tl;dr The Iranians loved the first bomb that killed the dictator. They hate the consequences of war. It is absurd to think that they love the war just because they cheered the bomb.

When I was a kid Bomberman was a popular game that I used to play on my Nintendo Famicom (it was actually a Chinese clone console named “Micro Genius”). The game is about a dude¹ who used bombs to destroy obstacles, kill enemies, and occasionally reveal hidden treasures. The bomb was basically the answer to every challenge.

I got older, played other games, took part in the real life and, slowly but surely, came to the conclusion that bombs in reality are less efficient in solving problems: they are hard to get by, they make a real mess when they explode, and they can kill people without having the chance of restarting the game that is life. But not everyone went through the same development as I did. The most prominent one being those in charge of the US foreign politic. Harry Truman had the “Little Boy” (cute name, right?), an atomic bomb, dropped in Japan, even though the Japanese had already lost the war. During the Vietnam war, the US dropped over 300k tons of napalm bombs in a period of 10 years and still managed to lose the war. In 2001, they dropped BLU-82 (predecessor to the “Mother of All Bombs”; no relation to Little Boy) on Taliban just for the Bomber to handover Afghanistan to the Bombee 20 years laters. You can see the failure pattern here. Yet this obviously doesn’t overweight other factors that convinces US American politicians to consider bombs as a viable solution.

That brings us to today’s situation: US and Israel bombing Iran. I don’t want to get into the “why” of this war. To be honest, I’m convinced that both aggressors just love to drop bombs. They don’t need a reason or plan to do so. Look at how Israel carpet bombed Gaza indiscriminately. So let’s not get into rationalities. What is interesting here is as to why some Iranians support the bombings? Aren’t the bombs, that they cheer, also a threat to their own lives?

To understand the situation, think of all the people who got shot at the west German border as they were trying to flee east Germany, or north Koreans that defect to the south. If you live in a country where “being you” is dictated to you, the chances are that you’d try to break free. That is why widespread Demonstrations and uprisings are very common in Iran. And every time, they are suppressed brutally. The most recent uprising in early 2026 ended with tens of thousands being executed on the streets. And this changed everything. The sign read: comply or die. Although this has been the core motto of the Islamic republic since it’s inception, this time it was enforced with a brutality that could not be absorbed by the Iranian socitety anymore.

And then the bombs started to fall. And on the first day, the supreme leader, the DNS of the regime, was killed. For many it was a relief, like removing a tumor that has been growing for decades without any hope of a cure. So they cheered. They went on the streets in Iran, they went on the street outside of Iran. The bombs finally removed the dictator. But the bombing didn’t stop. They hit a school, killing hundreds of children. They hit fuel stores and caused black acid rains that ruined the crops. The short-lived euphoria gave way to the soberness of war and the fact that the regime is still standing.

Iranians cheered the bombs. But not because they love bombs, because it killed the supressor; removed the Despot. Right now, many of the same people are hating the bombs, because there is no bomb without a war, and there is no war without indiscriminate killing.