The Women Who Would Not Kneel
During the Biden administration, I attended a small dinner with Iranian dissidents living in the United States. As they spoke, quietly, intensely, of a free Iran, I asked what they wanted most from American leadership.
Their answer was simple.
“We do not want you to fight for us. We just want to know you will not abandon us when the time comes.”
“We do not want you to fight for us. We just want to know you will not abandon us when the time comes.”
Earlier this year, tens of thousands poured into the streets across Iran in the most profound protest movement since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Many were women. (RELATED: Iran Is Not That Simple)
The courage required is difficult to comprehend from a distance. Iranian women and girls stepped into public squares under a regime that has never concealed its capacity for cruelty toward them. For decades, they have lived with midnight arrests, endless interrogations, murder carried out by morality police, and prisons that swallow dissent without a trace. Still, they chose to stand openly. (RELATED: Time to Stand With the People of Iran)
What followed ranks among the most grotesque displays of state violence in recent memory.
Accounts from detainees, families, and medical personnel describe women raped in custody, mutilated, and returned to their loved ones in conditions that defy comprehension. There are credible reports of uteruses removed, scalps taken, and bodies so desecrated that families were denied the chance to see or bury their dead. Some never received remains at all. In a system long accustomed to repression, these acts are meant to extinguish resistance and memory.
Such brutality is not incidental. It reflects a regime that understands the role women have played in Iran’s movement for freedom. Women at the front of protests do more than challenge a policy. They expose the moral fragility of a government that depends on their submission and call into question the legitimacy of power sustained by humiliation and force. Their presence in the streets carried a symbolism that the regime cannot contain. The images that spread across the world like wildfire were those of women burning images of the Ayatollah with their own flames.
Warnings were issued to Tehran not to execute protesters. Statements of solidarity were broadcast to the Iranian people, to continue protesting and encouraging the takeover of institutions. For individuals deciding whether to step into the open against a government known for torture and execution, those words mattered profoundly. They suggested that America would not avert its gaze once the cost of defiance became clear.
The evidence now before us forces a reckoning with the meaning of those words. The mutilation and murder of women who sought basic dignity cannot be absorbed into the routine calculations of diplomacy. It speaks directly to the character of the regime and to the credibility of those who claim to oppose such brutality. A government that wages violence against its own daughters with calculated savagery reveals a regime whose conduct should temper any illusion that negotiation alone can secure lasting stability.
For the United States to avert its gaze now would carry consequences. It would signal to dissidents that courage may be met with distance rather than support, reassure authoritarian regimes that even barbaric acts can pass without meaningful cost, and erode the credibility of those who speak of freedom while hesitating to stand with those who risk everything for it.
The U.S. now faces a test that is both moral and strategic. Words spoken in support of the Iranian people created an expectation that brutality on this scale would not be met with indifference. The preservation of American credibility, and of the principles long associated with it, requires resolve.
Unarmed women in Iran met a violent regime with astonishing strength. Their courage casts an unforgiving light on any hint of timidity from American leadership. The world’s most powerful democracy cannot afford to appear less resolute than the women who marched unarmed into danger.
Any deal the United States makes must result in the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program: zero domestic uranium enrichment, the destruction of highly enriched uranium and advanced centrifuges, and direct constraints on Iran’s missile programs and support for terrorism. For America’s safety and security, a bad deal is worse than no deal. If a bad deal is the only option left on the table, the use of force may ultimately be required. As the president has said repeatedly, peace is achieved through strength.
Strength, in this case, is not only a matter of deterrence but of credibility. The dissidents I met asked for only one thing: not to be abandoned when the time came. That time has clearly come, and in this moment, protecting America’s security and standing with those who resist the regime are not competing aims but the same test of resolve.
Meaghan Mobbs, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for American Safety and Security at Independent Women and president of the R.T. Weatherman Foundation. She also serves as a presidential appointee to the United States Military Academy Board of Visitors.
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