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The Nation

Featured Iran Reporting

“Why Did So Many People Think This War Was a Good Idea?”

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Alex Shams

Published in the June 2026 issue of The Nation. The story of how millions of Iranians fell for the regime-change fantasy. “There is nothing to be worried about. Israel and

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Alex Shams is an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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About

Born and raised in an Iranian-American family in Los Angeles, Alex Shams has long been fascinated by the stories that places can tell us. Growing up, he learned Persian and Spanish; in college, he learned Arabic and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo before moving to Beirut after graduation. After receiving his master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, he moved to Bethlehem, Palestine, where he was a journalist at Ma’an News Agency, the largest independent Palestinian news organization. He received his PhD. from the University of Chicago in Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, entitled “Constructing Islamic Modernity: Power, Religion, and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” was based on three years of ethnographic research in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as well as archival research in the British Library and Ba’ath Party Archives.

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