People attend a protest against U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, in New York, the United States, on Feb. 28, 2026 There is a story the West tells about Iran. In this story, Iran is an irrational theocratic state, a sponsor of terror, an obstacle to regional stability, and a government whose people would be free if only the regime could be removed.
It is a story built on selective memory, strategic omission, and a consistent refusal to account for the West’s own role in producing the exact conditions it now claims to be correcting. The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 is, in this story, a conclusion. The removal of the Supreme Leader to the West = the decapitation of the Islamic Republic.
The moment the Iranian people are finally liberated from 47 years of theocratic rule. But history, actual history, not the curated version, suggests something more uncomfortable. What was killed on Saturday was a man, not a system.
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And that the system, which was itself born from the rubble of an earlier Western intervention, has never once been weakened by force from the outside. This is that history. It holds two truths simultaneously, which is the only honest way to hold them at all.
Iran’s government has been treated with a degree of international lawlessness that no Western ally would tolerate for a moment as well that Iran’s government has also perpetrated crimes against its own people of a scale and savagery that demand more than silence. These two truths do not cancel each other out. They coexist.
And the failure to hold both of them at once is the reason every Western intervention in Iran has produced the opposite of its intended result. To understand why the Islamic Republic exists, you have to start not in 1979 but in 1951, when Mohammad Mossadegh was appointed Prime Minister of Iran with an overwhelming democratic mandate. Mossadegh was a nationalist, an internationalist, and a democrat.
He was also an irritant to the British Empire for a simple reason that he believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iranians. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which would later rename itself BP, had controlled Iranian oil since 1913. It paid Iran a royalty so small, and refused consistently to allow an independent audit of its accounts, that the Iranian parliament could not even verify what the country was owed.
Mossadegh’s government nationalised the industry in 1951. The British response was to impose a global boycott of Iranian oil and seek the country’s diplomatic isolation. When that proved insufficient, Britain approached the United States.
Operation Ajax, known in British files as Operation Boot, was the joint CIA-MI6 operation that overthrew Mossadegh on 19 August 1953. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency had ever orchestrated the removal of a democratically elected foreign government. CIA officers funded opposition newspapers, spread disinformation, bribed politicians and clerics, hired demonstrators to foment street violence, and coordinated the military coup that removed Mossadegh from power.
He was arrested, sentenced to three years in prison, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967 having never been free.
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