LOS ANGELES ― When the war in Iran began, Freddy Kashani would set his alarm for 6 a.m., wake up and turn on the news, monitoring reports all day until bedtime. Kashani co-owns Saffron & Rose, a Persian ice cream shop in Los Angeles. His family is from Iran, and some of his employees have family members there.
A part of him was excited to see potential change in Iranian leadership. But as a war touted to last just weeks reaches its six-month mark, he has only questions — and a feeling like nothing is happening.
“What are we doing?” Kashani said. “Is there a plan?”
With no end in sight to a conflict that has seen neither side willing to concede much ground, Iranian American sentiments range from frustration and disillusion to defiance and flickering
hope ― and, for many like Kashani, concern for loved ones still there.
The regime some hoped would topple has remained stubbornly in place and increasingly emboldened despite American military might and crippling economic sanctions, an outcome predicted by observers such as the National Iranian American Council in Washington, D.C.
“Our feelings leading into the war have been completely validated, I’m sad to say,” said council president Jamal Abdi. “We’ve warned for two decades against war, especially the notion that military action would liberate the Iranian people.”
A council-commissioned poll of Iranian Americans at the war’s outset found the community evenly divided for and against the United States’ attack on Iran ― a result the council found surprising given Iranian Americans’ longstanding opposition to war. Abdi believes people were still upset over the regime’s deadly January crackdown on civilian protests prompted by anger over a floundering economy.
A month later, a second poll found two-thirds of the community against the war.
The effects of the war are easily measured in terms of lives lost, livelihoods ruined and worsened inflation. At least 3,400 Iranian civilians had been killed as of June 30, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, while consumer food costs were 128% higher in July than the year before. Nearly $60 billion has been lost in energy infrastructure alone, according to an Arab Gulf States Institute analysis, while major airports across the country have sustained extensive damage.
But for the Iranian diaspora, the emotional toll has been harder to measure.
A primary fault line between people for and against the war is what role the U.S. should be playing, if at all, said Sahar Razavi, a professor of political science at California State University, Sacramento, and director of the school’s Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center.
“There are those, as happened in 1980 when Iraq invaded, who think yes, this government has to change, but it can’t happen at a time of war and attack from foreign powers; we will sort out our own affairs,” Razavi said.
But high emotions and at-odds opinions have stifled dialogue, others say.
“There’s so much division among people within the Iranian diaspora that it’s difficult to communicate effectively,” said Persis Karim, retired former director of the now-defunct Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. “There’s lot of talking over and at each other. And it’s really the people of Iran who are paying the price.”
For Iranians, life has become even more miserable than it was before the war, Karim said, with severe fuel shortages and skyrocketing food prices.
“The war, in combination with the destruction of infrastructure, a severely crippled economy and the shutting down of the internet, has made it untenable,” said Karim, who has family in Tehran. “It’s really bad, and likely to worsen.”
Reluctant to expend costly fuel, she said, people don’t go anywhere. Ongoing sanctions and bombed pharmaceutical factories have complicated efforts to get needed medications. Now, the government is shutting down cafes, one of the few places where young people can socialize.
“The mood is constant agitation,” Karim said. “There’s seemingly no conclusion to this war and yet the effects are still surmounting. The anger and hostility directed both at the government and the war ends up coming out toward each other.”
Prolonged war has sowed more division
More than half of the nearly 400,000 Iranian immigrants in the U.S. are in California, most of them concentrated in the Los Angeles area, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Many fled Iran after the 1979 revolution.
After the U.S. attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the community experienced “a flash of polarization,” Razavi said, falling largely into two camps ― one angry over American military aggression amid ongoing negotiations, the other hopeful that along with the elimination of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei it could spark long-awaited regime change and set the nation on the right path.
"Lines were drawn, friendships lost, family relationships dashed," Razavi said.
Now, as the war drags on and the regime appears more entrenched than ever, those camps have split even further, she said. Many even disagree about what a post-regime Iran should look like, with some calling for a democratic republic and others eager to restore the monarchy overthrown in 1979.
“There was a lot of hope at the beginning that the dominoes would fall, but the system is so entrenched that that is proving to be difficult,” said Nizam Missaghi, a Phoenix-area anesthesiologist whose forthcoming book, “Passport to Freedom: From Tehran to Triumph,” details his escape from Iran after being denied higher education opportunities there because of his family’s Bahá’i faith.
For some who dreamed that military intervention would produce meaningful regime change, hope has turned into disillusionment.
“Many who felt like there were no other options and came to support the decision to launch war have now had second thoughts and now realize this was folly,” Abdi said.
“There was this illusion that there was an organized opposition outside Iran that could, if given the opportunity, play a role in governing a new Iran and ejecting the old regime,” Abdi continued. “But it was a fairy tale concocted to give people assurance that it wasn’t just a war that was going to destroy Iran.”
For others, optimism been replaced by nationalism as U.S. military strikes leave more Iranians dead and infrastructure destroyed, Razavi said. Still others cling to the belief that war and economic sanctions will ultimately spur the regime’s collapse, a change they believe is worth it, whatever the cost.
“There’s a level of not listening, of not wanting to reckon with what’s happening on the ground in Iran,” Karim said. “There’s a tendency to focus on the goal of regime change without attention to the consequences of intervention.”
Robak Hoospianmer, a Christian pastor in Los Angeles who left Iran in the 1990s because of religious persecution, said he wants the war to end as soon as possible. His older brother, a Protestant Bishop in Iran, was found stabbed to death after going missing in 1994 ― murdered, Hoospianmer said, for publicly supporting an imprisoned man who’d converted to Christianity from Islam.
“I believe America will bring freedom to Iran, but I don't know how long it's going to take,” Hoospianmer said.
Then there are others like Selin Petrosians, an Iranian-born caregiver in Los Angeles who cited the rise in gas prices accompanying the war and lamented the cost of rent and food in the city. Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars ― $37.5 billion, as of Aug. 7 ― are funding the Iran war while families are homeless in America, Petrosians said, a dynamic that makes no sense to her.
“Is my government making the right decision by squeezing my dollars to make sure to free another country that has nothing to do with us?” said Petrosians, 42. “As long as we are not taking care of ourselves, we are in no place to tell some another country how to behave or spend our money on another country's resources or welfare.”
'Difficult to imagine a solution'
Community opinions are mixed, too, about how the conflict should or will play out.
Bombardment alone isn’t enough to “bring the regime to its knees,” said Missaghi, the Phoenix physician. However, he thinks the U.S. naval siege and sanctions could be the most effective way to trigger mass disobedience ― not just in the form of protest but labor strikes, “not doing the bidding of the Republic. That dismantling can be seen on the horizon.”
Razavi, of CSU-Sacramento, isn’t as optimistic.
“Iran has prepared for this war for at least the last 23 years,” she said. Faced with debilitating economic sanctions, “it’s turned inward and created a weapons industry that is self-sustaining, manufacturing weapons and drones quickly and cheaply. Those prepare them to hunker down for a war of attrition that will outlast the U.S.’ willingness to engage.”
Furthermore, she said, Iran understands the midterms mark a pressure point for Trump and that the political fallout will only deepen.
“That puts them in a favorable position,” she said.
Razavi thinks Trump might “remix” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that he withdrew the U.S. from three years later ― only with terms more favorable to Iran, while selling it to the public and allies as a victory.
“That’s the only way he can get us out of this anytime soon,” she said.
Karim, the retired center director, said as far as a best-case scenario, she doesn’t see one.
“I don’t see how there can be any trust rebuilt between these two entities given the level of aggression and rhetorical posturing,” she said. “It makes it difficult to imagine a solution. Unfortunately, it means the regime is not only still in power but has become more aggressive itself, not only toward U.S. military bases or friends of the U.S. but also toward its own people.”
Adbi, of the National Iranian American Council, hopes the more Iranian Americans abandon the notion of war as a solution, the more the community “can have real dialogue about how those of us outside Iran can stand with those still in Iran . . . Hopefully this war is a sobering moment for our community that will allow us to get back to productive conversation.
“There’s no end to the suffering, it seems,” he said. “Everything feels on a knife’s edge and doesn’t seem to be getting any better as this war carries on. And the people suffering most are Iranians.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Is there a plan': 6 months into war, Iranian Americans worry about future
