What We Don’t Know About Iran – and Why It Matters

Charles Kurzman, “What We Still Don’t Know About Iran, and Why It Matters,” April 23, 2026.

What do Iranians think about the attack that the U.S. and Israel launched on their country in February?

Would the answer to that question affect your views on the war? If this war was originally launched — at least in part — on behalf of the Iranian people, perhaps what Iranians want ought to be central to ongoing conversations about the war, even during the current shaky cease-fire.

I mean Iranians inside Iran, not just outside of Iran. The Iranian diaspora is vocal, and very divided, about this war. In conversations with dozens of friends and colleagues in the Iranian diaspora since the assault began on February 28, I’ve noticed they tend to believe that their attitudes are also the attitudes of Iranians in Iran. No doubt that reflects who they are speaking with inside Iran, when they are able to make contact.

But contact with Iran is very limited. For more than two months now, internet access in Iran is rare and fleeting. International land-line calls are expensive, and Iranians can’t receive calls from abroad. Few Iranians can afford special VPN software that bypasses the internet blackout, with a single gigabyte of data costing more than the average monthly income. Possessing a smuggled satellite phone is punishable by death, and the Iranian government says it can trace the phones’ signals. Government officials and prominent supporters have full access to the world through “white” SIM cards, and official media outlets communicate their views freely, but independent journalists and ordinary Iranians cannot.

As a result, even now that the fighting has paused, we still don’t have systematic information on public opinion inside Iran. Let’s imagine two scenarios.

In the first scenario, imagine that Iranians overwhelmingly supported the war. If you have opposed the war, would that change your analysis?

In this scenario, we might point out that large numbers of Iranians have voiced their opposition to the government repeatedly over the past generation, including widespread protests in 1999, 2009, 2017, and 2018-2019. In 2022, hundreds of participants in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement were killed. Thousands of protestors were killed in January 2026, with demonstrators expressing more outright rejection of the nezam – the Persian word for the system of government — than the Islamic Republic has ever witnessed. Home videos of funerals even show headscarved grandmothers, who one wouldn’t expect to be anti-government, cursing Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, Iran’s leader, who was assassinated in the first wave of bombardment on February 28.

Internal avenues for political change are blocked: reformist candidates are not allowed to run for office, moderate candidates are not allowed to make changes when they do get elected, and protests are violently repressed. Iranians may have welcomed an exogenous shock like foreign military intervention. But we don’t know how many shared this view.

Now imagine an alternative scenario. What if few Iranians supported the war, even among the opposition. If you have been in favor of the war, would that change your analysis?

In this scenario, we might note that Iran is among the most nationalistic societies in the world, according to the World Values Survey. Iranians may consider the war an assault on Iran’s sovereignty. They may worry about the safety of their families. They may feel that the violence of war is unbearable, even if they support regime change. They may be discouraged that the war did not immediately topple the Islamic Republic, or that the war is leading to heightened repression.

President Trump’s initial announcement of the war called on the Iranian people to complete the operation by overthrowing the Islamic Republic once the American and Israeli bombing stopped: “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.” We now know that this appeal was disingenuous – the director of the Central Intelligence Agency told Trump that this scenario was “farcical.”

But if American war planners considered Iranians to be potential allies, the U.S. did little to cultivate Iranian public opinion. In one of the most harrowing incidents of the war, U.S. forces bombarded an elementary school, killing more than a hundred children. The Trump administration did not apologize. Instead, American officials talked about destroying the entire country, not just the government. President Trump threatened “to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” and warned that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” unless the government agreed to his terms. State media in Iran seized on insensitive comments like these to rally internal support.

One month into the war, Trump denied that the U.S. was fighting to liberate people of Iran: “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change.” Instead, the Trump administration offered justifications for the war that have little to do with improving the lives of Iranians. For example, Trump suggested that he was looking for a Delcy Rodriguez in Iran – a government figure who will maintain the current government by cutting a deal with the U.S., as Rodriguez appears to have done in Venezuela. Iranian dissidents can’t be pleased with that prospect, if they have enough access to global news to have learned of it.

And regardless of what Iranians want, this war was launched on false premises of imminent threat to the United States, in violation of international law, and with poor strategic planning.

From the scraps of evidence I’ve been able to assemble – scattered social media posts from inside Iran, diaspora reports of brief conversations with relatives, a few quotes in news outlets that have heard from ordinary people inside Iran – I would guess that Iranians are just as divided inside Iran as outside the country, and that views trended more negative as the violence accumulated.

When Iran’s portals to the outside world eventually re-open, I imagine that Iranian public opinion will not decisively support the war as liberation from tyranny, even among Iranians who consider the Islamic Republic to be tyrannical. But I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.