Iranian American support for the U.S.–Israel war on Iran has plummeted, as euphoria over Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death shifts into concern over the conflict’s growing civilian toll, according to a new poll.
Nearly two-thirds of Iranian Americans now oppose the war after opinions were near evenly divided at the start of the conflict, according to a Zogby Analytics survey.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name. There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection.”
The nearly 17 percentage point leap comes as the prospects that the Iranian regime will collapse seem to have dimmed, the conflict’s endgame becomes increasingly murky, and steady bombings have swelled the number of civilians killed.
Jamal Abdi, president of the nonprofit group that commissioned the poll, the National Iranian American Council, said the survey results show that the diaspora’s feelings on the war are more complicated — and more negative — than pundits have suggested.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name,” Abdi said. “There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection and voices from the diaspora claiming that there is this mandate from our community, and it’s not based on data or facts or reality. It’s based on a campaign for regime change no matter what the cost is. It’s dangerous for our community to be used like this.”
NIAC has long been one of the major voices in the diaspora expressing skepticism about war with Iran. In days leading up to the February 28 strikes that started the war, however, figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s former shah, were given prominent platforms to argue for regime change.
NIAC’s March 24 to 27 poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, is the second that the group has commissioned from Zogby Analytics. An earlier survey was conducted from February 27 to March 5, a period that coincided with the final hours of U.S.–Iranian negotiations and the beginning of the conflict.
The survey results suggest that Iranian Americans are now more opposed to the war than Americans as a whole, after being more supportive at its start.
Iranian Americans are a sliver of the U.S. population, about 0.2 percent, making polling of the group more difficult than the general population. Abdi said that Zogby drew from a “significant list of contacts” in the Iranian American community to conduct the survey.
One prominent Iranian American, Ahmad Batebi — an exiled dissident who thanked President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the war began but has spoken out against targeting civilian infrastructure — questioned the poll results.
“My view is that the reported decline in support should be interpreted cautiously,” Batebi said in an email, “not only because opinion may indeed be shifting in real time, but because the more basic question is whether this polling instrument can credibly be treated as representative of the broader Iranian-American community in the first place.”
In the earlier survey, Iranian Americans showed nearly a 50-50 split in their position on going to war with Iran.
Iranian Americans now believe by a wide margin that President Donald Trump should end the conflict, according to the more recent numbers. 70 percent of respondents said that it was time to end the war. Only a quarter believed it should continue.
Trump is scheduled to give an address on the war Wednesday night, with officials giving mixed signals as to whether he will wrap up the conflict or expand it with a ground invasion.
The recent Zogby poll also captured an increasingly pessimistic view of the war’s likely outcome. Many Iranian Americans celebrated on social media when Khamanei’s death in an Israeli airstrike was confirmed on March 1.
Hard-liners have held onto power in Iran since then, however, leading to a dimming view of the future among the diaspora. Nearly 60 percent of Iranian Americans believe ordinary Iranians will be worse off a year from now and more than half believe the Islamic Republic will remain in power.
“There was probably some initial exuberance in that first week,” Abdi said, “and that has trailed off as we have seen civilian casualties and a shuffling of chairs in the regime but not any signal that the regime itself was going anywhere.”
Discussion about this post