A PROMINENT opponent of the Iranian government has voiced a lack of surprise that Donald Trump looks set to walk away from his war on Iran with the regime he vowed to overthrow still intact.
With a new peace deal – not a treaty but a “memorandum of understanding” – between Washington DC and Tehran, the US president is proclaiming the success of his administration in both the diplomatic and military spheres.
Speaking to The National in late March, Nima Bahrami, who sought sanctuary in Scotland, predicted that – already bogged down in an unwinnable war – Trump would come to an agreement with the dictatorship he had vowed to remove.
Trump’s endgame was, he said, to “reach an agreement with the Tehran regime that would ignore the people of Iran”, Bahrami takes no pleasure in seeing his prediction come to pass.
The US-Iran deal “is not regime change”, he says, “it is only a change of dictator. Trump replaced Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). I can’t say, ‘thank you president Trump that you changed the dictator.’ Sorry for that”, he says, with a sardonic laugh.
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As Bahrami predicted, given a choice between the geopolitical and economic interests (as he sees them) of the US and the struggle of the Iranian people for democracy and human rights, Trump has abandoned the long-suffering population of Iran. “In January”, the dissident remembers, “president Trump sent the message, ‘don’t go home, continue your protests, I will definitely support you.’”
Such messages had two main consequences, Bahrami explains. “One was to encourage the people to continue their protest movement in the streets. The other was to tell the regime that the US wanted to break its power.
“Trump was telling the regime ‘you are in a huge amount of danger’. In this situation every dictator will kill everybody.
“In fact, Trump encouraged the people to stay in the streets, and he encouraged the regime to kill them. But he didn’t send any help for the Iranian people, he was just typing.”
Bahrami always suspected that Trump’s proclaimed support for the pro-democracy movement was no more than a dangerous game. The problem was that the overwhelming danger was faced, not by the US, but the Iranian people themselves.
“For this so-called ‘change’, 4000 Iranian people have been killed and many parts of the United Arab Emirates have been destroyed,” he comments. “The world economy has been plunged into chaos. This is the cost of changing the dictator in Iran.”
For Bahrami, Trump’s deal with the Tehran regime is all about opening up the global economic choke point at the Strait of Hormuz. A major reason for doing so, he believes, is that the economic consequences of the closure of the strait for US citizens are threatening Republican prospects in the midterm elections in November.
The horrible irony of this situation, he says, is that Trump’s war of choice has had a devastating economic impact upon the people of Iran. The US-Israeli destruction of Iranian infrastructure has added further economic misery to an already biting sanctions regime.
“The Iranian people are living under heavy economic problems”, says the Iranian dissident. “They are 10 times worse off than last year when Trump started typing. “Last year was not a good situation, but it was better than it is right now. Since Trump started typing, every day the economic situation gets worse.
“Every day the regime gets more aggressive, executing many innocent protestors. Who is responsible for this situation? After the Ayatollah himself, the main person to blame is president Trump. If you start by typing about human rights, you can’t just suddenly change to saying it is about economic questions or Iran’s atomic programme.”
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The UK and other Nato governments have tried to distance themselves from the US-Israeli war on Iran. However, Bahrami sees the current crisis in the Middle East as part of a far longer pattern of Western failure.
The anti-immigrant politics rising in much of the West fail, he says, to take into account the role of Western foreign policy in making people refugees in the first place. “They are coming from your mistakes”, he says.
“You can’t ignore Assad, who has killed 500,000 innocent people in Syria. You can’t ignore the people of Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon, and then ask why there are boats carrying refugees towards your countries.”
For Bahrami, the most egregious example of Trump’s disregard for the Iranian people came on April 7 of this year. Frustrated with yet another failure to come to a deal with the Tehran regime, the US president threatened that “an entire civilisation will die tonight” unless the Iranian government agreed to his terms.
“It is unbelievable”, Bahrami says. “The first thing I thought at that time was, ‘what has happened to a democracy like the United States that such a guy becomes the representative of that country?’”
The consequence of the war and, now, Trump’s deal with the regime is, the dissident says, that the eyes of the Iranian people have been opened. “The Iranian people do not agree to any deal that the US makes with the Tehran regime. The Iranian people demand regime change.”
Right-wing figures in the Iranian diaspora – who support Trump and Netanyahu, and seek the return of the Iranian monarchy – do not represent the bulk of the Iranian people, says Bahrami. Most of his country folk, he believes, “cannot trust the United States and Western countries again”.
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