Arang Keshavarzian on the Plight of Iran's Reformists
| The joint US–Israeli bombing of Tehran, now in its eleventh day, has already taken a heavy toll across the city. Among the numerous civilian sites in Iran’s capital to have suffered damage from what Pete Hegseth calls “death and destruction from the sky” is its Grand Bazaar, long a hub for the city’s influential merchants. “Nine weeks earlier,” Arang Keshavarzian wrote on Sunday in the NYR Online, “that bazaar had been at the center of a very different upheaval. In late December shopkeepers, moneylenders, and merchants there took to the streets, igniting an immense wave of protests against the regime that was brutally repressed by Iran’s security apparatus. When they unleashed this week’s violence, the US and Israel at once obscured the memory of that uprising and capitalized on it.” That Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are “trying to bend the Dey protests to their own purpose,” Keshavarzian continues, makes it “all the more urgent to understand the uprising’s causes and legacy.” Those causes are complex. They stretch back, Keshavarzian argues, to the early years of the twenty-first century, when the regime at once sidelined a prominent reformist movement and implemented policies that put much of the country’s economy under the sway of institutions with close ties to the state. The protests sparked by these changes, he suggests, “offer a window into the fortunes of Iran’s citizens, the changing structure of its state, and the trajectory of the regime the US now seeks to obliterate.” Below, alongside Keshavarzian’s essay, we have gathered recent pieces about the war on Iran alongside essays from our archive about the political and economic shifts that transformed the country in the first decade of this century. To understand the regime the US now seeks to obliterate, we have to return to the political and economic convulsions that produced last January’s uprising. “The legal questions are not just relevant but essential. A world in which only a leader’s subjective ‘morality’ constrains any nation from launching aggressive military attacks against other nations is not only a world governed by men rather than by law but also one in which power rules absolutely.” —March 6, 2026 “Fathoming Trump’s motives for attacking Iran now is a fool’s errand. His stated reasoning does not wash, and he hardly seems to have a consistent line of thinking. But his actions doubtless reflect how little US military strategists still understand the power of Iranian nationalism, or indeed of Iran.” —March 4, 2026 This Thursday:
Sue Halpern in conversation with Marc Elias Thursday, March 12th at 5 PM EDT New York Review contributor Sue Halpern hosts the attorney and voting rights expert Marc Elias for a wide-ranging conversation on threats to American voting rights, including gerrymandering, campaign financing, and the SAVE Act. The event, conducted via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes including an audience Q&A session. This event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public. “We are witnessing today the intensification of the post-election crackdown, perhaps the severest the country has experienced since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989…. The repression has included widespread arrests of reformist politicians, student and women activists, trade union leaders, journalists, lawyers, and public intellectuals; show trials and trials behind closed doors; coerced televised ‘confessions’; lengthy detentions without trial and long prison sentences after trial; and, perhaps most disturbingly, widespread executions.” —April 7, 2011 “Millions of Iranians have moved from reluctant acquiescence to a system over which they believed they had some limited, quadrennial influence into outright opposition to a regime they now view with undiluted contempt. The clerical and political establishment is more split—and more volatile—than at any time since the bloody postrevolutionary years, when scores were settled as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini outmaneuvered those who had fought for democracy rather than theocracy.” —August 13, 2009 Twenty-nine months of reformist rule have given Iran a vigorous press and a less doctrinaire foreign policy. But Mr. Khatami’s achievements in government have been modest. In the words of Ms. Adelkhah, the Islamic Republic is “continuing basically along the same course” it has followed since the revolution. About many aspects of Iranian life, a voter might ask: Are the dovom Khurdadis really reformers at all?
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