Azadeh Shahshahani

Opinion contributor

I cringe when President Donald Trump speaks of how his policies have taken the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse. I lived through the devastation of the Iraq-Iran war, and I fear that Trump's anti-Iranian policies, which he elaborated on in his speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, is driving us towards an even more horrific war.

I was born in Iran in February 1979, four days after the revolution. My name “Azadeh” means free-spirited in Persian, signifying the hopes of my parents and many others for what the revolution would bring.

Their hopes were soon to be dashed, however, as the oppressive regime of the shah of Iran was replaced by a theocracy that soon crushed all of its opposition. And as Iran got entangled in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war initiated by Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion into Iranian soil, the United States supported the Iraqi dictator.

A long history of U.S. meddling

I clearly remember the nights when the four of us — my parents, my sister and myself — would hold hands and sit underneath the stairs in our house in Tehran with a blanket around us, in an improvised tent, with all lights off as sirens warned of a missile attack by Saddam’s forces.

We were among the lucky ones. Our house was never hit. Others were not so lucky. Iranians, especially those near the border, had their houses and sometimes entire neighborhoods flattened and were made refugees. A million people lost their lives in the war. In addition, thousands of Iranians were killed by chemical weapons utilized by Saddam.

All of us who lived in Iran during that time bear the psychological scars of the war.

I remember how I felt, even as a young child, about U.S. government support for an invader who was bombing us indiscriminately on a daily basis.

To add insult to injury, in July 1988, a U.S. warship shot down an Iranian civilian airliner flying near the Persian Gulf, claiming that it had mistaken it for a military fighter jet. All 290 people on board the aircraft were killed, including 66 children.

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This was not the first instance of U.S. intervention in Iran. Every Iranian can tell you about the 1953 CIA-engineered coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq, the popular prime minister of the first democratically elected government in Iran. He had committed the sin of wanting his country to regain control over its natural resource: oil. As a result, the U.S. and British governments toppled him, and the shah returned to power.

I often wonder what would have happened if that coup had not worked, if Mosaddeq had been allowed to govern, if democracy had been allowed to flourish. I think the course of recent Iranian history would have been very different. Those of us who, either before the revolution or afterward, have been forced to leave our country because of political persecution or lack of educational or economic prospects contemplate this question often.

Let Iranians decide Iran's future

The recurrent memories of war and destructive American intervention is why I find the U.S. campaign of “supporting Iranian voices” frightening. Which voices exactly?

They include the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a darling of national security adviser John Bolton but until recently was included on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. This is a group that has assassinated innocent Iranians and actively participated in Saddam’s war against Iran. MEK has zero credibility in Iran.

The pre-Iraq War scenario is unfolding before our eyes — this time with Iran. The administration is attempting to cut off all exports of Iranian oil, and it has unilaterally exited the nuclear agreement, leading to the recent re-institution of sanctions against Iran. These sanctions have over the years inflicted great harm on the Iranian people, leading to uncontrollable inflation, unemployment and greatly reduced access to medical care.

None of that appears to bother the factions in the Trump administration who will stop at nothing short of regime change in Iran. Bolton said Monday that the U.S. government is not pursuing regime change as a matter of official policy, but that contradicts his long history of previous statements on Iran.

Any expression of sympathy from this administration towards the Iranian people rings hollow. The same government that has banned Iranians from coming to the USA to seek urgently needed medical care and to visit with their family members per the Muslim travel ban cannot profess to care about the plight of Iranians. On the contrary.

It is time for the U.S. government to stop intervening in Iran and let the Iranian people determine their own destiny.

Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director with Project South and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. Follow her on Twitter @ashahshahani.