The rush to celebrate the supposed fall of Iran and the end of radical Islam reveals more about Western propaganda than about the lived realities of Iranians or the broader Middle East. The current protests in Iran are real and deeply rooted in age-long carefully engineered western and Israeli destabilisation schemes, they are also rooted in economics, governance and accountability, not in the collapse of a religion or the cartoonish geopolitical framing pushed by Western policy circles.
If Iran falls today, it will not be because Islam failed or because Israel surgically removed the head of a snake. It will be because Western powers have been plotting the Iranian collapse since the moment Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalised Iranian oil and broke the monopoly of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company. Iran also drew ire when It supported the Palestinian cause. From that moment, Iran became a target for coups, sanctions, isolation, proxy destabilisation and narrative war. The same playbook was later used against Venezuela the moment Chavez nationalised PDVSA and Bolivia when Morales nationalised gas. The pattern is not Islamic. It is economic.
The so called radical Islam that commentators love to point at was not born in a vacuum. It was fuelled by decades of Western support for Israel against Palestine, by the punishment of Iran for asserting sovereignty over its resources, by the dismantling of Iraq after Saddam dared sell oil in euros, and by the destruction of Libya after Gaddafi proposed a pan African gold standard for oil trade. Syria followed the same script not because Assad was uniquely evil, but because Damascus leaned towards Russia and China and refused to bend to the regional architecture that Washington prefers. When you destabilise countries over energy, trade and currency, do not pretend to be shocked when the populations, movements and ideologies that emerge are not polite.
Western media loves to report the decline of economies like Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan as failures of culture, religion or ideology, while carefully ignoring the decades of sanctions, blockades, sabotage, regime change operations and information warfare that created those conditions in the first place. Iran did not become economically crippled because it funded Houthis or Hezbollah. It became crippled because for forty five years it has been fenced off from the international financial system, denied access to capital markets, blocked from selling oil freely and subjected to some of the harshest sanctions ever applied to a sovereign state. Venezuela did not collapse because socialism is inherently inefficient. It collapsed because it was cut off from its own oil revenues, barred from accessing foreign banks, denied spare parts for refineries and suffocated under sanctions that even the United Nations acknowledges increased hunger and mortality. Zimbabwe did not collapse because Africans cannot govern themselves. Zimbabwe collapsed after London and Washington punished Harare for land reform that challenged colonial property arrangements. America was happy to work with the Taliban when they served US geopolitical interests in Afghanistan and equally happy to abandon them later. If you destabilise regions for decades, expect complex outcomes. Do not blame religion.
The claim that Iran funds Boko Haram, ISIS or ISWAP is another propaganda line that does not survive scrutiny. Iran supports mainly Shia aligned and anti Israeli regional actors because that is its ideological and strategic framework. Boko Haram and ISIS are Wahhabi Sunni extremist groups rooted in Saudi inspired ideology and Gulf petrodollar financing. Their emergence owes far more to Iraqs collapse under US occupation and to the Gulf Arab competition for influence than to Tehran. It suits Western narratives to turn all non Western actors into one big radical Islam blob. Reality is far more layered.
If Iranians are protesting today, they are not protesting to help Israel or America remove the Ayatollah. They are protesting because the rial has collapsed, because youth unemployment has exploded, because the state has failed to deliver prosperity, because they want dignity, accountability and better governance. These are universal demands. The Iranian people deserve to be seen in their full agency, not as background extras in someone elses ideological play.
So before anyone celebrates the fall of Iran as a victory for civilisation, or as the end of radical Islam, it is better to understand what is really at play. Great powers compete. They sanction, isolate, destabilise, narrate, delegitimise and collapse non compliant states. They do it for resources, for currency dominance, for military posture and for strategic alignment. Religion is most often the cover story. The list of countries that have been choked for refusing Western dictates is long. Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine and others show the same pattern. It is not theological. It is geopolitical.
If Iran changes tomorrow, it should change because Iranians themselves demand it, not because Washington or Tel Aviv finally get to redraw another region in their preferred image. And if we in Africa and the global south are wise, we will study these patterns carefully. The same narratives used against Iran are already creeping toward Nigeria and others. The language shifts, the think tank reports emerge, the human rights discourse is deployed, the sanctions threats begin and then economic strangulation follows. It is the same script with new actors and new targets.
By Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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