[News] Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists an Illegal War of Aggression

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://ipa-aip.org/2026/08/22/against-the-false-symmetry-of-the-scissors-an-open-letter-while-iran-resists-an-illegal-war-of-aggression/?sfnsn=mo>
Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran
Resists an Illegal War of Aggression – IPA
August 22, 2026
------------------------------

*Vijay Prashad*

Dear friends and colleagues,

The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in
February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs have fallen
upon civilian and military targets inside the country. Hospitals, schools,
energy facilities, and neighbourhoods have been struck. The 168 schoolgirls
killed in Minab have become the terrible symbol of this war. Iranians have
been forced to live under the constant expectation of another attack, while
Iranian families outside the country endure the peculiar agony of watching
the destruction from afar. This follows on three years of Israeli genocide
in Gaza, which has been carried out due to the relentless military support
of the United States.

Iran did not begin this war. The United States and Israel did. Iran is
resisting an armed attack upon its territory and its people. That
elementary fact must determine the timing, language, and political
responsibilities of anyone who writes about Iran at this moment.

It is in this context that I read your open letter
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners>
to Iran’s political prisoners.

Among you are former political prisoners (such as Angela Davis) and a
current political prisoner (Mumia Abu-Jamal). I have stood in agreement
with many of you on most of the great questions of our time. Of course,
there are elements of your letter with which I agree, but I feel that *this*
letter at *this *time plays a politically damaging role. Just when the
United States and Israel are on the back foot, this letter can provide the
kind of political confusion that mystifies the actual political dynamic on
the ground: Iran has the strategic advantage, having transformed the
US-Israeli question (should Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons) into
an Iranian question
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/11/iran-has-changed-the-question/>
(should Iran allow commerce through its territorial waters unimpeded). That
provides the background of the Left’s moral clarity, the war of aggression
that has failed and that has put Iran as well as its neighbours into a
discussion about regional security rather than imperial security.

But this letter, from the Global North, provides the kind of ideological
cover that the US loves: if the US has lost, then let all sides lose and
let all sides be at fault.

The central image, *two blades of a scissors*, is evocative but erroneous.
It suggests that one of the blades is the Islamic Republic and the other
blade is the United States and Israel, with the Iranian people being cut by
the two of them. The error of the scissors is not merely that its blades
are unequal. It is that the image makes the aggressor and the attacked
appear as parallel sources of the same danger, stripping away the history
and hierarchy that connect them. US imperialism is not simply one
oppression alongside another. It is the force that has encircled Iran,
devastated the region, armed Israel, imposed sanctions upon an entire
population, and now brought war to Iranian territory. Your letter places
the aggression and its target in the same moral frame.

The United States maintains
<https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/>
over 900 hundred military installations outside its borders, imposes
sanctions upon entire populations, finances and arms Israel’s genocide in
Gaza, and has destroyed or destabilised country after country. Iran,
whatever criticisms one might make of its political system, has never
launched wars of aggression. The state born from the 1979 Revolution has
not launched wars of conquest, but it has instead endured invasion from
Iraq at the behest of the West, encirclement, sanctions, sabotage,
assassinations, and now direct attack. The two blades are not equivalent.
One is the blade of imperialist war. The other, whatever its internal
contradictions, is the state and society being cut.

*Hollowness*

The open letter argues that there is a ‘false binary of imperialism and
hollow anti-imperialism’. I was interested in the use of the adjective
‘hollow’.

First, Iran’s actual defence of itself. The assassination of Commander
Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq in 2020 marked a decisive stage
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/28/a-war-that-cannot-be-won-israel-and-the-united-states-bomb-iran/>
in the escalation that culminated in the February 2026 illegal attack on
Iran. Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s forward strategy, namely, to
build a defensive shield through pro-Iranian armed groups that would attack
Israel and US military positions from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen,
Palestine, and other countries. From 2020, the US and Israel systematically
went after that network by trying to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah,
and end the use of Damascus as a base for many of these groups as well as
Syria and Iraq as a logistical lifeline from Iran. Having weakened this
shield, the US and Israel felt emboldened to attack Iran. But they did not
calculate that Iran has built a mechanism to hit the US bases in the Gulf
Arab states and that Iran would restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz.

The use of these mechanisms by Iran put it at a strategic advantage over
the United States and Israel (the latter which has subsequently receded
from the foreground of this war). Iran’s anti-imperialism has not been
‘hollow’ at all but has in fact enabled the Iranian people to protect their
country from an imperialist take-over. This is a significant feat that is
being celebrated across the formerly colonised world as one of the most
consequential strategic reversals suffered by the United States since its
defeat in Vietnam in 1975 (the withdrawals
<https://thenewpress.org/books/the-withdrawal/> from Afghanistan and Iraq
are of a different character than this strategic upper hand by Iran).

Second, in 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries chanted, *Today Iran, tomorrow
Palestine*. Indeed, despite the crackdown on the Left within Iran in the
immediate aftermath of the revolution and with the formation of the Islamic
Republic, the commitment to Palestine remained firm. Iran has never even
hinted at normalisation with Israel and indeed has been forthright in its
defence of the Palestinian cause. No other country in the region has been
as committed to the Palestinian freedom movement, and none has paid so high
a price for that commitment.

Why have the United States and Israel been obsessed with Iran since 1979?
Not because of any question of democracy (Iran has an electoral political
system, although one shaped by the Guardian Council and limitations on
political participation – just as the democratic claims of the United
States are constrained by oligarchic power, racial exclusion, and the
domination of money). Not even because of any nuclear threat (the
International Atomic Energy Agency has not established
<https://www.iaea.org/topics/monitoring-and-verification-in-iran> that Iran
possesses an active nuclear-weapons programme, while Iran’s leadership has
repeatedly declared nuclear weapons religiously prohibited).

The reason they hate Iran is because it is defiant, and its defiance
includes its position for the Palestinian cause.

One can have any view on Iran, of course, but to call its anti-imperialism
‘hollow’ at this moment is inaccurate.

*The US must retreat*

The open letter closes with two demands: first that the Iranian state must
‘stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now’. Common
opposition to the death penalty, which I share, does not place the United
States and Iran in the same historical or political position, nor does it
justify subordinating the immediate demand that the aggressor end its war
to a general indictment of the country under attack. During this period of
the US illegal war on Iran, the United States put nineteen people to death
by lethal injection, but the letter says nothing about that (nor about the
genocidal treatment of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli versions of
Guantanamo – such as Sde Teiman, about which Wesam Afifa has written
<https://leftword.com/product/survivors-of-the-darkness/> so movingly; the
only statement is to say that Iran uses ‘the same logic of domination’ as
Israel, which is a very strange formulation). One can oppose the death
penalty. One can demand due process and humane treatment for prisoners. One
can listen carefully to Iranian workers, women, minorities, and political
activists. But internal criticism cannot be detached from the concrete
conditions in which it is made.

The second demand of the open letter is that the US and Israel ‘must end
their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our
communities’. We are in total agreement here. But the letter is not
addressed to the United States but to Iranian prisoners. That is another
curiosity of its formulation. The signatories are mainly US nationals. Why
not write to their own government? The letter devotes most of its
analytical energy to constructing a common carceral logic, while the demand
directed against the imperialist aggressors is compressed into its final
sentence. The formal condemnation of the war does not undo the political
architecture of the letter, which gives parallel status to the US-Israel
war of aggression and the Iranian prison system.

Frantz Fanon taught us that anti-colonial struggles do not unfold under
conditions of their own choosing. States placed under permanent threat of
invasion, sabotage and regime change develop profound internal
contradictions, including security institutions that can turn coercion
against their own people. You ask ‘global civil society and
anti-imperialist activists and organisations’ to ‘put pressure on the
Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative’. That is, in sum, asking the
people of the world to take a position that would weaken Iran now when it
is standing tall against the war of aggression. There is a time to make a
demand and there is a time to act in solidarity. This is the time of
solidarity with Iran, and not a time to make a claim that advantages the
aggressor imperialists.

Dear friends, neutrality or a third space does not exist in the midst of a
war of aggression. Would we write such a letter to the Vietnamese
government in Hanoi during the US war of aggression, or to the Cuban
government which is now facing a terrible strangulation by the United
States? Why direct this intervention against Iran at this moment? Why
challenge Iran just when it has the United States and Israel on the back
foot? Is it necessary to ask Iran to become perfect before you defend its
right to survive?

At this hour, solidarity begins with a clear demand: the United States and
Israel must end their illegal war, and they must retreat.
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