But he didn’t expect it to be as timely as it’s become.
“I didn’t think that the book would come out during such massive protests in Iran, and this kind of slaughter of people inside the country,” he says. “But again, the questions remain the same, about intervention, the American role, Israel’s role in instrumentalizing protests in Iran.”
Each time a major event unfolded, Ghamari rewrote the introduction, which recounts some of his time in prison. By the third rewrite he decided to end with an admission:
“By the time this book comes out, we don’t know what kind of world we are living in.”
That uncertainty, he added, turned out to be the point.
Across its sections — on Iranian power structures, US–Iran relations, American politics, protest movements and media — The Long War on Iran makes a thorough, brick-by-brick argument: Iran is not an anomaly frozen in religious fanaticism, but a modern political society shaped by contested power and popular resistance. “My hope was to, by putting all these essays together, sort of demystify Iran,” Ghamari said. “Because Iran always is situated as the ultimate ‘other.’”
That framing, he argues, flattens Iranian society into a caricature that serves US foreign policy more than it reflects reality.
In US policy debates, Iran is often portrayed as an irrational theocracy solely animated by medieval religious impulses. Ghamari dismantles this view by closely examining the country’s electoral politics, factional rivalries, and civic life. Even under authoritarian constraints, he argues, elections in Iran have mattered.
“I wanted to show Iran has the same kind of politics that everywhere else in the world exists.” – Behrooz Ghamari, author of The Long War on Iran
The author is equally critical of portrayals that reduce Iran’s leadership to fanatics unmoored from modern political logic. Iranian politicians, he writes, are politicians like those elsewhere: opportunistic, corrupt, and deeply attentive to popular pressure. Their differences are not theatrical, but structural, and ignoring them has led Washington to repeatedly miscalculate Iran’s internal dynamics.
“I wanted to show Iran has the same kind of politics that everywhere else in the world exists,” he explains. “There are contested spaces. There is a civil society. There are writers, philosophers, religious thinkers.”
The danger of misreading Iran, Ghamari says, is not merely academic. It becomes justification for sanctions, covert operations and military threats that ultimately strengthen repression inside the country. “The more the US pressures the Iranian government,” he said, “the more it gives the security forces in Iran an excuse to repress the opposition.”
One of the book’s most memorable throughlines is its attention to protest. Ghamari wants readers to know why Iranians repeatedly mobilize despite brutal crackdowns, and when he spoke to Inkstick, this part of his new work was especially timely: Renee Good had just been killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, even as US President Trump was declaring the Iranian government would face consequences for killing protestors.
“There’s nothing that is in the right place at this moment,” Ghamari adds.
He then talked about Iran’s protest movements in comparison to unrest in other countries. Turkey, in his view, has also endured obscenely high inflation rates, yet no protests have occurred on the same level as those recently seen in Iran.
“So why do Iranians pour into the streets?” he asks.
His answer is historical: “They experienced the revolution. They think they bear certain rights, and they’re very assertive in demanding their realization. And they pay the price for it. They’re slaughtered, they’re jailed, they’re exiled. But nevertheless, that continues.”
Ghamari, staid throughout most of the interview for this story, swelled with pride when talking about this unique resilience.
Over the past half-century, he notes, Iran has seen major uprisings every few years. That persistence, he argues, is a testament to Iranian society, to the parts closest to his heart. “That’s the exceptional part of what’s going on in Iran,” he says.
Ghamari is unsparing in his critique of US policy across administrations, arguing that Trump represents an acceleration of long-standing trends. “One of the purposes of this book,” he says, “was to show that many different administrations laid the foundation for the emergence of a Trump administration.”
He points to reporting that, during deliberations over whether to attack Iran, Trump appeared more concerned with domestic optics than geopolitical consequences. “They were more concerned about what Tucker Carlson would say, what Steve Bannon would say, how to sell it domestically,” he argues.
“For Trump, all of this is a spectacle,” he adds. “If the spectacle works for him, he would go for it.”
What restrained him, Ghamari believes, was not humanitarian concern, but fear of chaos. “The US doesn’t want a failed state in Iran. That’s too risky.”
Despite the grim realities he describes, Ghamari hopes his book is a rallying cry, of sorts, for accountability.
“We don’t have any control in this country over the Iranian government and their behavior, but we do have some control, no matter how marginal that control is, over our own government here. And I think that people should encourage and pressure and demand and urge the government in the US to follow a non-interventionist policy. The interventionist policy only creates disasters.”
One of those “disasters” is an empowered security apparatus. By treating Iran as an abstraction rather than a society, Ghamari shows how successive US administrations have reinforced the very dynamics they claim to oppose.
The Long War on Iran ultimately insists that the future of Iran cannot be engineered from abroad. To understand the country, Ghamari suggests, Americans must abandon the comfort of caricature and confront Iran as it is: fractured, unfinished, and far more modern than we realize.
As he writes in his new book, “I hope to document and unmask the impunity with which this politics of hate and genocide unfold today. To show that despite their claims that these atrocities are committed for the salvation of all, will only lead to the annihilation of others.”
