They are making a serious error. The argument here is straightforward: the interests of the United States and Israel overlap with those of Iranian dissidents on exactly one question, weakening the current government. On every question that follows, they diverge. What kind of Iran emerges? Who controls its oil? Who decides its military capacity? On all of this, Washington and Tel Aviv have preferences that run against what most Iranians would want. The sooner the opposition absorbs this, the less likely they are to be discarded once they’ve served their purpose, as the Kurds were, as Venezuela’s María Corina Machado was.

Start with Israel, because the Israeli position is the more honest of the two. Netanyahu has stated his war aims plainly: to eliminate the existential threat posed by Iran and destroy its nuclear and missile programs. His foreign minister called military action urgently needed to prevent Iran from reaching immunity for its nuclear program. Notice what is absent. No mention of Iranian democracy or sovereignty. These are security objectives aimed at capacity reduction, full stop. Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily, recently argued that the bombardment closely resembles the country’s wars against Hamas and Hezbollah. Israeli strategists call this pattern “mowing the grass,” a concept laid out in a 2014 paper by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir at the Begin-Sadat Center. The logic: periodically degrade your adversary’s military capabilities, accept they will rebuild, hit them again. Manage without resolving. Nicholas Grossman of the University of Illinois told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the strategy “has no endgame” and that applying it to 88 million people a thousand miles away means “there’s no way it can work.” But endgames are beside the point. Israel wants an Iran that cannot accumulate the means to pose a strategic challenge, no matter who governs it. A secular, democratic Iran that insisted on its sovereign right to ballistic missiles or nuclear energy would face the same hostility as the current government. What is being enforced is a caste hierarchy of permissible military power: Israel at the apex, Iran kept at permanent incapacity under any flag.

The American case is less principled and more transactional, which at least has the virtue of legibility. Trump, asked by NBC News whether the U.S. might seize Iranian oil, refused to rule it out and pointed to Venezuela as a model. His administration has offered shifting justifications for the war: an imminent threat that Pentagon officials privately told Congress did not exist, nuclear concerns the IAEA could not corroborate at the time of the strikes, and, most candidly, securing Iran’s natural resources. That Venezuelan reference deserves unpacking, because it tells Iranians exactly what to expect. In January, U.S. forces raided Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro. María Corina Machado, the country’s most prominent opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had spent years positioning herself as Washington’s ally. She dedicated her medal to Trump, called him a “visionary,” and endorsed his military strikes on her own country. When her moment came, Trump dismissed her on live television, said she lacked “support” and “respect,” announced the U.S. would “run” Venezuela, partnered with Maduro’s own vice president, and moved to ensure American companies would market Venezuelan oil through U.S.-controlled accounts. CNN reported that democracy and Machado were not even “on the map.” She did everything asked of her. She was discarded the moment the resources were accessible. Iranian dissidents who think their trajectory will be different are not paying attention.

And then there is the question of who actually bleeds for this project. The United States and Israel are waging this war from the air and sea. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has refused to rule out ground troops while committing to none. The White House confirmed that ground operations are “not part of the plan right now.” About 74 percent of Americans oppose sending soldiers to Iran. So who does the ground-level work? Netanyahu answered plainly: Israel creates the conditions, and Iranians “take to the streets.” Think about what this means. Two of the best-armed states on earth bomb from a safe distance, while Iranians, who in January alone saw their own security forces kill thousands of protesters, are expected to walk into the wreckage and finish the job. They absorb the bullets and the reprisals. They serve as the ground force in a war they did not design. If Washington and Tel Aviv are committed to Iranian freedom, why won’t they risk their own soldiers? Because the freedom of Iranians is peripheral to the actual aims.

Some dissidents may assume that collaboration with the war effort will be rewarded, that there will be immigration pathways, asylum protections, political standing in the West. Here the Afghan precedent is instructive, and devastating. For twenty years, Afghan translators, soldiers, judges, and intelligence officers served alongside the American military. The US created the Special Immigrant Visa program specifically to resettle them. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has terminated Temporary Protected Status for Afghans, suspended SIV processing, shut down the resettlement offices that coordinated their evacuation, placed Afghanistan on a blanket travel ban, and started deporting parolees whose asylum cases were still pending. A former Afghan judge who prosecuted terrorists through the American detention facility at Bagram was sent back to Taliban-held Afghanistan. Over 50 Afghan prosecutors and judges have been killed in Taliban reprisals since. Hundreds of American veterans signed open letters begging the administration to honor its commitments. They were ignored. And just days ago, Trump went on Fox News Radio and blamed the “genetics” of Muslim immigrants for violent crime, telling the host that certain people are “sick” and that “the genetics are not exactly your genetics.” David Bier of the Cato Institute described the comments as those of “an old-school eugenicist nativist.” This is the same man who in 2023 said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, language that Biden compared to Hitler’s. Iranians who imagine they will be treated differently because they helped are not reading the room. The Afghans who translated for American soldiers, who bled alongside them, who watched their colleagues murdered by the Taliban for the association, imagined the same thing.

Behind all of this sits a historical template that Iranians know well, even if the diaspora seems eager to forget it. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, after he nationalized the country’s oil industry, which had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British firm. The Shah was reinstalled, signed over 40 percent of Iran’s oil fields to American corporations, and built SAVAK, his feared secret police, with CIA and Mossad training. For 26 years Iran was nominally sovereign but functionally subordinate, its ruling class oriented toward serving foreign patrons rather than citizens. The Texas National Security Review documented the result: political dysfunction, accumulated resentment, and the 1979 revolution that produced the current government. A post-war Iran run by exile figures with a Washington constituency, stripped of military capacity, its oil flowing west on American terms, would reconstruct the post-Mossadegh order. The country would be formally independent and operationally a client state. That is the Faustian bargain being extended, and it ought to be refused.

The Kurds have a proverb: they have no friends but the mountains. Across three generations, from Kissinger’s 1975 abandonment of Iraqi Kurdish rebels to Trump’s 2019 pullout from northern Syria that left Kurdish fighters who lost 11,000 dead against ISIS exposed to a Turkish invasion, the pattern has held. Iranians should learn from it. Naghmeh Sohrabi, a historian at Brandeis, described the isolation of Iranians caught between the pro-war fever of the diaspora and the violence of the state. That isolation, uncomfortable as it is, contains more political clarity than anything coming out of the rally stages. Neutrality here does not mean passivity. It means refusing to serve as foot soldiers for powers that won’t put their own troops on the ground. It means building political capacity that owes nothing to foreign intelligence services. It means insisting, with patience and discipline, that Iran’s future belongs to Iranians, and that no amount of liberation talk from people who speak of your genetics with contempt should convince you to hand it over.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)