War in Iran: Our First Reaction Was Grief

In a recent article in Universitetsavisa, the war in Iran was described as something that initially brought a feeling of relief. For many Iranians, however, the dominant feeling today is not relief but grief. People are dead. Families are mourning. Schools and universities are closed. A nation is approaching its new year in shock rather than celebration.

War in Iran: - We are relieved

There is a proverb often attributed to Chinese wisdom: When an egg is broken from the outside, it becomes food for others. When it is broken from the inside, it becomes life.

The meaning is simple. Real transformation must come from within a society. When change is imposed from outside, it rarely produces freedom. More often it produces destruction.

Iran is a country of more than 90 million people, with over 70 million adults. It is also one of the most socially and culturally diverse societies in the Middle East. Iran is one of the oldest continuous political and cultural entities in the world and, despite periods of foreign intervention, it was never formally colonized. Such a society is quite resilient.

Iranian society contains a broad spectrum of views: regime supporters, conservatives, moderates, reformists, advocates of gradual reform, and those who seek radical political change. Some even support overthrowing the system at any cost. But there is little evidence that any single position commands an absolute majority.

In such a society, political change cannot be reduced to slogans such as “the Iranian people want this or that.” Which people? What percentage? Even if only 10 percent of the population supported a particular political position, that group alone would still be larger than the entire population of Norway.

Sustainable political change in such complex societies normally occurs gradually. Looking at the past two centuries, Iran has indeed changed slowly through cycles of reform, crisis and adaptation. Iran today, both its society and its political system, is very different from the Iran of the first decade after the 1979 revolution.

External military intervention risks disrupting these internal processes rather than supporting them.

History also reminds us that foreign intervention in Iran has rarely produced democracy. One of the most decisive moments in modern Iranian politics was the 1953 coup, when the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown with the support of the United States and the United Kingdom. The Shah returned to power and ruled as an authoritarian monarch for the next 25 years. That episode was one of the factors that later fueled the revolutionary movement of 1978–79.

Today, some of the loudest supporters of military intervention are monarchist activists associated with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who has lived outside Iran since 1979. Another group advocating regime change through war is the organization known as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), a controversial group with a long and violent history that even supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s.

But beyond political debates, the most immediate reality is human suffering.

Reports from the first hours of the war indicate that more than 160 schoolgirls were killed when a primary school in the southern city of Minab was struck. Footage has also circulated showing attacks on schools in other cities, including Qazvin in northern Iran. Civilian infrastructure has also been hit, including police stations in residential neighborhoods, civil airports, government buildings, and hospitals in Tehran. Strikes have occurred in densely populated neighborhoods of a city with more than 12 million residents.

Among the victims was Hamid Amini, a Norwegian-Iranian engineer who studied at NTNU and later worked for many years at DNV. He had traveled to Iran for parental leave with his wife and newborn child. He was killed in his home.

These are not abstract geopolitical developments. They are human tragedies.

Even international media outlets that are not known for sympathy toward Iran have described the destruction in stark terms. The British far-right newspaper The Telegraph recently described Tehran as resembling “an apocalypse,” with hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble.

Schools across the country are now closed. Universities, where women today form the majority of students, particularly in many STEM disciplines, have also shut down. March 21 marks Nowruz, the Iranian New Year and the beginning of spring. Traditionally it is a time of renewal, family gatherings and hope. This year many families will mark it in mourning.

Some commentators have compared the current war to the Allied interventions in Germany and Japan during the Second World War. Such comparisons are historically misleading. Those wars followed aggressive expansion by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which invaded neighboring countries, occupied their territories and imposed brutal systems of domination. During the Second World War, the United States and the United Kingdom even allied with the Soviet Union under Stalin’s brutal regime in order to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate occupied Europe. The historical context and causes of that war were fundamentally different from the situation in Iran today. Iran has not invaded neighboring countries in such a manner.

Over the past three decades, the Middle East has repeatedly experienced foreign military interventions, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. These wars were often justified in the name of democracy or liberation. Yet the outcomes have frequently been instability, fragmentation and long-lasting human suffering. There is little reason to believe that the current war will produce a different outcome.

Criticism of the Iranian government exists both inside Iran and among Iranians abroad. That debate is real and ongoing. But a reckless war driven by the geopolitical interests of leaders such as war criminal convicted Netanyahu and Trump cannot be presented as a path to freedom.

War does not liberate societies overnight. It destroys lives immediately.

And today, many Iranians, inside the country and across the diaspora, are not feeling relief.

They are mourning.