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. 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. It has only ever been strengthened by it.
US-Iran History
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.
The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, returned to power. Five American oil companies were immediately granted a share of Iranian oil production that had previously gone exclusively to Britain. The Shah ruled for 26 years as an authoritarian ally of the West.
The 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah was not, in its origins, a fundamentalist revolution. It was a broad popular uprising that included leftists, nationalists, liberals, and Islamists united by decades of humiliation at the Shah’s hand and at the hand of the Western powers that had installed and sustained him. When Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as its figurehead, it was in part because the secular and nationalist alternatives had been systematically destroyed by SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police) over two decades, using training, intelligence, and equipment provided by Washington and London.
This is the foundational fact of the US-Iran relationship that is almost never named in Western coverage of Iran. The Islamic Republic is, in a very real and traceable sense, a product of American policy. Not because America wanted a theocratic revolution. But because America destroyed the democratic alternative 26 years before the revolution happened, and left a traumatised, politically hollowed society with only religious institutions intact enough to organise.
International Law
The United Nations Charter is one of the most straightforwardly worded documents in international law. Article 2(1) establishes the sovereign equality of all member states. Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 2(7) prohibits interference in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. These are not ambiguous provisions. They are the bedrock principles of the post-1945 international order, designed specifically to prevent powerful states from doing to weaker ones what the colonial powers had spent centuries doing freely.
Iran has been on the receiving end of violations of every one of these principles, not occasionally, but systematically, and by the very states that most loudly invoke international law when it suits them.
The 1953 coup violated Article 2(7) so completely that the CIA did not even attempt a legal justification. The 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA, a treaty that the IAEA had confirmed Iran was honouring in full, was not merely a political decision. It was a repudiation of a binding international agreement made without cause, followed by the imposition of sanctions that deliberately targeted Iranian civilian infrastructure, in violation of the humanitarian carve-outs that international sanctions law requires. The June 2025 US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had no UN Security Council authorisation. Operation Epic Fury, which killed the sitting Supreme Leader, his family, his cabinet, and thousands of civilians including schoolchildren, was launched without a declaration of war, without Security Council approval, and in direct contravention of every principle the UN Charter was written to protect.
Iran has watched this dynamic with the clarity of a country that has experienced it repeatedly and personally. It watched Saddam Hussein price Iraqi oil in euros in 2000 and then watched the United States invade Iraq in 2003. It watched Muammar Gaddafi propose an African gold dinar and then watched NATO bomb Libya in 2011. It watched itself, a country that had complied fully with the JCPOA have that agreement torn up unilaterally by a new American administration, with no consequence for the tearing party and catastrophic economic consequences for the complying one.
Iran’s nuclear programme, which is at the centre of every Western justification for escalation, is legal under international law. Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, explicitly guarantees every state party the inalienable right to develop, research, produce, and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Iran has maintained consistently, and the IAEA has never been able to prove otherwise, that its programme is for civilian purposes.
The People
It is here that intellectual honesty requires the hardest turn in this analysis. Because holding Iran’s sovereignty to the same standard we hold every other sovereign state cannot and must not mean, pretending that the Islamic Republic has not committed crimes against its own people of extraordinary severity and sustained duration.
The most significant protest movement in Iran since the revolution itself, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. The state’s response was to deploy AK-47s and Uzis against crowds of young women, schoolchildren, and university students. A UN Fact-Finding Mission confirmed the state used firearms, including military-grade weapons, against unarmed protesters. Over 530 protesters were killed in that crackdown, including 71 children. More than 22,000 people were arrested. At least seven were executed for their connection to the protests.
Iran’s execution rate has climbed steadily since 2022. In 2025 Iran carried out executions on a scale unseen since the late 1980s. The protests that erupted again in December 2025, triggered by a currency collapse and decades of accumulated economic mismanagement and repression, were met with a response that Amnesty International described as the deadliest period of repression it had documented in decades. On 8 and 9 January 2026, the death toll from the crackdown rose into the thousands. HRANA confirmed 4,714 adult protesters killed, 42 minors, with thousands more deaths under investigation. Security forces deliberately shot at the heads, eyes, genitals, and vital organs of protesters, a documented, intentional pattern of mutilation designed to terrorise. They raided hospitals to arrest the wounded. They imposed a nationwide internet blackout to prevent the world from seeing what they were doing.
The people of Iran were begging the world to pay attention. Some were begging for intervention. Their suffering was, and is, real. Their oppression was, and is, documented. Their government’s crimes against them constitute, under the Rome Statute, crimes against humanity.
Despite this unfortunately. Iran is not a hollowed-out state with weak institutions. It is a 47-year-old revolutionary republic with deep institutional roots. It is a network of religious foundations that control an estimated one-third of the Iranian economy; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is simultaneously a military force, an intelligence apparatus, and an economic conglomerate with interests in construction, oil, and finance. The system is a bureaucratic structure that has survived the Iran-Iraq War, decades of sanctions, three different waves of protest, and two rounds of US-Israeli military strikes. The ideology that animates the system was not invented by Khamenei and it did not die with him.
The Assembly of Experts, the body of senior clerics whose constitutional function is to select the Supreme Leader, was already convening within hours of Khamenei’s death. The succession machinery of the Islamic Republic is an institutional feature, not an improvisation. There has been exactly one supreme leader succession in 47 years: from Khomeini to Khamenei in 1989. The mechanism worked.
Operation Epic Fury
Operation Epic Fury was designed, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, not merely to degrade Iran’s military capacity but to topple the Islamic Republic through domestic regime change, either through popular uprising or internal palace coup. Military historians, including Harvard’s David Silbey, assessed that air power alone has never successfully overthrown a government with strong institutional structures. There is no indication of a US ground campaign as Iran’s terrain makes this challenging. There is no plan for the day after. There is no alternative government ready. The exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who intensified his political activities following the June 2025 war, represents a monarchist strand of the diaspora that has little demonstrated support inside Iran. The regime’s opponents inside the country are brave, determined, and diverse, but they are leaderless, divided, and facing a state security apparatus that has killed thousands of them in the past 60 days.
Killing Khamenei did not end this cycle. It is not even clear it interrupted it. The system that produced him was not killed. The grievances that sustained his government among a significant portion of the Iranian population were not addressed. The alternative political structure that might replace the Islamic Republic does not exist in any form capable of governing 90 million people. And the countries that launched Operation Epic Fury have no plan, no legal basis, and no historical track record that suggests what comes next will be better than what was.
Libya still has no government. Iraq still has a parliament dominated by Iranian-aligned militias. Afghanistan has the Taliban. These are not anomalies. They are the predictable results of the consistent application of a doctrine, regime change through military force, that has never worked when applied to societies with strong institutional cultures and deep historical memories of foreign interference.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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