Some in the West are "bewildered that young Iranians will cheer because the Americans have started bombing them." Ali M. Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, told The Wall Street Journal there's nothing bewildering about it. "What they want is a better life. A normal life. They want to be able to travel to America or study there."
As reported by "Hvylya", referencing the WSJ's interview with the historian, the disconnect between Western shock and Iranian reality reflects a deeper analytical failure. "We fail to give the Iranians agency in what they do," Ansari said. When Iran's economy is in shambles, the reflex is to blame U.S. sanctions rather than look at the regime's own catastrophic governance.
Ansari challenged the sanctions narrative directly. "That doesn't explain why the Iranians have mismanaged their water. It doesn't tell you why, well before the real sanctions arrived in 2011-12, they were never able to get any foreign direct investment into the country." The reasons were internal: "the corruption, the kleptocracy, the short-termism, the opaqueness, the lack of accountability, the uncertainty." Sanctions didn't make life easier, he acknowledged, but they were a consequence of the regime's behavior, not the root cause of Iran's dysfunction.
The historian traced this blind spot to what he called "Washington-centered analysis." "We always see Iran as almost marginal to the problem, which is Washington." Commentators rage about Trump's decisions, but ignore what the Iranian people themselves have been saying for years through wave after wave of protests - each larger, each more defiant, each met with greater brutality from a regime running out of tools.
For Iranians, the real turning point was 2009, when hope for domestic political reform died after the regime crushed the Green Movement and the West looked away. "But of course we miss that in the West," Ansari said. "We're so fixated on what we think we're doing about security and nuclear - which has its place - that we don't understand what's going on inside the country." If young Iranians are cheering American bombs, it is because they have already concluded what Western analysts still struggle to accept: the problem is the regime.
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