The Country that Gave Me Refuge Is Bombing the Country I Fled
On war, memory, and the cost of regime change
I was eighteen years old when I fled Iran. It was 1984, the revolution already five years deep, the war with Iraq grinding on. We crossed through Pakistan, waited in Vienna, and landed in America. I wrote a memoir about that journey, not because the story was unusual, but because it was common. Millions of Iranians have versions of it. I never imagined I would wake up one Saturday morning, forty-two years later, to learn that the country I escaped was being bombed by the country that gave me refuge.
At 2:30 a.m. on February 28, 2026, American and Israeli missiles began striking Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Kermanshah, Tabriz, and cities across Iran. President Trump posted a pre-recorded video to Truth Social, calling it “Operation Epic Fury.” The white USA hat, the lectern at Mar-a-Lago, the address telling ninety million Iranians to overthrow their government: all of it staged before a single missile was launched.
“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” he said. He’s right about that, though not in the way he means.
Two days earlier, U.S. envoys sat across from Iranian negotiators in Geneva. Oman’s mediator told CBS a deal “actually can be reached tomorrow.” Iran had reportedly agreed to dilute its near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile and submit to inspections. By Friday afternoon, the State Department designated Iran a “State Sponsor of Wrongful Detention” and ordered embassy staff in Jerusalem to leave “TODAY.” Friday night, Trump flew to Mar-a-Lago.
At 2:30 a.m. on Saturday, the missiles started.
Elliott Abrams, Trump’s own former special representative for Iran, reported from Israeli sources that the strike date was agreed upon two weeks earlier, during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington. Every round of the Geneva talks unfolded while the date was already locked in. The diplomacy was staged. Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev called it a “cover operation.” For once, he wasn’t wrong.
David Sanger’s analysis in the New York Times names it: a war of choice. The Defense Intelligence Agency assessed last year that Iran would need until 2035 to develop an ICBM capable of reaching the United States. Trump’s own Secretary of State acknowledged on February 25 that Iran is “not enriching now.” A confidential IAEA report from February 27 noted the agency cannot verify the composition of Iran’s stockpile because Tehran denied inspectors access after last summer’s strikes. The administration will argue that the inability to verify is functionally equivalent to a threat. I understand that logic. But accepting it means accepting that any country that restricts IAEA access has authorized its own bombing. The absence of evidence becomes the evidence. We went to war in Iraq on that reasoning. The graves in Fallujah are the result.
Trump did not seek congressional authorization. He called it a war and warned of American casualties, but made no effort to obtain authorization for the use of military force. Britain refused to allow the use of its bases. Officials from three allied governments told the Washington Post they had heard “no plausible legal justification.”
I fled Iran in 1984. That I am now watching the country that took me in bomb the country I left, without congressional authorization or legal justification, does not sit easily.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Americans have rallied in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Munich. The diaspora has watched the regime massacre protesters by the thousands since December 2025. And now the bombs are falling, some are jubilant, but most are conflicted.
I carry that conflict myself. You cannot have fled that regime, or watched it murder your compatriots, without harboring a feral hope that it will finally end. For the person in a Tehran prison right now, or the mother who buried a child shot at a January protest, the identity of the liberator may not matter. I cannot tell them they are wrong to welcome the bombs. I have not earned that right.
I am writing this from Portland, Oregon, not from a cell in Evin. But liberation delivered by air power, with no plan for the day after, has a history. It is not a hopeful one.
We who fled Iran did not flee so that the country could be liberated by a man who governs by emergency decree and denounced his own Supreme Court as agents of foreign powers a week before starting a war. The Iranian people deserve freedom. They do not deserve it as a gift from an aspiring autocrat who does not believe in freedom for anyone but himself.
David Frum, a conservative and former Bush speechwriter, asked the question the administration hasn’t: what if the regime doesn’t fall? Trump has insisted he will not send ground troops. Iran has already retaliated, firing missiles at U.S. bases across the Gulf. A wounded Islamic Republic, still in power, still armed, now with a blood debt, is the worst outcome for everyone.
Frum wrote a line I haven’t been able to shake: “A free Iran and a free United States: Americans should seek both. If we can get to a free Iran fast, Trump’s plot against American freedom will have less scope to operate. If the war to free Iran falters or slows, the attack on free institutions at home may expand and accelerate.”
The moral case for liberating Iran is one I have lived. But the instrument delivering that liberation is a president who has taxed without Congress, started a war without authorization, and weaponized federal agencies against political opponents. War empowers presidents. The legal challenges that have checked this president’s emergency decrees carry far less weight once service members are in harm’s way. No president in American history has shown himself less trustworthy with that power.
I left Iran because a revolution devoured its own ideals. I am not prepared to watch the same thing happen here. Congress must act. Oversight cannot wait. The flag stands for something, and it is not a man in a white hat posting videos at 2:30 in the morning from a country club while missiles fall on my country of birth.