When Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian declared on December 27 that his regime is engaged in a “full-fledged war” against the United States, Europe and Israel, he was not merely indulging in rhetorical hyperbole, he was engaging in calculated deception. The Islamic Republic is indeed at war, but not with foreign powers. Its real, relentless and increasingly brutal war is being waged against the Iranian people themselves.

Speaking in an interview published on the website of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian claimed that the current confrontation with the West is “worse than the Iran-Iraq war.” That eight-year conflict, launched by Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980, cost over a million lives and scarred an entire generation. To invoke it now is a cynical attempt to summon nationalist fervor, silence dissent and justify repression at home.

But unlike the Iran-Iraq war, today’s crisis was not imposed on Iran by an invading army. It is the direct consequence of four decades of ideological extremism, regional aggression, nuclear deception and contempt for international law. And the primary victims are not Western governments or Israeli generals, they are Iranian citizens, workers, women, students and minorities, who are being crushed under a jackboot of fear.

Since nationwide protests erupted in recent years, the regime’s response has been ferocious. Arbitrary arrests have surged. Torture is routine. Executions have accelerated at a pace unmatched anywhere else in the world. Public hangings, death sentences after sham trials, and the execution of political prisoners have become instruments of terror designed to cow a population that........

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