elaborate. You’ve got Mojtaba Khamenei, who is the son of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed. You’ve got Alireza Arafi, director of Iran’s religious seminaries; Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, an ultra-hard-line cleric; and among others, also Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini —

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — who died before Khamenei.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes. I don’t think that the Iranian state is in any rush to appoint a successor to Ayatollah Khamenei at this point. They have a council — 

AMY GOODMAN: Because they’re concerned he would be killed.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes, and also it would be a rushed decision, and that decision has to be made by the Assembly of Experts, and they have to find time for a meeting of the Assembly of Experts to appoint the successor of Ayatollah Khamenei. And I think that the council that my colleague Golnar just mentioned is appointed there to take care of the leadership issues at this point. And so far, they are able to maintain a succession of leadership at the very highest levels. And I don’t believe that any of these candidates that you named are going to be one of those candidates that they are going to replace Ayatollah Khamenei.

The most important person that people talk about is the person, the cleric from the Supreme Court, the Guardians Council, Ayatollah Arafi, who is a religious leader, not much of a political actor, but very respected in the seminaries. So, at this point, people are mostly talking about him. But that’s yet to be seen, that how this transfer of power would happen.

But I do not think that they are in a rush to appoint a successor to Ayatollah Khamenei, because the structure of leadership is in place. And they were expecting this for a long time, and they are going to take their time before announcing any successor to Khamenei. Whether or not the Trump administration is in conversation with people inside Iranian political power, this sort of Venezuela model, we don’t know. They’re all speculation, whether or not they’re talking about — to people about the possible successor who would be friendlier to American interests in the region. But at this point, these are all the speculations.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the president, the current Iranian president, who — Pezeshkian, who’s believed to be alive?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Yes, but he is not going to be appointed as the supreme leader. The supreme leader needs to be coming from the ranks of the clergy, so he is not going to be appointed in that position. The person who is very important at this point, as Golnar mentioned, is Ali Larijani, who is the head of the National Security Council. And he’s been very, very active, and he’s pretty much in charge of the affairs at this point, with consultation with the Council of Leadership that is in place right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah, known for his brutal rule through his secret police, the SAVAK?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Reza Pahlavi, basically, is a Israeli American project. And in recent months, he’s been gaining support inside the —

AMY GOODMAN: Where is he?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: He is in the U.S. He lives in Maryland, but he’s traveling, trying to gain support from American politicians and the U.S. Congress and some Europeans. And he has a significant support among Iranian diaspora. But this has been a project in the making for many years, and millions and millions of dollars have been poured into making Reza Pahlavi an alternative to the Islamic Republic. Whether or not he can emerge as the real alternative, we don’t know, but I doubt it.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Golnar Nikpour, you wrote a piece for Jacobin last year, “The Failson and the Flag.” Explain.

GOLNAR NIKPOUR: Yes, in that piece, I essentially argued, as Behrooz just did so ably, that Reza Pahlavi is fundamentally an Israeli American project, as he just said. He has been the sort of hope of the neo-monarchist movement for many years, and indeed decades, but has never been able to build organizational support, institutional support within Iran. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have supporters, of course, largely in the diaspora. He’s an important political figure in the diaspora, maybe the important political figure, and presumably some supporters in the country, as well, but no institutional kind of entrenchment — right? — no organization or political party or council that can be imagined as having state-like functions and stepping in to fill a power vacuum.

To bring Reza Pahlavi, who himself in an interview just not very long ago said that he can’t even imagine moving back to Iran full time because his life is in the United States — he said this on a right-wing podcast in the U.S. a couple of years ago. This is a figure that just does not have connections, organic connections, to political movements in the country. So, for him to emerge either as a transitional leader, which is what he says that he wants to be, or as a long-term leader, would need, in my view, significant military investment on the part of outside powers to prop up his rule — boots on the ground — because there is a military, a strong military apparatus and institutional apparatus in Iran of the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, and Reza Pahlavi doesn’t have a kind of a comparable institutional support in the country. So, to imagine bringing him to power would need a great deal of military support. This is what he has been, essentially, sort of on the back scene advocating for, but has, to my knowledge, not managed to quite convince the Trump administration to pour that last bit.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Behrooz Ghamari, let me ask you a question, as we begin to wrap up, about Iran retaliating by sending drones to Israel, by going after the Gulf states, one after another, and the significance of this, where you’d think they would want not to alienate these Gulf states. But now if you can explain the attacks on Saudi Arabia, on UAE, on Qatar, on Bahrain, now apparently on Cyprus? There’s a British base on Cyprus.

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Right. Iran is primarily targeting the U.S. bases in these countries, and many of these missiles are targeting Iran from the Saudi soil, from the UAE, from Kuwait. And Iran has forewarned them that they should not allow the U.S. to launch its attack from their soil. And it’s the case that, obviously, when they start attacking, there are damages that happen outside the American bases. But primarily, that’s the objective, to attack American bases in these countries.

And they also want to expand the war. And Ayatollah Khamenei last week mentioned that if there is an attack on Iran, it’s going to be a regional war. And this regional war, they want to make sure that they create an expansive war, that it is felt, it is felt by the entire region and globally, because then they are going to disrupt the flow of oil. They are going to show Europeans, primarily, that they cannot sit on the sidelines without taking a position against this illegal act of aggression.

AMY GOODMAN: We just got news that the wife of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has also succumbed to her injuries. She has died. We know that also killed in that attack, aside from the close to 50 commanders, was Khamenei’s daughter and also grandchild. Your final thoughts? Again, you’re a professor here in the United States now, but you were imprisoned at Evin Prison. You were on death row. What’s going to happen now, and why you feel so strongly that you are a deep — that though you are a deep critic of this regime, that this war on Iran is wrong?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI–TABRIZI: Because I think, you know, I can’t find any reason to celebrate the assassination of the Iranian supreme leader, because I think it’s part of a package. It’s a package, because the assassination of the Iranian supreme leader is also part of the killing of Iranian schoolchildren. It’s also part of the killing of Iranian innocent people. It’s also part of the attack on Iranian hospitals. And these are not separate issues.

And I think that for that very reason, I don’t think there is any reason to celebrate the demise of the Iranian leader, because it’s happening in the hands of what I call the king of genocide and someone in the U.S. who’s so deeply in trouble with the American legal system, with the Epstein files. And so, for as many people say that this is Epstein war, and I think that we should not be sort of fools to think that this is — in any shape or form, is done on behalf of Iranian people. This is done on behalf of American and primarily on behalf of Israeli interests. And I think Americans should ask themselves that: Why exactly are we attacking Iran without any kind of provocation? This is a war that is not in the interests of the United States, and it only fulfills and realizes the desires of a regime in Israel that is promoting forever wars in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest book, The Long War in Iran: New Events, Old Questions. He’s previously professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, where he directed the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, was imprisoned at Evin Prison in the 1980s, on death row there. And Golnar Nikpour, associate professor of modern Iranian history at Dartmouth College, author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to Tel Aviv and also look at Europe and how it’s responding right now to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Do You Believe in Rapture?” by Thurston Moore, performing at Smith College in 2005.