It’s the ultimate hypocrisy of the west to punish Iran for a law Iran has not broken. When no one has found the tiniest evidence of Iran producing nuclear weapons – which is the whole purpose of the non-proliferation treaty that it has signed – what kind of international law justifies the UN security council’s sanctions on Iran? Since when has international law become able to measure the intentions of countries and react to them, if they say Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons? And how come the same UN security council turns a blind eye to Israel, India, and Pakistan – who everyone knew had long the same intention? They have never signed the non-proliferation treaty, yet their defiance has been and is still rewarded.

Make no mistake, when the powerful UK, which has lived safely among its peaceful neighbours still feels the need for its nuclear arsenal, any sovereign state like Iran, which has constantly been under the US threat for since its popular revolution against an American-aligned, corrupted and incompetent monarchy. Especially when suddenly it finds two of its neighbouring countries invaded. That’s why I would definitely support Iran if one day it decided to start making the weapons. But has it actually started? Everyone says that even if Iran plans to, it will take up to 10 years before it manages to do so. So what is all this bullying really about?
The more the clash between the west and Iran escalates, the more convinced I become that the west’s real problem with the Islamic Republic of Iran is not its nuclear activities, its level of democracy, its human rights record, or its support for "terrorist" groups. Pakistan, followed closely by Saudi Arabia, easily beats Iran on all these fronts. The real problem is that the Islamic Republic has decided to be independent in a region saturated with fossil energy resources, and at the same time run by American puppets. Iran has posed the biggest continuous challenge to the American hegemony in the whole world, and so it has to pay a price.

Increasingly, a lot of secular Iranians, like myself, are figuring that even if Iran is turned into the most democratic, secular, fair and peaceful state on earth, there is no guarantee the US won’t find another excuse to try to overthrow its government. It will start bullying Iran for its "devastating role" in climate change, or animal rights, or – who knows? – for obesity. The interests of the Islamic Republic, with all its internal struggles, challenges and flaws, have never overlapped more closely the interests of Persia as a historic nation. And here lies the surprising support of most Iranians, despite their serious dissatisfaction and frustration, for the Islamic Republic and its resistance towards the US, symbolized by its nuclear program.

I’m not saying this as a fervent religious man with sexy Ahmadinejad’s posters on my wall. In fact, I am an atheist and this can easily get me into serious trouble in any Islamic country. I did not vote for Ahmadinejad and I would do anything to democratically bring him down. I have also risked my life and future in Iran by becoming the first Iranian after the revolution who has publicly visited Israel. Why? To counter both countries’ nasty and demonizing propaganda against each other and to save my grandmother, postman or university professor from being compared to Nazi soldiers who must be nuked tomorrow. A matter of fact, I am even a victim of the paranoid state of Iran that censors criticism and punishes dissent for fear of foreign-backed revolt. (Remember the CIA had commissioned newspaper articles and cartoons to discredit prime minister Mossadeq before bringing his democratically elected government down by a coup in 1953.) My own blog is blocked in Iran and I was detained and forced to sign an apology for my writing before being allowed to leave Iran in 2005.

And of course I do have the dream of an open, free, fair and secular Iran, run by competent and representative officials, and in peace with the whole world, obviously including Israel. However, I believe the Islamic Republic is a valuable cause, worth defending and, at its worst, is way better than anything that the United States or anyone else can bring to Iran. If the US waged a war against Iran, I would absolutely go back and defend Iran. Fortunately, I’m not alone.

This article appeared in The Guardian, February 23, 2007. Hossein Derakhshan’s blog is hoder.com.