The conversation around Iran is rarely an honest one. It is curated, edited, and presented in fragments that serve a larger narrative. What is offered as moral clarity is, in reality, selective memory. The story begins where it is convenient and ends where it must.

To understand Iran today, one has to begin not with protest videos or sanction regimes, but with 1953. That year did not just mark a political event. It marked the dismantling of a democratic possibility. Iran, at the time, had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who made the politically inconvenient decision of nationalising his country’s oil. This was not ideological adventurism, but a straightforward assertion of economic sovereignty. Oil, after all, lay beneath Iranian soil, not British. Yet, that assertion proved unacceptable to those who had grown accustomed to controlling both extraction and profit. What followed is no longer contested history. The United States and the United Kingdom, acting through their intelligence agencies (the CIA and MI6), orchestrated a coup that removed Mossadegh and restored the Shah with expanded authority. A democratic trajectory was cut short, not by internal collapse, but by external design. This is not the footnote, but the starting point. The theocratic Iran that emerged in 1979 did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged from years of accumulated discontent under the Shah’s increasingly autocratic rule, a model of rapid Westernisation that often appeared imposed rather than organic, and an economic order that deepened inequality even as it promised modernity. What ultimately coalesced into revolution was not a single ideological current but a convergence of forces, religious, secular, and student-led, united as much by opposition to the Shah as by resentment of American influence and the social disruptions of his reform agenda. Under Ayatollah Khomeini, that convergence found direction, and the monarchy had to give way. To discuss Iran without acknowledging this rupture is to read only the second half of a sentence and pretend it stands on its own.

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Now, decades later, the methods have changed, but the impulse remains. The tools are no longer coups, but sanctions. The United States has, over time, constructed one of the most comprehensive sanctions regimes in modern history against Iran. These measures target oil exports, banking systems, and access to global markets. While they are presented as instruments of pressure on the regime, in practice, they function as instruments of economic suffocation. The consequences are borne not by abstractions, but by the Iranian people. Inflation, currency collapse, restricted access to medicine, and industrial stagnation. Sanctions do not operate in isolation. They shape the very conditions that later get cited as evidence of internal failure. Having contributed to economic distress, external actors then point to that distress as justification for further pressure. It is a circular argument, laundered into something that politely calls itself policy. When unrest follows, as it inevitably does in an economy under sustained pressure, the narrative shifts again. What we are shown is a simplified tableau. Peaceful protesters on one side, and a repressive state on the other. Although it is a compelling frame, it is also incomplete.

The protests in Iran were not uniformly peaceful spectacles. Alongside genuine expressions of dissent, there were incidents of arson, attacks on governmental infrastructure, and the targeting of religious institutions. Security personnel were killed. These are not marginal details. They are central to how any state interprets such events. In a theocratic system, the targeting of religious sites is not merely symbolic, but it is incendiary. It transforms unrest into something far more volatile, where the state no longer sees protest alone, but the possibility of deeper destabilisation. This does not negate the legitimacy of grievances, nor does it erase the fact that many protesters were driven by real and serious concerns. But what it does do is complicate the picture. And it is precisely this complication that is often edited out. No state confronted with such a situation would consult a manual on restraint. It would respond as states tend to respond when they perceive themselves under internal assault, using force. The question is not whether force is used, but how much, and at what point it crosses into excess. Iran is hardly unique in this regard. Any state, faced with sustained unrest involving violence against institutions and security forces, would respond with severity. The United States, if confronted with a comparable situation involving foreign infiltration and violent unrest, would not rely solely on appeals alone for calm. It would deploy force, invoke national security, and act decisively. Yet, when Iran does so, the response is judged in isolation, stripped of both context and precedent.

To pretend that these events unfolded in a vacuum is equally misleading. Iran has long been a theatre of covert operations. Israeli intelligence has been linked, widely and credibly, to targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists, sabotage of infrastructure, and deep penetration of Iranian systems. This is not conjecture. It is part of an ongoing shadow conflict. In such an environment, internal unrest is rarely viewed by the state as purely domestic. It is seen, rightly or wrongly, through the lens of external subversion, and that perception shapes response, hardens it, and accelerates it. A protest, in this context, is not merely a protest. It is a potential front in a larger contest. What emerges then is not a false narrative but a curated one. Civilian suffering is highlighted, and state excess is foregrounded. These are real and deserve scrutiny all right, but what is consistently underplayed are the pressures that frame these responses, the violence within protests, the history of intervention, the ongoing reality of covert operations, and the economic constraints imposed from outside. The result is a narrative that is not just inaccurate but also incomplete. And in geopolitics, incompleteness is often more misleading than outright falsehood.

Iran is judged today as though it exists in isolation. Its actions are evaluated without reference to the forces that have shaped it. A country that was undermined at a critical juncture, economically constrained for decades, and subjected to sustained external pressure is expected to behave as if none of that history existed. This is where the moral argument begins to unravel. None of this suggests that Iran is beyond criticism. Of course, it is not. States remain accountable for how they exercise power, and civilian harm, disproportionate force, and suppression of dissent are valid grounds for critique. That remains true regardless of history or circumstance. But critique divorced from context is less analysis and more positioning. The deeper issue is not what is said about Iran, but what is omitted. The silence around 1953, the framing of sanctions as neutral instruments, the selective portrayal of protests, and the reluctance to acknowledge the ongoing shadow war within its borders. What is presented as moral clarity is, in effect, a carefully assembled narrative. It assigns roles, simplifies events, and leaves little room for complexity. Iran is not an isolated case. It is, however, a clear illustration of how geopolitics often operates. History is truncated. Context is compressed. Present actions are judged without reference to past interventions. The result is not understanding. It is convenience. And in geopolitics, convenience has an uncanny habit of masquerading as morality.

(The author is a national award winner for narration and an independent political analyst.)

© Mathrubhumi English