Iranian-Americans to Trump: Finish the job and free Iran

For 47 years, Iranian Americans have watched administration after administration try to talk the Islamic Republic out of what it is.

We watched Jimmy Carter lose the Shah and gain the hostage crisis. We watched Ronald Reagan trade arms for hostages and get lied to for his trouble. We watched Bill Clinton float engagement while the regime blew up Khobar Towers.

We watched George W. Bush call Iran part of an axis of evil and then hand the regime a $700 billion gift by removing Saddam from its western flank. We watched Barack Obama fly pallets of cash into Tehran and pretend it was diplomacy. We watched Joe Biden lift sanctions, unfreeze billions and shrug while the regime funded Oct. 7.

And then we watched Donald Trump do something none of them did.

He hit them.

He hit their nuclear infrastructure. He reimposed the blockade. He rescinded the oil waiver. He said out loud what every American president since Carter never had the courage to say: That the Islamic Republic is a hostage-taking regime with a flag and it will not be reformed at a negotiating table.

For that, from a community of nearly 2 million Iranian Americans, thank you.

Now finish the job.

Iranian Americans are not a political monolith. We disagree about many things. Some in our community will look at this war, at the destruction, the casualties, at the price of oil, at the strain on the global economy, and conclude it was not worth it, especially if it does not deliver a free Iran on the other side.

But there is one thing the majority of Iranians, inside and outside the country, agree on: The Iranian people are deserving of the basic freedoms this regime has denied them for 47 years.

The right to live freely. The right to practice the religion they want or none at all. The right to love who they want. The right to wear what they want. The right to study what they want. The right to say and write what they want without fear of imprisonment, torture or death. On that, from Tehran to Tabriz to Tehrangeles, there is no disagreement.

We know because the Iranian people told us themselves. They came into the streets in 2009 and 2017 and 2019 and 2022 and every year in between, unarmed, chanting for their freedom.

The regime answered with bullets. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000-50,000 Iranians were killed by their own government in January alone, and thousands more since 1979. Protesters shot in the eyes. Girls beaten to death for showing their hair. Teenagers hanged from cranes.

President Trump said he would come to their rescue, and he did.

Presidents before him did not have the vision, or the will, to see the Iranian people themselves as America’s most important ally on the ground. They kept looking for a reformer inside the regime. There isn’t one.

The regime still has its Basij, its Revolutionary Guard, its intelligence services and its executioners. That means the US has to keep degrading the regime, its military, its financial lifelines and its ability to project fear at home and abroad.

The Iranian people are still there. They are still our best allies, and our best chance at removing this regime for good.

And it is a chance we should take now, because removing this regime is a matter of American national security. This is the regime that took our diplomats hostage in 1979; that killed 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983; that used IEDs to kill and maim American soldiers in Iraq for a decade; that launched the drones and proxies that have been killing Americans across the Middle East for 40 years.

Which brings us to the American service members we have lost in this war: 18 killed and nearly 500 wounded as of this week. Every single one of those losses is a tragedy. No American should ever suffer a scratch, let alone lose a life, at the hands of this deadly regime and its deadly ideology.

Our military has spent months carefully degrading the regime’s military capability while going to extraordinary lengths to keep both American and Iranian civilian casualties as low as possible.

None of this is to celebrate war. Iranian Americans, of all people, understand what war costs. Many of us have relatives who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and never came home. Many of us have parents whose lives were bent in half by the revolution and everything that followed. We are not warmongers. We are witnesses.

And what we are witnessing, finally, is an American president who has looked the Islamic Republic in the eye and refused to blink.

So thank you, Mr. President.

Now please do what every previous administration was too afraid to do.

Finish the job.

Free Iran.

Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.

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