Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi teaches at St Andrews.
The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even the pretence that it was compelled by evidence of an Iranian dash for a bomb or an imminent attack. Such claims do not survive scrutiny; they barely withstand repetition.
In a crowded conference room in January 2025, Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the Executives of Reconstruction Party and brother-in-law of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, compared the country’s situation after the collapse of the Syrian state to the crisis it faced at the al-Faw peninsula in 1988. During the First Battle of al-Faw in 1986, Iranian forces...
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