After Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, few names in contemporary American diplomacy command as much respect among Iranians as Secretary of State Marco Rubio. From my student years in security studies through my field research on Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, I have followed his words and speeches, and have had the privilege of attending two or three of them.
Without exaggeration, Rubio understands both the “book of the Shiite mullah” and Iran’s history — two qualities that give him a distinctive, respected voice in the White House. He knows that negotiating with Islamic terrorists leaves a “brand of disgrace” and a “stain of shame” on history. He also understands the Iranian regime for what it is: an Islamic Caliphate of Velayat-e Faqih, the religious dictatorship of a Shiite mullah who, like the Nazis, considers himself superior and society to be his servants, sheep, and slaves.
Rubio has repeatedly made another point, often between the lines and rarely welcomed by the left-wing media: This regime bears no resemblance to Iran’s culture, literature, or civilization. His eye is sharp, his advisers know Iran and the Middle East, and he wastes no time on diplomacy with the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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Today, as a Guard junta has seized power, Rubio understands that Mojtaba Khamenei is no genuine political force: he is a cardboard figure, a name displayed for effect. Thugs and rogues, protecting their fortunes, the mullahs’ propaganda machine, and the discredited clerical order, are playing President Donald Trump and the world. But little of Khamenei remains.
As national security adviser, Rubio, perhaps more than anyone since General Mike Flynn or Sebastian Gorka (whose books I translated into Persian) understands Shiite terrorism as an even more dangerous branch of Islamic terrorism. He has long understood the Iranian regime as the principal source of Middle Eastern instability: a regime of repression, plunder, destruction, and occupation.
It is a regime with elections in name only, ruled by a “criminal sect” and a mafia system in which the people’s vote carries neither value nor influence. Rubio is among the few American politicians who understand that the so-called reformists, the Islamic Left of “moderates,” a blend of reformists and fundamentalists, and the regime’s hard-liners are no genuine alternatives. All seek to preserve a system from which they benefit.
He is also among the few in American diplomacy who recognize how left-wing outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, have fed Western audiences falsehoods in the name of Iranians that never spoke for Iranian society.
On Feb. 4, 1979, as the Shah’s government neared its end, the New York Times reported: “What we want is something like the government of the Prophet and the government of Imam Ali.” But the paper had not read history. What “justice of Ali”? It was an Islamic caliphate marked by bloodshed, war, and struggles over the spoils of conquest. Nor did intellectuals ask the simplest question: What did the “justice of Ali” have to do with Iran?
The first three caliphs’ 25 years of rule were consumed by deception, intrigue, conflict, and struggles waged in the name of God, the Quran, and the Prophet. Today, Iran itself is the war booty of the Guards and mullahs, who have devastated it. The same New York Times falsely claimed that the late Shah had killed 100,000 people. Where are the names? Where is the fact-check?
To Rubio, one should say: Thank you for seeing clearly. Iranians today are neither ignorant nor blind. They do not live in the age of Arabian idolatry or the Middle Ages. Even amid the humiliation of Shiite clerical rule, a young, dynamic generation is searching for Iran’s lost history. A baseless reactionary ideology and the brutal, contradictory order of the mullahs’ Islamic caliphate have brought Iranians to ruin and driven the wheel of their civilization centuries backward.
On Aug. 30, 1979, the Palestinian Hizb ut Tahrir told Ruhollah Khomeini plainly: “The Islamic system is not, in principle, a republican system. It is a caliphate.” Khomeini had no genuine belief in human rights or humanity. His fabricated “Islamic Republic,” enabled by Islamic terrorism, produced one absurdity after another, yet faced little intellectual resistance. Islamic propaganda and the clamor of the 1979 upheaval had cloaked it in false sanctity. Khomeini called his caliphate a “compulsory order” and spoke of drawing the sword “until corruption no longer remains,” “exporting the revolution to the world,” “raising the banner of Islam,” and establishing “Islamic justice with the sword of Islam.”
Thank God, Rubio does not follow the left-wing propaganda machine in its embrace of a populist and, in my view, deeply discredited figure like Mohammad Mossadegh. He knows Mossadegh’s government was marked by martial law and torture. Two reactionary followers of Mossadegh, Abolhassan Banisadr and Mehdi Bazargan, became propagandists for Khomeini’s Islamic savagery, helping cloak him in false sanctity within a society steeped in superstition.
Banisadr said: “Do not say Iranian first and Muslim second. Iranian identity finds its meaning within Islam.” Yet almost no critic asked: Were you appointed to drag Iran back 14 centuries? By what authority? Who were you? Khomeini spoke the same language. Demagogues, status-seekers, manipulators, and fabricators defended an exclusivist religious class and the absolute rule of Shiite clerical fanaticism, resentment, hatred, and revenge, while media falsehoods deceived and brainwashed a generation.
Even invoking Iran’s name came to verge on blasphemy. Cries of “Islam, Islam” gathered crowds around Khomeini’s robe and sandals. The same shallow faction called itself “religious-nationalist,” while Iran’s worthy sons and daughters, heirs to an ancient civilization, were sent in groups to the graveyards.
Resentful of the descendants of Iran’s kings, this faction had — and still has — a fundamental quarrel with Iranian identity, culture, and the enduring values of its civilization. Bazargan claimed in Ettela’at and Kayhan on March 2, 1980, that “the number of executions by the revolutionary courts has not reached sixty and is no greater than the 100,000 people whom [the Shah] and his government killed during these years.”
Did anyone ask this self-important translator of the Quran and creator of the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq a simple question: A lie this vast, on what evidence? From what source? Khomeini, like his followers, made reckless assertions, weaving crude traditions into fabrications and pronouncing them with absolute certainty. These deceivers and charlatans sought above all clerical rule and Iran’s destruction in the name of Islam.
Khomeini declared: “Government without the clergy, government minus the clergy, is not possible! Elsewhere: “Those who did not vote for the Islamic Republic and boycotted the vote are hypocrites. We shall deal with them as hypocrites and suppress them.”
Such words revealed the ignorance, madness, backwardness, and intellectual reaction of the Shiite Supreme Leader. He roared: “Do not gather so much. Do not speak. Do not issue statements. Do not publish. You have dared to raise your heads? I will strike you in the mouth!” Which left-wing newspaper or media outlet reported these words for what they were? These “white-turbaned men with blackened faces” first struck at an inheritance centuries in the making: Iranian identity itself.
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They forged a terrifying compound of resentment, fanaticism, repression, superstition, ignorance, violence, and revenge, opening the house of deceit and hypocrisy. These zealots of the so-called Dar al-Mu’minin, denying Iran’s history and ancient order, embraced power, destruction, hatred, and vengeance under absolute rule and medieval thought. Before the rage of this system’s first two caliphs — Khomeini, 1979-1989, and Khamenei, 1989-2026 — they fell silent whenever personal, partisan, factional, or tribal interests demanded it. Foul-mouthed and narrow-minded men nodded along as Khomeini displayed ignorance of Iran’s history and hostility toward its ancient culture, as in his Qom speech of March 2, 1979. When Khamenei showed the same clerical hostility, placing Iran under foreign influence for wealth and power, they again fell silent.
Rubio brought satisfaction to many Iranians when he expelled the Iranian group from American soil. In a period of political transition, he may carry a historic responsibility, perhaps comparable in consequence to Kissinger’s. That possibility should not be overlooked. And perhaps, after half a century, he will be the man who opens the doors of the American Embassy in Tehran once again.
Erfan Fard is a counterterrorism analyst and Middle East studies researcher based in Washington, with a particular focus on Iran, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic conflicts in the region.