Iranian Americans in San Francisco Warn Against Ending War Too Soon
SAN FRANCISCO — The crowd that gathered at the Ferry Building on May 24 was not calling for peace. Not the kind that leaves things as they are.
Roughly 691,000 people of Iranian ancestry live in the United States, according to a 2004 MIT study. More than 40 percent of them have settled in Southern California. They fled a revolution in 1979, or they came later for school, for work, for freedom. What binds many of them is a shared conviction: the Islamic Republic that drove them out is not a government they want to see survive.
So when the protesters in San Francisco spoke out against an immediate end to the Iran war, they were not arguing for more bloodshed. They were arguing for a better outcome. Their fear, plain and direct, was that a hasty withdrawal would leave the regime in power. That would crush any hope of change inside Iran.
The event itself was small, contained to the plaza outside the Ferry Building. No one threw punches. No one got arrested. But the stakes, as these Iranian Americans see them, could not be higher.
The United States and Iran have been locked in a hostile relationship for decades. The 1979 hostage crisis. The arms deals. The nuclear talks. The sanctions. The drone strikes. The proxy wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq. Each escalation deepens the divide. Each pause raises the same question: what happens to the Iranian people when the fighting stops?
For the diaspora, that question is personal. Many still have family in Tehran, in Isfahan, in Shiraz. They watch the news from thousands of miles away, hoping for a signal that the regime is weakening. A premature ceasefire, they argue, would send the opposite signal. It would tell the ayatollahs that they can wait out any storm.
The Iranian-American community did not always speak with one voice. Early immigrants in the 1950s came on government scholarships, loyal to the shah. After 1979, the new arrivals brought stories of prison, of torture, of escape. The community fractured along political lines. Some wanted engagement with Tehran. Others wanted regime change. Over time, a consensus hardened: the Islamic Republic is not a partner, it is a problem.
That consensus showed itself in San Francisco. The protesters were not marching for war. They were marching for a war that ends the right way. They want the regime gone, and they believe a quick exit would leave it standing.
U.S. Secretary of State — the report does not say which secretary or what position he or she took — has not commented on the gathering. The State Department typically avoids direct commentary on diaspora protests. But the administration in Washington is under pressure from multiple sides. Anti-war activists want out now. Iranian Americans want out later, under conditions that break the regime’s grip.
Neither side is likely to get exactly what it wants. Wars do not end on tidy schedules. The Iran conflict, whatever its current shape, will drag on until someone forces a decision. The people at the Ferry Building made their preference clear: do not rush it.
They stood there in the California sun, holding signs, talking to each other in Farsi and English. Some had driven hours to be there. They were not famous. They were not powerful. They were just citizens who believe the fate of their homeland hangs on how this war ends.
And they are not going away.
