Avideh Motmaen Far: The mullahs took Iran from its people. America is taking it back

US President Donald Trump, alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaks about the conflict in Iran in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on April 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. Photo by SAUL LOEB /AFP via Getty Images

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I am an Iranian-Canadian — one of more than 200,000 in this country who fled, or whose parents fled, the very regime now collapsing under American pressure. We did not leave Iran. The Islamic Republic took it from us. And 47 years later, that distinction still gets erased every time a Western foreign policy desk treats “Iran” and “the regime” as synonymous.

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They are not. The Iranian people are the Islamic Republic’s first and longest-suffering victims. Mahsa Amini, beaten to death by the morality police in 2022 for letting her hair show. The 176 passengers and crew — 55 of them Canadian citizens and 30 Canadian permanent residents — incinerated when the IRGC shot down Flight PS752 in January 2020 and then lied about it for three days. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protesters answered with bullets, prison and rape. The Baha’is, Christians, Jews, Kurds, Baluchis, Sunni Arabs — who faced discrimination — and the dual nationals taken as hostages and traded for cash. That Iran — our Iran — is the one the regime spends every waking hour trying to silence.

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What Iranians inside the country want is not a mystery to anyone. They want the regime gone. They do not want the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). They do not want supposedly constructive engagement. They want what their cousins in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles and London already have — the right to choose their government, the right to dress as they please, the right to a functioning economy and the right to live as a normal nation alongside Israel rather than to be conscripted into a 40-year holy war against it. The flag they wave at every rally is the lion-and-sun, not the green-white-and-red of the mullahs.

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President Trump’s Hormuz Doctrine, Secretary Hegseth’s “shoot to destroy” rules of engagement and the three carriers in the Gulf are not — whatever the regime’s apologists insist — an attack on the Iranian people. They are the first credible American policy in a generation that takes our side against the theocracy that hijacked our country.

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For four decades, the United States treated the Islamic Republic of Iran as a problem to be managed — a regime to be sanctioned, contained, negotiated with and ultimately appeased. Every administration since Carter quietly accepted Tehran’s premise: that the mullahs were a permanent fact of geopolitical life, and that American power had to bend around them. That premise died this month in the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have replaced it with something the Islamic Republic’s clerical oligarchs have not faced in a generation: an American president who is not bluffing.

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By the time the USS George H.W. Bush slid into U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility this week, three American supercarriers were operating in the Middle East simultaneously for the first time since 2003. That is not a coincidence. That is a doctrine.

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The arrival of the USS George H.W. Bush, joining the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Gerald R. Ford in theater, places three Nimitz and Ford-class strike groups, twelve escort vessels, more than 200 aircraft and roughly 15,000 sailors and Marines in striking range of every Iranian target that matters. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, this is the largest concentration of American naval airpower in the region since the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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Trump declined to give a timeline for when the Iran war ends. Good. Predictability is what gave us the JCPOA. Strategic ambiguity — combined with overwhelming force in the water — is what wins. The carriers are not in the Gulf to fight a war. They are there to make sure Tehran understands that any war it chooses to escalate, it will lose catastrophically and quickly. That is what deterrence looks like, and Washington had forgotten how to spell it.