Women in the political arena can be a very potent transformative force. I know this firsthand from almost 50 years in the challenging field of politics. In this long odyssey, the women who changed me — who changed how I understand leadership, sacrifice, and what it means to fight for freedom — are mostly unsung heroines the world has never heard of. And that silence is not an accident. It is a strategy.
The case in point is Iran, where there is a great deal of debate about its future.
I need to tell you what I saw.
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For years, I have stood alongside the Iranian Resistance, not from a comfortable distance, but close enough to see decisions being made when the cameras were off, and the stakes were life and death. I was there during the Camp Liberty years, when thousands of unarmed men and women of the Iranian resistance were trapped in a camp near Baghdad airport, stripped of their protective barriers, denied medical supplies, and blockaded from food shipments, while rockets from the Iranian regime’s proxies rained down on them. Five missile strikes. One hundred and seventy-seven dead. The world looked away.
But one woman did not look away.
Maryam Rajavi made decisions in those days that no human being should have to make, navigating between governments that had abandoned their promises and a regime in Tehran that wanted every last person in that camp dead. I watched her work through impossible negotiations, absorb devastating news, and never lose sight of the people whose lives depended on her judgment.
What struck me was not her strength. I expected strength. What struck me was her humility. In every crisis, she made others feel that they were the ones leading. She pushed women who had never held authority to take command. She insisted they could do what centuries of history had told them they could not. She built an entire generation of women and placed them there instead.
Today, half the members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the coalition of Iranian opposition movements that rejects both monarchy and theocracy, are women. This did not happen by decree. It happened because one woman spent decades in exile, under threat, through war and siege and loss, breaking the invisible walls that kept other women from believing they could lead.
This is why the Iranian regime fears her immensely.
And it should. Because here is the truth that the mullahs understand better than most Western analysts: You cannot bomb an ideology out of existence. Religious fascism, the kind that hangs women from cranes, executes children, and hijacks one of the world’s great faiths to justify medieval savagery, cannot be defeated by F-35s or sanctions alone. It can only be defeated by a force that speaks its own spiritual language and proves, through sacrifice and example, that faith and freedom, Islam and democracy, devotion and dignity, are not contradictions.
It is the movement Rajavi has built.
This is why the regime has spent 40 years and billions of dollars trying to destroy, demonize, and erase this movement from the world’s consciousness. The regime has attempted assassinations and bombings and spread calumnies against the movement and its supporters, which are often repeated by gullible media. But the movement has not only survived, but it has successfully gathered support among parliamentarians in Europe and members of Congress of both political parties. It has done so based on the principles it consistently expounds, which include freedom of speech, separation of religion and state, an independent judiciary, a free market economy, and equal rights regardless of sex, religion, or ethnicity, as well as a commitment to a nuclear-free Iran.
But the right to govern a free Iran must be earned, not bestowed by outside forces, no matter how well-meaning. In the case of Reza Pahlavi, son of the last monarch of Iran who has lived luxuriously most of the last 47 years in the United States, bloodline should be no entitlement to future leadership. Pahlavi’s father ruled with an iron fist enforced by a vicious secret police, the SAVAK, which the son has been loath to renounce. One thing the U.S. experience in Iraq should have taught us in our support for Ahmed Chalabi is that we’re not very good at picking the winning horse.
Meanwhile, the real resistance to the mullah is taking place in Iran. Resistance Units operate in all 31 provinces and are paying the price in blood. Thousands of protesters were killed in January’s nationwide uprising, while the families of the deceased are threatened and silenced.
I believe that the most important women’s movement in the world today is not happening in Washington or Brussels or Paris. It is happening inside Iran, led by Iranian women who are determined to bring down a ruthless regime for which misogyny is one of its hallmarks.
Those women are leading now: in the streets, in the cells, in the Resistance Units, and in the prisons where they face execution and refuse to recant.
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The question for us — for Europe, for America, for every woman and man who claims to believe in equality — is simple. When those women win, and they will win, will we be able to say we stood with them? Or will we have to explain why we looked the other way while they bled?
I know which side of history I intend to stand on.
Linda Chavez is Chairwoman of the Center for Equal Opportunity and former Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President Reagan, the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House.