Many Iranians wonder why world leaders of the democratic West continue to flirt with the Islamic regime of Iran, rather than put faith in the people of Iran to liberate themselves from Islamic tyranny. If Western countries would just step out of the way, then Iranians might be able to join the West as a newly productive country, in humanity, peace, prosperity, freedom and open trade.

Obviously, regime change would bring increased security for the world, if the Iranian people were to rise up and remove the Islamic terror state from power. No doubt it would be bloody for the terrorist mullahs and their hired killers and torturers. But in the aftermath, a revived economy in Iran would become an added benefit for both the Iranian people and the West. There is a powerful economic argument to remove sanctions and to increase trade and development, if that regime and its Sharia enforcement could be made to just go away.

Iran holds the world’s second largest natural gas reserves and ranks fourth in oil. Iran is an ancient country, with remarkable people and culture. It should be preeminent in the world, as a supplier of energy, natural reserves, and human resources. Iran has the potential to match the West with a strong, open economy.

What is the motive behind the forces from the West that keep Iran enslaved under Islam? It is hard to find any coherent reason for western nations to fail to unify with the Iranian people, and to refuse to stand against the terror regime that the people want to remove.

Iran is far from just another Islamic backwater of illiterate desert goat herders stuck in the 7th Century. Despite common Western misconception, Iranians are not Arabs, and also are mostly not really Muslims. Iranians are Persians, a very proud and ancient people, with one of the oldest religions, a monotheism called Zoroastrianism, or Zarathustrianism. It dates from several millennia ago and had a big influence on emerging Christianity and other faiths that followed.

In the aftermath of the first World War, the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey, collapsed from its centuries-long Islamic hold over the wider Middle East. As a result, by 1925 the royal Pahlavi Dynasty seized power in Persia, and Persia was renamed as modern Iran. From that time, Iran began slowly, but strongly developing as a modern nation, ruled by the succession of Shahs. The first of that royal line, Shah Reza Pahlavi, improved the country’s overall infrastructure, fulfilled a promise of educational reform, reformed the legal system, and modernized industries.

For average Iranians living under centuries of Islamic conquest, the quality of life index had not changed much from what it had been under the Samanid Empire (after 819 AD), to the later Safavid Dynasty, or even through the Qajar Dynasty (ended 1925). But Iranians began to enjoy new prosperity during the emerging post-Islamic Pahlavi era (1925-1979).

During 1963-1977, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Iran grew in real terms by an average annual rate of around 10.5 percent, with annual population growth at around 2.7 percent. Modern Iran was ranked among the fastest growing of both developing and developed economies in the world. As a result, Iran’s per capita income rose from $170 in 1963 to $2,060 in 1977.

So then, why did world leaders allow such a successfully modernizing Iran to collapse back into Islamic tyranny? In part, it may be that the Shia regime was allowed to come to power in 1979 as an attempt by the West to counter Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War. For example, it can be argued that the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan later that year was in pursuit of a shipping outlet to the sea region of Iran’s Persian Gulf. Western strategists may have feared that any failed attempt by the West to support the Shah could have enraged the people, and so tipped Iran over into that rising Soviet sphere.

In an interview on February 12, 2019 Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi said, "A couple of years ago, I saw Mr. David Owen, the British Foreign Secretary (at the time of the Shah’s 1979 exit from Iran), in London; he told me, ‘If we knew the king was ill, this wouldn’t happen.’ ” But it is hard to understand that the direction of a powerful nation’s civilization-changing policy could hinge on such a minor misunderstanding over the Shah’s health. In fairness, the western powers up to that time did not have any conception of the kind of cultish horror an Islamic theocracy would make of a modern, industrializing country such as Iran was becoming by the 1970s.

Whatever the reasons back then, now after 40 years of watching that persistent mass atrocity upon Iranian humanity, the western leaders still prefer to engage with the abomination of that horrific cult regime, rather than try to move forward with the people, or to simply get out of their way of self-determination into civilized modernity.

For example, while western leaders continue to fund and host the United Nations, the Islamic regime has now been appointed to the “UN Women’s Rights Panel”. That travesty was one of the worst messages that western leaders could have possibly sent to the Iranian females who want to be recognized as fully human. Those girls are declared as adult “women” and sold into marriages at age 9. They are raped at will, because reporting any such crime would mean a death sentence for the girl, not for the rapist. The anti-woman regime legally assigns its enslaved women at half the value of a human.

Another glaring example of disastrous western policy is the Iran Nuclear Deal. President Trump called it, “The worst deal ever”. And obviously he has been proven correct, as the West has watched the Islamic regime funnel all that money into its weapons and terror proxies. But the western industrial countries continue to trade with the terror regime, and to ignore the frustrated people of Iran, who want to see the weaponized cult collapse.

A dictatorial regime like the one in Islamic Iran survives by internal pressure against its population, and by external courting of powerful, foreign enabler states, corporations, and groups who prop it up.

Internally, the totalitarian regime allows no electoral path for candidates from any alternative political parties. So the regime can never get voted out of power. After it seized power in 1979, the Islamic regime of Iran disbanded all political parties, including those which were the main pillars of the revolution. Most of their members were jailed or hanged.

As a further tool, the Khomeinist cult regime violently cracks down on the people by sending out its proxy street thug militants, and also official security forces, in attack upon any opposition demonstrations. But worse, the regime steals funds from the economy to finance that internal oppression. To repress its citizens, the regime recruits thugs for hire from inside Iran and also buys mercenaries from abroad (from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and militants such as Liwa Zainebiyoun).

Externally, the regime buys the support it needs from developed, industrial countries, which choose to deal with the regime both openly and secretly. At the same time, those external world powers send mixed or false messages to the opposition inside Iran, to keep the people pacified and off balance. When complicit western countries invest in Islamic Iran, they are investing directly into the terror infrastructure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (a designated terrorist group), because that Khomeinist armed force controls at least 40% of Iran’s economy.

Those terror-supporting policies by the West must stop immediately. Next, western leaders must unify in their purpose, and encourage the Iranian people to fulfill their desired move toward regime change in Iran. Such a peaceful transition in the country will be a win-win for both the people of Iran and the western world.

Together, they will then be able to engage in safe trade, and will enjoy leveraged economic prosperity, by opening new access to markets, customers, vendors, and Iran’s human intellectual capital. And much of that human capital will come from millions of Iranian women, who remain trapped without education, jobs or mobility under the archaic Islamic rules of male guardianship and enforced as law by the anti-female terror state.

Regime change in Iran can make a better world for us all who want to live in peace and prosperity. Iranians are widely fed up with the mullahs. They are more than ready to collapse the Islamic regime through a civic revolution, if only the international community will support their peaceful demonstrations across the country, instead of the Islamo-terror-government. That is the strategy that I detailed in February 2018, “Why the West Should Support Iran Protests”. And it remains the path to international success, to make up for four decades of terrible and tragic failure.

By: Kaveh Taheri, a Turkey-based Iranian Human Rights researcher and journalist, co-founder and chairman of the ICBHR.Com and American Truth Project Contributor.