A woman feeds cats in Laleh Park in Tehran. Credit: ZarlokX, a Wikimedia Commons contributor.
The name of the park in Tehran caught my attention, Laleh Park. It appears in the second paragraph of a November 2015 Time magazine article by Karl Vick entitled “Iran 2025 – How its next decade will change the world.”
Viewing online photos or YouTube video of Laleh Park, you see much peaceful greenery, walkways, and benches typical of any park in a large city. I can almost envision the scene described in Vick’s article describing Iran with a metaphor of the hijab, the headscarf required for Muslim women.
Vick writes in 2015: “A visitor might even think Iran has already joined President Barack Obama’s (remember him?) ‘community of nations’, black tresses flowing free as those of the young women playing badminton in the twilight of Tehran’s Laleh Park, headscarf not around her head but around her neck, like a bandana.”
The reporter’s name also drew my attention, and admiration: Karl Vick, a former colleague on the staff of the University of Minnesota Daily student newspaper many years ago. He made the big time, as did several other of my college classmates.
Vick’s hijab metaphor presages by a few years a 2018 book by Masih Alinejad, The Wind in My Hair – My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran. Alinejad, described as “an ordinary working-class village girl in Iran,” succeeded in becoming an international activist for equal rights. In 2014 she founded My Stealthy Freedom to campaign against the compulsory hijab.
Deep contradictions
Ten years may seem like a long time, until it’s not. In 2015 Iran, the U.S. and other world powers enacted an agreement that rolled back Iran’s nuclear ambitions for 10 years. After that, Iran would be free to ramp up its nuclear program.
Although the Biden administration worked hard to renew the agreement, it fell victim to many complications and then disappeared after he left office, with no interest from the new president. And now we have war, again; thankfully not nuclear, yet.
As with most of the previous wars in the Middle East, this one comes with some deep contradictions. Iran’s oppressive, ultra-conservative theocracy needs to go. Since the end of World War II Israel receives our strong support, except for its mistreatment of Palestinians, and now leading this U.S. administration into war.
Iran will not be a pushover as the current U.S. misleaders seem to think. If only they would study history. This may be the first time that I or any reasonably educated person could say that we seem to know more about Iran and the history of the region than do the current president and defense secretary.
The result of war will not be peace; rather, a pause until the next war, with munitions makers the only beneficiaries, and much suffering by the people and military casualties, not to mention the economic cost and disruption. “We believe the U.S. is really pursuing regime change,” an Irani journalist is quoted in Vick’s 2015 report. Today, it will not succeed.
93 million
The image in the 2015 Time article helps you to think of the people in Iran, more than 93 million. Laleh is a common woman’s name and means ‘tulip’. I learned that from three Iranian students, a man and two women, I met years ago at Iowa State University in Ames. I reached out to them hoping to better understand Laleh, a main character in my third novel, The Swineherd’s Angel.
I was surprised and humbled by their eagerness to talk about their country and their experiences in the U.S. I attribute that to their appreciation of someone showing interest in them, and also for the deep cultural appreciation and understanding of the arts in Iran, literature in particular.
The women were eager to know, did Laleh wear a hijab? The story says that she usually doesn’t, but only sometimes when necessary. They smiled and seemed to understand. The other main lesson involved their status in the U.S. They arrived here as students with single-entry visas. If they returned to Iran even just to visit it would be very unlikely that they could get a new one to return and complete their studies. They said they often felt homesick, assuaged by socializing with their ‘family’ of Iranian students.
This is explored somewhat in my July 3, 2025, post, “ ‘Empire of the mind’ – Cancel conflict; learn about vast history, culture, and people of Iran.” Beyond this limited personal experience, like most others, I rely on other experts in trying to understand what is happening there.
Sy and Tom
If you are old enough to remember the Vietnam War, you may recall Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who uncovered the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in 1969. In 2005 he was 20 years ahead of history writing an article in The New Yorker, “The Coming Wars,” saying that Iran was the next U.S. target in the Middle East. I recommend watching the 2025 documentary about his career, Cover-Up, on Netflix.
Approaching 89 years old, Hersh is still writing on Substack (March 5): “Is Trump a liability in his own war? Trump’s loose lips may be undermining the war against Iran he and Netanyahu started.” Hersh writes: “Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups…
“The president apparently spoke without recalling that this fact is top secret… the casual comment has led to a Revolutionary Guard witch hunt to search out the insiders who may have been dealing directly or indirectly with Israeli or American intelligence agencies… the war launched by the US and Israel did not have to be.”
In a Feb. 17 column in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes, “Netanyahu has played Trump for a sucker… He has gotten them to focus on Iran and ignore the fact that everything he is doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and inside Israel will strain ties between the U.S. and its major Middle East allies, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Qatar.”
It’s tragic that the misguided egos wielding such political power and military might on all sides have usurped the will and welfare of their citizens. If the outcome of the current conflict becomes more dire, it makes the question of wearing a hijab or not seem trivial. Compared with a fighting war, a culture war is the lesser of two evils.
In the U.S., Israel, and Iran, the only solution comes from the collective political power of their people ousting the authoritarians and voting to restore the rule of law and representative democracy. In the U.S. that process will start Nov. 3, 2026.
Hopeful predictions: The pointless ‘war’ with Iran will be long forgotten by then or overshadowed by its impacts; U.S. voters will stem and reverse the current slide into autocracy, but it won’t be a walk in the park.
