Marc Champion: I read Iran's 14,390-word letter to Americans so you don't have to

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has published a letter to the American people ahead of midterm elections in the U.S. Suffice to say that this remarkable document ends with Jesus Christ and the last Imam, Mahdi, rising together to lead humanity into the Kingdom of Heaven. I read all 14,390 words — think of it as a public service.

Well executed and at one tenth the length, this could have been an interesting exercise for the Islamic Republic, because it had plenty to work with. The war President Donald Trump launched against Iran on Feb. 28 was never popular with Americans — including much of his own MAGA movement — and seven months in, it clearly has not gone to plan.

Ignoring the pious incantations with which all Iranian officials are obliged to begin their statements, it starts astutely. The IRGC states that this was an unprovoked war that opened with U.S. and Israeli missiles killing 168 school children and their teachers in the south, as well as Iran’s supreme leader and much of his family, including a 14-month-old granddaughter, in Tehran. None of this is seriously disputable and few Americans would feel pride at the deaths of innocents.

The letter goes on to pose a series of interesting questions, such as: Why do Iranians chant “Death to America”? (Answer: It’s complicated, but not personal); and how did Iran manage to defeat a military with a budget 100 times the size of its own? “After all,” the authors say, “it is the American taxpayers who will have to bear the cost of America’s unjust wars, and so they deserve to know the truth.”

Some passages may or may not be true, but would certainly resonate with never-Trumpers. Spoiler: Iran’s leaders think the president conducts foreign policy to get rich. There’s also a lengthy recitation of perceived U.S. wrongs and missteps in the Middle East since 1953, some of which is accurate.

And yet, as an attempt at truth telling, the IRGC’s letter is a spectacular failure. It gives Americans far less insight into Trump, U.S. injustices or the misunderstood virtues of the Islamic Republic than it does into the document’s authors. It provides a glimpse into how they misinterpret their enemy, the war’s progress and therefore its likely outcomes. And it shines some light on the worrying mix of cynicism and swivel-eyed insanity that awaits Iran’s more rational negotiators whenever they take proposals home to the men with guns for approval.

So, how is it that Iran claims to be “the Victor” in this still unresolved war? The IRGC says that, not only has the country prevented the House of Oppression (as it calls the White House) from achieving its war aims, but it has also decimated America’s military bases across the Gulf, forced the U.S. Navy into retreat and destroyed billions of dollars-worth of high-end radar and aircraft. All of this is partly true, though overstated, just as the letter wildly understates the IRGC’s own losses, including a whole navy.

At a strategic level, the IRGC is even more bullish. Within Iran, the U.S. has allegedly undone decades worth of its own propaganda efforts aimed at “alienating Iranian youth from their cultural heritage,” thus unifying the nation, reconciling the young to Islamic values and ensuring the Republic’s political survival for decades to come. At the same time, this unsuccessful attack has definitively ended U.S. hegemony, put Iran in full control of the Strait of Hormuz and vindicated the superior moral and political legitimacy of the Islamic Republic’s system of governance. I’d class this analysis as somewhere between wishful thinking and certifiable delusion.

Then things really start to come untethered. These successes are explainable, according to the IRGC, by “the Quran’s superior doctrine and worldview,” as summarized at length through the origin story of Shia Islam: The 680 AD martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his infant son, the loyalty of his brother Hazrat Abbas and the steadfastness of his sister Zaynab. Their heroic purity is then essentially reflected through time via Iran’s current supreme leader, the wounded, wise and saintly Mojtaba Khamenei.

America’s military, by contrast, suffers from poor morale because its soldiers have no idea why they’re fighting. The U.S. population has been kept from the truth about their own country, including that it was the CIA, not Osama bin Laden, that carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers. The same agency also apparently created the Sunni terrorist organization Islamic State, which Iran (not the U.S. and its allies, as you may have been told) then destroyed.

If only Americans would come to Iran, say the IRGC, they would see that the regime is adored by its people, that there is no tyranny and that the supreme leader keeps shops full, despite sanctions. This utopia is contrasted with the U.S., where people are miserable, the economy is on the verge of collapse and police kill 1,300 people every year. Americans (who have a real median household income of about $88,000 compared with $2,100 in Iran) are poor because their leaders send the tax money to Israel, which for no apparent reason — by the IRGC’s twisted reasoning — used it to launch a genocidal war in Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023. The slaughter of Israelis a day earlier, carried out by Hamas, goes unmentioned.

As a frequent critic of this U.S. administration’s foreign policy and the way Israel’s government conducted the war in Gaza, I’d agree that there is plenty to discuss here. But not with the leaders of the Islamic Republic, whose policing methods this year involved killing tens of thousands of innocent Iranians who had dared protest their oppression and impoverishment.

Fortunately, just as God and the virtues of the Islamic Republic are the reason Iran is winning the fight for Hormuz (for the record, it isn’t), the IRGC says Jeremiah 18:7-10 shows the way for Americans to save themselves: Repent; close 800 U.S. military bases around the world; end aid to Israel; and don’t let your vote be bought for a $5,000 bribe.

Many Americans might agree with some of that. And, clearly, the IRGC’s commanders don’t believe all of their own propaganda, religious or otherwise. But only a group of men who profoundly misunderstand the U.S. could publish such a screed in the hope of moving its voters. That’s far from reassuring when those same men hold a de facto veto over any negotiated settlement of the war.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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