After initial jubilation, some Iranian Americans fear a quagmire

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Software engineer Arin Saghatelian shed no tears when he heard that the supreme leader of his native land had been killed by American bombs.“I don’t think you’re going to find many people in support of that dictatorship or the mullahs that are in power right now,” said Saghatelian, who lives in La Crescenta and fled Iran with his family when he was 10.“I think the world is a better place today.”But the fleeting relief that Saghatelian, 45, felt last week as an exile from Iran quickly turned to the dread he feels as an American citizen and taxpayer: What if his adopted country gets sucked into another long, deadly and expensive conflict like the war in Iraq?After the initial jubilation in “Tehrangeles” and other local Iranian American communities, with thousands taking to the streets to celebrate the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the tone of some conversations this week grew more sober.

As Iranian Americans like Saghatelian watch the rapid escalation of the war that began with U.S.and Israeli bombs falling on Iran, some fear that their native country, and perhaps the whole Middle East, could descend into chaos.In Iraq, after a U.S.

invasion toppled dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, sectarian leaders stepped into the vacuum.The long-simmering rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims erupted into a civil war that killed tens of thousands of civilians.Roozbeh Farahanipour, a former Iranian dissident who now lives in Los Angeles, worries that a destabilized Iran, with its complex cultural heritage and patchwork of ethnic and religious groups, could devolve into a far worse mess than post-invasion Iraq.“It’s more complicated ethnically, civically and historically,” so a protracted war there “is not going to be like Iraq — it’s going to be 10 times worse,” he said.

California Demonstrators gather outside the federal building in Westwood, the epicenter o...