I heard a British Iranian on the radio the other day, calling into a phone-in, very calm, very sure of herself, explaining that the bombing should continue. Not as a grim last resort, but more as if it were simply the next sensible step. Then she added that all expat Iranians agreed with her and welcomed what Trump was doing.
That was about the point where I stopped following the argument and started noticing the framing.
“All expat Iranians”. It sounds convincing if you don’t stop to think about it. As if someone has gone round, asked the question, and tallied the results. In reality it just nudges the awkward bits out of view. Which expats. Who disagrees. Who exactly is being spoken for.
Because the reality is not tidy. The Iranian diaspora is not a bloc, it’s a spread. Monarchists who would quite like to wind the clock back. Republicans who want something entirely different. Secular liberals, left-leaning groups, people who still support the regime, and plenty who have no interest in any grand project and are simply trying to keep track of family. They don’t agree on the destination, never mind the route.
And in fact, over the past few days, you could hear that plainly enough if you listened. Plenty of British Iranians have been calling into the same sort of programmes saying the opposite - that it’s a disaster for ordinary Iranians, that it will make things worse, that Trump shows little interest in what happens to the people on the receiving end of it. Not a unified chorus, but certainly not silence either.
I did find myself wondering who she had actually spoken to, if anyone. Or whether this was one of those private consensus exercises where the dissent never quite gets invited.
None of that, on its own, is especially troubling. People generalise all the time, especially on the radio. It’s a phone-in, not a policy seminar.
What caught slightly was the ease with which “the bombing should continue” was said from here.
Living here does have its advantages. You can speak plainly, you’re not filtering yourself, and you’re not trying to piece together events from patchy information or wondering if the connection will drop. You can say the regime is oppressive and should go, which plenty inside Iran would agree with if they could say it safely.
But it does shift the feel of what you’re saying.
Saying “keep going” from a call-in line in Britain is not quite the same thing as saying it from a flat where the windows have already been taped up and there’s a bag by the door in case you need to leave quickly. The words are identical, but they don’t carry the same consequences. One is a view. The other is a judgement call you may have to live with the same afternoon.
War, at a distance, tends to arrange itself into something more orderly than it really is. It becomes about pressure, leverage, what comes next. On the ground it’s more immediate. Is there fuel. Is the road still open. Do you go now or wait and see if it settles. That sort of calculation.
None of this makes her position mad. There are Iranians, both inside the country and outside it, who think the regime won’t shift without force, and you can see how they arrive there.
But moving from that to “we all agree” does something else. It smooths over the disagreement and, with it, the uncertainty about how this plays out. It quietly drops the people who are less keen on being on the receiving end of it.
I found myself thinking about the call afterwards, not because it was unusual, but because it wasn’t. You hear that kind of certainty quite a lot once you start listening for it.
And meanwhile, somewhere else, someone is deciding whether to stay put for another night or get in the car before dark, which doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that lends itself to neat agreement.
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