The mother of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a third-grade student grade student killed in U.S. airstrike on primary school in Minab: I had prepared dinner for him and when he was eating he said: “Mom, the food you made tastes like heaven.” I said: “My son, why are you saying this? You’ve never said this before.” Around midnight he put pillows around himself and sat with his brother. He said: “Brother, let’s play. I’m Iran and you’re America. Let’s play with guns and tanks.” They started playing together. He said: “See, Iran won? Brother, Iran won. I was Iran and I won.” My son said Iran was the winner. All these things seemed to be inspired to him that night. He did all of this the night before his martyrdom. He also prayed and read the Quran that night. In the morning he said: “Mom, take a picture of me.” This child was an angel. He used to say: “My name is Mikaeel. Mikaeel means God’s angel. If anyone has a wish, tell me so I can fulfill it.” Everyone involved in the decision to kill Mikaeil was once a child. Once, they were also five. They laughed and they played. If the American soldier that fired the missile had been born somewhere else, at another time, they might have met a child like Mikaeil on a playground. Maybe he would have shared the delicious dish his mother made with them. What is the purpose of life if not to share a good meal with a good friend. That dark day, I remember scrolling through social media and finding an article published in The Forward rebuking an amorphous political abstraction it called “the left” for refusing to let Iranian people celebrate the death of Ayatollah Khamenei. By then, Mikaeil was already dead, one child among 163, yet the article did not name him. Nor did it name Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani, the fourteen-month-old granddaughter of Khamenei, who was killed alongside him in the same U.S.-Israeli strike. I imagine Zahra playing with her grandfather inside his home. Or maybe she was asleep when the bomb came. When I finally saw her tiny coffin, all I could think about was the article chastising me for refusing to celebrate the very strike that killed her. I still do not know what name to give the moral deformity required to publish such a piece and I will carry the cruelty of that moment until the day I die. Since then, I think constantly about the war—about how it was sold to the American public and, especially, to the Iranian American diaspora. I think about how readily some of the worst people in the world consign the death of sweet Mikaeil to the anesthetizing category of “mistake.” Former intelligence officer Josephine Guilbeau broke rank and spoke with uncommon courage on how the presence of a school would have been readily apparent to anyone conducting even a minimally competent review. The exterior of Shajarah Tayyiba Elementary School, Guilbeau noted, bore a bright mural hand-painted by the children who studied there. A playground was plainly visible in satellite imagery, and an official public listing identified the building as a primary school. She added that the Tomahawk believed to have struck it carried an onboard camera capable of relaying an image of the target before impact. The school was not hidden. It was visible from the ground, from above, and, by her account, from the weapon sent toward it. To behold the real face of American “foreign policy,” one need only look toward Gaza, where the world can watch the Palestinian genocide unfold in real time under American patronage. With Capitol Hill authorizing one weapon transfer after another, any fleeting note of “concern” or “condemnation” can amount to little more than theater. Yet let an American teenager invoke the vaunted right to “free speech” and oppose the wanton carnage carried out in our name throughout the Global South, and the state will physically and psychologically batter them into submission. The imperial boomerang is not some left-wing thought experiment. Contempt for civilian life abroad and repression at home belong to the same political order. That same order “accidentally” sent a 3,000-pound American cruise missile toward Minab. Nor did the missile arrive apart from the wider policy that made it possible—the economic siege, the destruction of diplomacy, the long campaign to render Iranian life expendable. The violence changed form, but never purpose. It was deliberate then, and it is deliberate now. By the time an American weapon struck the school in Minab, Washington had spent the period since 1953 proving that Iranian dignity and sovereignty could be sacrificed whenever American power demanded it: the CIA-backed coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized the oil industry and defied British imperial control; the Shah and the terror of SAVAK, a secret police agency built with American and Israeli aid; and the Reagan-era embrace of Saddam, consecrated in Iranian blood when Donald Rumsfeld offered him a handshake one month after the American government had documented near-daily Iraqi chemical warfare against the country. But what of economic warfare, so often omitted from any serious account of American violence because it does not arrive with a big explosion? The familiar anti-government op-ed, by now almost a genre unto itself, has given exhaustive attention to “regime” brutality, followed by near-total silence about the economic strangulation imposed by America. Iranian pain may serve only to indict Tehran. The first year of Trump-era “maximum pressure” offered one stark example. America abandoned the nuclear accord in May 2018 even while the IAEA continued to verify Iranian implementation of every nuclear-related commitment under it. America then weaponized control over the dollar and global banking, making even lawful payment for food or medicine extraordinarily difficult. The burden, of course, fell on the Iranian patient. By May 2019, MAHAK, a pediatric cancer center in Tehran, lacked pegaspargase, mercaptopurine, and vinblastine, each needed for childhood leukemia care. Since no bomb had fallen, however, America could preserve the fiction that it had killed no one. Yet a 2025 study in The Lancet Global Health linked unilateral economic coercion to an annual toll near 564,000, comparable to armed conflict; more than half of that toll fell on children five or younger. I also think about the inhumanity required to cheer the death of little Mikaeil, to weigh the life of a child against the continued enrichment of a wealthy pedophile and decide that the bargain was worth it. When President Donald Trump publicly declared, “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he was speaking to me, to my family, and to the happy and modest life they had built in Isfahan. The old Iranian proverb, “Isfahan is half the world,” came to distill the extraordinary wealth of beauty, history, and art held within the city. But not to génocidaire Donald Trump, who effectively boasted that some of the most consequential decision-making in American “Middle East” policy had been cultivated by his Zionist billionaire patron. No—not to Miriam Adelson, who poured $95 million into the pro-Trump Preserve America super PAC during a single quarter of the 2024 election. Adelson, whose cherished genocidal project is the permanent absorption of the occupied West Bank into “Israel.” Not to the grotesquely rechristened “Department of War,“ either. Not to Pete Hegseth and his crusader-inflected worldview. Not to Marco Rubio, the plunderer-in-chief of Venezuela. To him, Venezuelan oil is not a national patrimony but an American entitlement awaiting collection. And not, apparently, to the small but vocal wing of the Iranian diaspora that cheered the bombing of their native land while venerating “Persian civilization.” I have to ask: how exactly does that work? Israel bombed Golestan Palace in Tehran, Chehel Sotoun and Masjed-e Jāme in Isfahan, and ancient ground in the Khorramabad Valley. Yet these same "people” who claim to guard Iranian cultural inheritance now wave the flag of the genocidal entity laying waste to it. The self-styled “Persian” who define Iran against Islam and an imagined Arab invader, is not a guardian of civilization but a chauvinist. To tear the Islamic inheritance away from Iran in the name of “Persian civilization” would not recover some pure national essence. The Islamic Republic did not bring Islam to Iran in 1979. Islam entered Iran in the seventh century and became inseparable from Iranian art, poetry, philosophy, architecture, and political life. Medieval Iran preserved a distinct linguistic and cultural identity within the Islamic world, even as Persian language, literature, philosophy, and statecraft helped shape Islamic civilization itself. Hell, even the brutal, occidentophilic monarch they continue to romanticize from their Encino mansion was Muslim. If family trauma can confer political authority, am I now entitled to determine the fate of a nation of ninety million and an architectural history six millennia old? We all carry trauma, but I am hardly so self-important, so deluded, that I would imagine mine could grant me the right to hand Iran over for “liberation” to a country at war for more than ninety percent of her recorded history. And certainly not to Reza Pahlavi. A mere day and a half after America joined an unprovoked Israeli-led war and committed a reckless act of aggression by bombing safeguarded nuclear infrastructure at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan that risked radiological and chemical catastrophe, Reza Pahlavi appeared in the French capital to urge every Western government to deny Tehran any reprieve. Only regime change, he declared, would do. Pahlavi who eagerly shook the hand of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court. In 2002, Netanyahu assured Congress that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would bring “enormous” positive change to the region and trigger an “implosion” in Iran. He would spend nearly a quarter century repackaging the same catastrophic domino theory, with Iran forever cast as the next brick to fall. Netanyahu, who threatened to visit upon Lebanon the same “destruction and suffering” Israel had already inflicted on Gaza. As I stated on Blueksy: I think often about how America transformed victory over Nazi Germany into an enduring claim to civilizational righteousness, only to preside over a Western order that enabled economically strangling and gassing the people of Iran. I return to that contradiction and whenever someone in America should inevitably ask me, “Why does Iran chant ‘Death to America’?” I return, too, to the photograph of Mikaeil waving goodbye to his mother for the final time, his little hand raised in an ordinary gesture of love.