Over the years, I have taken part in many conferences and rallies supporting the movement for regime change and democratic governance in Iran. Spearheaded by the National Council of Resistance of Iran and its leader, Maryam Rajavi, this movement has steadily gained vital support from lawmakers and pro-democracy activists around the world. Attendees at these gatherings come from all over, offering me the opportunity to hear praise for their platform in a number of different languages.
Yet, in each of those situations, it has been clear to me that everyone in attendance was ultimately speaking the same language — a shared language of commitment to democratic principles and universal human rights.
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It makes perfect sense for that broader fight to begin in Iran and focus on the severe abuses taking place there. The mullahs’ regime is widely recognized as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Just this past January, its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps undertook its worst crackdown on dissent to date, killing several thousand peaceful protesters in a desperate bid to suppress the public.
Making matters worse, the regime still refuses to turn away from its nuclear ambitions, even in the face of conflict and economic ruin. Tehran has previously committed as much as $2 trillion to an endeavor that would make nearly every nation on Earth an equivalent target of its oppressive impulses. Tehran’s refusal to bring an end to regional aggression is a stark reminder of just how committed the regime remains to sowing instability and threatening Western civilization.
However, the more immediate crisis remains the threat of further reprisals against domestic dissenters, especially the NCRI’s main constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. Since March, nine of its members, including the 26-year-old Mehdi Khanaki, have been executed alongside 29 participants in the protest movement. Accordingly, the rate of politically motivated executions has risen dramatically in a country notorious for maintaining the world’s highest overall rate of executions per capita.
Through this long history of state killing and brutality, the Iranian regime has lost every pretense of legitimacy and credibility. It has become clear to an ever-widening array of politicians and activists that regime change is the only viable path forward for the Iranian people. This realization follows countless attempts at peaceful resolution over nearly five decades, all of which Tehran has rejected. The United States and its Western allies should recognize Tehran’s stubbornness and political violence as clear reasons to support the Iranian people and their organized resistance movement in their efforts to overthrow the regime.
Tehran has always been deeply afraid of such efforts, and that fear was never more apparent than during the January uprising — the latest of four major rebellions dating back to December 2017. The Iranian people long for a genuine democratic republic, emphatically rejecting both a return to the deposed monarchy and the maintenance of the oppressive status quo. The recurrence of these uprisings in the face of escalating repression is clear evidence that the spirit of revolution persists and that regime change can and will be achieved.
There are legions of organized “resistance units” operating across Iran at this moment under the banner of the MEK, and their ranks have been growing even as the mullahs have accelerated their crackdown. One can imagine how much more quickly those ranks would grow if it were clear that the world’s existing democracies would be in the people’s corner if open conflict broke out tomorrow.
Unfortunately, many in the West remain hesitant to commit to this, mostly because they doubt the vulnerability of a system that has stayed in power for 48 years. But that doubt is a familiar echo from history, and it has been proven groundless time and time again.
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When my late father, Edward Kennedy, led the U.S. Senate in imposing economic sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid government, hardly anyone thought they would live to see the day when that system collapsed, and Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and into the presidency. And for much of the Cold War, it was assumed that the Iron Curtain would remain forever, until young people across Eastern Europe stood up together to topple the Berlin Wall.
The same victory over oppression is not only achievable in Iran but inevitable. The only open question is whether the U.S. and its allies will stand on the right side of history. If they will, they must act by endorsing the NCRI as Iran’s clear democratic alternative and setting policies that prioritize protections for Iranian activists while holding accountable the officials brutalizing them.
Patrick Kennedy represented Rhode Island’s 1st District in the U.S. House from 1995 to 2011. He is on X @PJK4brainhealth
