“How many people live in Iran, by the way?”
“I don’t know the population.”
“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?”
That was a real exchange between Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz last week. The clip has already surpassed 30 million views.
As absurd, even entertaining, as it may seem, the disturbing truth is that Ted Cruz isn’t an outlier. He reflects a broader pattern among U.S. policymakers and, frankly, the American public: A 2020 Morning Consult poll found that only 28% of Americans could find Iran on a map.
For decades, Americans’ ignorance about Iran — and the Middle East in general — has made it easier for politicians and pundits to flatten the country into a threat, a headline, a battlefield. That ignorance isn’t just embarrassing. It’s what allows recycled war narratives to take hold, painting military aggression as liberation and reducing millions of lives to collateral damage.
We don’t all need to be experts on Iran. But after Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Palestine, we should at least be able to recognize a propaganda campaign when we see one. If we’ve learned anything from the past 20 years, it’s that war doesn’t bring freedom. And we can’t afford to fall for it again.
If we’ve learned anything from the past 20 years, it’s that war doesn’t bring freedom. And we can’t afford to fall for it again.
As an Iranian American born and raised in the United States but deeply rooted in my Iranian heritage, I’ve spent most of my life watching people speak confidently about Iran with no real understanding of its history, culture or people.
Few bother to pronounce it correctly (“E-ron”), let alone grasp that we’re not Arab; we’re a pre-dominantly Persian-speaking country with deep ethnic diversity from Azerbaijanis in the North to Kurds in the West to Baloch and Arabs in the South. Iran is home to not only Twelver Shia Muslims, the state’s dominant sect, but also Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Bahá’ís and others. After 46 years of watching the regime weaponize religion as a tool of repression, many Iranian Muslims have reexamined their relationship to faith. Today, religious expression spans from devout practice to secularism, agnosticism and atheism — another layer of Iranian life that’s invisible in U.S. political discourse.
To most Americans, Iran is simply a state actor. An abstract threat. A boogeyman.
Even I absorbed that framing growing up. In elementary school, I wrote a report on the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, trying to understand why “Iranians and Americans don’t get along.” At the time, I stopped the story at the taking of American hostages. But as I grew older, I realized the story didn’t begin — or end — there. I dug deeper, learning about the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and later, the implications of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.
When things began to look up in 2015 with President Obama’s JCPOA in place, I visited Iran for the first — and so far only — time. It was a turning point. The country I had previously known only through headlines and family stories came to life. The black box cracked open, revealing a land rich in culture, history and humanity. The pride of the Iranian people was palpable — something I had always carried within me, even as someone who had never set foot in Iran and was raised as the child of an immigrant. That trip deepened my connection and sense of duty. I felt a responsibility to show others that the Iranian people are not a monolith, not a menace, and certainly not disposable.
The Iranian people are not a monolith, not a menace, and certainly not disposable.
Visiting Iran lit a fire in me to humanize my people, especially as U.S.-Iran tensions escalated once again. The political discourse surrounding Iranians remained reductive at best, dehumanizing at worst. Since many non-Iranian Americans cannot travel to Iran, I realized that we often become the first, and sometimes only, point of contact others have with Iranian people. For better or worse, we’re tasked with representing an entire nation and culture. That reality underscored for me how vital it is to speak not only in cultural spaces, but in policy arenas — where lives are too often reduced to numbers, talking points or collateral damage.
In 2019, I interned for my member of Congress and supported his staff with the #NoWarWithIran campaign. I sat in on Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, where even Democratic leaders like then-ranking member Bob Menendez — now imprisoned — pushed hawkish, fear-driven narratives about Iran. I was unsettled. Weren’t these tactics supposed to be the domain of Republicans?
It became deeply personal. And when I was later awarded a prestigious scholarship to fast-track a career in the U.S. Foreign Service, I turned it down. I couldn’t reconcile the idea of defending U.S. policy decisions, knowing how often those decisions — most notably comprehensive sanctions and a lack of formal diplomatic ties — devastate ordinary Iranians and still fail to hold governments accountable. I didn’t want to find myself defending policy decisions that have left generational scars in Iran and across the Global South.
Every time I think we’ve made progress in educating Americans about Iran, I’m reminded how far we have to go. Western interests continue to outweigh Iranian lives. Legitimate Iranian freedom struggles are co-opted to serve those very same interests. And once again, we’re watching the media and political class work overtime to convince the American public that another war is not only inevitable — but necessary.
But something is different this time.
Fewer Americans are buying the recycled narratives that justified the war in Iraq in 2003, which we now know was an unjust, unmitigated disaster.
Fewer Americans are buying the recycled narratives that justified the war in Iraq in 2003, which we now know was an unjust, unmitigated disaster. Why trust Trump, whose record speaks for itself? Why trust Netanyahu, who presides over a genocide with full U.S. support? Why trust a Democratic Party that has remained largely complicit?
We now have a record: of Iraq, of Afghanistan. Of Libya, of Yemen. We’ve watched a genocide unfold in Gaza for nearly two years — funded by our tax dollars. Even the most disengaged Americans know that Palestinians are suffering. People are more skeptical than they were two decades ago.
And because of that, the U.S. propaganda machine is working in overdrive — whether Trump’s newly-announced ceasefire holds or not — painting it as a war to keep the world safe and free Iranian women. But the world is not any safer with war, nor will Iranians be freed by bombs.
We must remain vigilant. Be wary of the fearmongering, including the claims we are already hearing: of “sleeper cells” or that the war will begin in Tel Aviv and end in New York. These are scare tactics meant to stir panic and convince Americans that Iranians are the ultimate threat to peace — not the U.S., not Israel.
And as always, we know who profits: weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, political elites and Wall Street. They line their pockets. We foot the bill. Iranians pay the price.
We’ve seen this before.
And this time, we can’t afford to let it go unchecked.
