 Welcome to Tisgy Sauer. I'm Michael Walker. In the middle of last night Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iran's most powerful General Kassem Soleimani. He was killed in a drone strike just outside Baghdad How should we understand this escalation in US-Iranian conflict? What is Trump thinking and how will the Iranians respond to help get to grips with the latest developments? I'm joined by David Wehring teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway University of London and friend of the show How are you doing? Yeah, I'm also joined by a skanda. Yeah, I was it's not the lightest of topics I'm also joined by a skanda Sadegi who's assistant professor in comparative political theory at Goldsmiths You've written extensively about the politics of Iran. It's your first time on Tisgy Sauer, but you've been on FM before it is Yeah, great to be here. Thanks so much Right, let's let's first get to grips. I'm gonna ask you first Who is Kassem Soleimani? Um, yeah, so if you want to start from the beginning he I mean, obviously he is the leader of Iran's God's force, which is basically Iran's equivalent sort of foreign operations So what is a part of the revolutionary guard corpse, which was obviously formed at the outside the outset of the Iranian Revolution? It was founded the sort of the Revolution guard itself was founded sort of as a parallel paramilitary Organization like at the outset of the revolution to basically consolidate I told a Khomeini and his disciples sort of hold on the revolution as it were and it's sort of its mission statement is to defend the political order the revolutionary political order as it stands And this is in a sense transcends that immediately to the sort of its sort of its commitments to the civilian Governments obviously and basically over the course of the eight year war with Iraq with Saddam Hussein obviously invaded Iran in 1980 That invasion was obviously backed by Western powers, which is West Germany, France, Britain, the United States and so on so The revolution guard is steadily institutionalized. Kassem Soleimani is obviously a very young man at this point He hails from the province of Kermann Which is obviously now for known for sort of one of being one of the areas where massive sort of Amounts of heroin are actually trafficked through Afghanistan It's between the Taliban period but in any of a he's far He hails from sort of what this provincial background and then sort of through just sort of due diligence You know his I mean his strategic sort of mine and valor He raises he sort of goes up through the ranks and then I think in 1998 He becomes the head of this of the goods force and then subsequently obviously following the invasion of Iraq He goes on to like further distinguish himself And really his ambition is to kick out or eject the United States from from the region So I mean he's a what he's a complex individual complex sort of legacy I think you know multi-faceted in so far as on the one hand. He was able to really sort of Represent or symbolize So Iran's self-sufficiency on the on the on the level of defense being able to defend the country Particularly against sort of United States aggression and depredations, but at the same time You know, he was party's part of obviously the Revolutionary Guard, which is also seen as an authoritarian sort of unaccountable institution which is Yeah, not democratically accountable and obviously is detrimental for the broader sort of struggle to deepen democracy within Iran itself So I think whenever talking about a figure like him We need to kind of get that multi-faceted in us at least to begin with and I mean also what's what's I suppose What's someone like myself who doesn't know that much about Iran what's come out today? Is it you know not come out or what's been apparent today is that he wasn't just a military leader He was also an incredibly significant political figure In Iran to you know to the population as a whole so to sort of introduce this conversation I want to go to a CNN clip There's you know the commentary on it is interesting enough But the main reason I want to go to this is because it's got footage of Events on on the streets in Iran of people I suppose celebrating his death or mourning his morning. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I didn't I mean celebrating his life I suppose mourning his death or protesting what what the Americans have done. So we're gonna go to that clip now Look at these live pictures. Okay. These are the streets of Tehran You have thousands and thousands protesting there today the action of the United States in this assassination This comes as Iran Supreme Leader is vowing quote heart revenge on America after killing its most powerful military general really the most powerful military general in the entire Region let's go to our Ramin must again who is live in Tehran now with more from the capital city I mean in more than 800 cities and towns rallies in post Friday prayers are underway and Deaths to America as usual and also revenge revenge revenge is shouted by The worshipers of the Friday prayers and different walks of society and so people are by and large are admiring Wasm Soleimani as their martyr and then Paying homage and respect to his family in Kerman His hometown and he's the village that he was born so we can say that the rallies are ongoing and We are still to see the Yes, I mean People in this part of the world people like myself you just look at various videos on social media You're not sure, you know what what impression you should take at face value is is this genuinely a popular guy in Iran? People are really mourning no political. I mean a political leader. Yeah Well, I think like any society Iran has obviously serious cleavages and like, you know And often this is often forgotten. We say the Iranian people think this or the Iraqis think this and obviously No, it's a society with with serious cleavages running through it But I mean at least on the polling data which we do have and obviously there's a lot of debates on how reliable that is He was generally seen as the most popular Sort of political personality in Iran even more than Javad Zarif more than the foreign minister more than many others and this I mean and Again, there were many people who obviously probably really might have happy by this or disliked him profoundly or thought that His sort of influence in the region was actually pernicious or negative or reflected badly on Iran or whatever I'm sure that those voices certainly exist But the fact that you know, it's undoubted. It's very clear that he was a popular Figure because I mean, I was just sort of looking at the reactions and I was quite surprised to be honest The extent a mark from basically liberal sort of liberal religious nationalists who are literally Constantly criticizing the Iranian state as a whole criticizing with its corruption whether it's lack of democracy whether it's clamping down with this Political prisoners constantly is literally abrading the Iranian state expressing absolute dismay outrage and expressing their condolences To that to obviously even actually grand ayatollahs who have been ex also dissidents and very critical of the Iranian state similarly similarly expressing You know a lot of sympathy and this is obviously because beyond his sort of role in the region He was seen as one of the you know part of a generation which fought to defend Iran in the course of the Iran Iraq war When Iran was like at risk of you know dismemberment or and actually, you know a million people lost their lives and were injured So he was seen very much That was when Saddam Hussein was wholly backed by the United States Yeah, he was seen as a much bigger and he was obviously you know representing Iran as an Iranian national figure and one of the interesting things about him is that he was generally he kept clear of a lot of the factional Infighting which we would see between reformers and hardliners and all these sorts of things So for the most part with the exception of perhaps maybe in 1999 the student protest where he did actually sign a letter with A bunch of other IRGC commanders basically telling the hot emigrant Which was the reformist government at the time to get a hold on the situation? Otherwise, there would be repercussions with that exception and obviously the conditions of that and when he under which he signed it And what not we do not know and he was generally above these sort of factional sort of Pettyness which we often would see and again like I said sort of a national defending Iran from Threats from abroad of the United States or this Israel or Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth So there's little doubt that he was popular I mean you look at Kermon people were flooding the streets to actually I mean and huge crowds In Kermon in Mashhad in Tehran and all of us and obviously today was Friday prayers So the the state's base would be mobilized, but the numbers I mean for some ways I'll see you know follows Iran day-in day-out From the it was actually palpably Very much higher than normal and I and like I said across the political spectrum From reformers to liberals so you would see actually expressions and outpouring of Outrage and sympathy and actually calling him by the honorifics of Shahid or Marta And obviously martyrs in Islam never die So I mean Trump in effect immortalized Qasem Soleimani and really in many ways gave him the fate which he had always anticipated for himself David from a from an international relations perspective you've got America the biggest superpower they have assassinated by a drone strike a foreign leader in in a third country how Unusual how exceptional is this I? Mean it's it's exceptional by virtue of the fact that the guy is so senior and it's so blatantly an act of war and because it comes on the back of Tensions which have been rising It's always tends to in Iran in the United States, but particularly the last couple of years Trump pulled out of such as to rewind a little bit and perhaps we get the chance to go into the history in more depth But just a recent history to give it context Barack Obama broke a deal with Iran and with the major powers Europeans Russians and the Chinese to control Iran's nuclear program to contain it and We could talk more about that later on but at that point anyway without going into use detail about it the point was that Relations between Iran and the US were as stable as they had been for a while Okay, so there's a the potential for that to develop further. I mean the idea Between Obama and his senior foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes was that this would be the opening to a wider Approach from on between Iran and the region So it's great promise at that point in everything that's happened since then has taken it downhill from the election of Trump the year after to Trump's Abrogation of the deal about 18 months into his presidency May 2018 May last year He severely ramps up sanctions on Iran and these are sanctions which don't just sanction Iran They sanction anyone who wants to do business with Iran and when you consider the fact that Iran's Almost completely dependent on its oil exports to sustain its economy and you're sanctioning anyone who tries to buy Iranian oil You're strangling the Iranian economy So they take that measure as a result of which Iranian economy collapses like GDP shrunk by eight percent in a year since that happened People struggle to buy food people struggle to buy medicine. It's really really when did that? When did those sanctions kick in particularly harshly this this I mean Iran's always on the some kind of section US but this round this ramping up of sanctions comes in in May 2019 alongside a Severe but a quite major build-up of American You know military personnel military hardware and erosion I think they send another aircraft back carry a battle group into the Gulf they increase that troop presence And this is all a provocation like you you stuck to that to that nuclear deal You did everything right in return for which we're tearing up the deal we're throttling your economy to the point where we want your regime to fall and We're sending a bunch of military hardware to your doorstep. We're gonna, you know Sail our aircraft barrier carry battle groups Next to your next to your country on your shores the same aircraft carriers that were that shot down an Iranian civilian They're lining up was it 1988? So this is all really intimidating from your only point of view and then So through last summer you only start to respond to that With targeted strikes against oil shipping in the Gulf and Later on the strike on illness on a Saudi or facility a quite major strike in a Saudi or facility all of this is deniable But it seems pretty clear that it's a random Iranian proxies who are doing it And the idea of it is to sort of say if you're gonna put these sanctions on us There's gonna be a cost to you exactly would say you can't just let us you know You can't just strangle us and expect us to suffer in silence Well, I am I predicted the economy to contract by 9.5 percent I mean just if you imagine like what austerity is done to Britain and my people have died as a result I mean as anecdotal from relatives. I mean just what you were saying. I mean drugs food I mean just people can't even eat meat anymore I mean, it's just absolutely the collective immiseration of 80 million people I mean, that's I know I was the intended that was the intention of it entirely. Yeah. Yeah, it's an act of war I mean, it's the sanctions are not just sanctions. They're effectively a blockade on the country No, the Iranian oil will not flow out of the out of the straight up almost And so the economy will collapse. It's it's it's effectively if not, you know Dejur and out of war and so these responses are as you say It's a basically a message that says you can't impose costs on us without you know And that if you impose these costs on us that will not be cost-free for you. Yeah And so these tensions have been rising in a really serious way because for the regime It's existential it seems to me and we'll go close to that And at one point this is kid in fact, there are two major flashlights One of them is in June when an American drone is shot down the Americans say it's outside Iranian airspace The Iranians say it's in whatever it's in that context. It's not unfraining to the Iranians So drone is shot down Trump orders airstrikes and then Bottles it or pulls back from the brink or whatever But you're that close to direct conflict between the two sides and then in September I mentioned before the Iranians will fire their proxies hit a really significant Saudi oil facility And the Saudis are responsible for well I can't remember how much Saudi oil production is as a proportion of total oil production But Saudi oil reserves are about 50% of global oil reserves if you hit their major oil facility You're not just damaging them because they're completely all dependent as well But you're damaging the the global economy potentially and the Americans again You'd expect them the Saudi certainly expected them to respond to that, but they didn't so twice We've come very close to all that war and twice Trump has pulled back from that And then you know, yeah, not not taking the not taking the bait But that that's the context, you know the existential threat to the regime tension flashpoint You know serious observers International crisis group for example last year talking about the Gulf's 1914 moment where all the All the pieces are in plot or in position for a major conflict to unfold if someone, you know throws a spark on the on the dry tinder and Every time something like this happens. This is why people take it so seriously. We think is this gonna Unfold into all that war. We don't know how the Iranians are gonna respond exactly maybe it will be Measured maybe it will take a while then what you feel about that But that context I think gives a reason for why people are so worried. It's not even that both sides necessarily want war But I don't think anyone really wanted war in 1914 either and yet, you know 30 years later the year it was devastated by two wars and the depression in the middle So we're gonna talk about those strategic calculations in a moment First of all, you're watching Tiske Sauer you're watching Navarra media as you know this show This station is only possible because of your kind support if you are already a subscriber. Thank you very much If not, please go to support. Navarra media.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month or give us a new year's bonus Keep your comments coming. We'll go to your questions at the end Or if you go on Twitter and comment on the hashtag Tiske Sauer We are even more likely to read those out and answer those questions because we want more people to come to this show And that is a way of getting out of our little YouTube bubble As much as we love you in the comments here Strategic calculations that you were talking about here You know, the Americans are provoking Iran, you know by putting or by flying drones either into their airspace or very close To their airspace either way it seems like a fairly provocative thing to do They've also, you know, obviously to apply such harsh sanctions on a country is in a way to provoke it What are they? Playing what to what end I suppose is the question. What are they? What are the Americans hoping to achieve by provoking some sort of reaction from the Iranians? It's Trump right and like it is really hard to analyze US foreign policy at this moment because I mean if you know anything about my Work, you know, I'm pretty Structuralist I think in terms of empire and state and capitalism all the rest of it But sometimes you just have to focus on individuals. They're the active components within the system, right? They do matter and this guy You have to focus on his personality as much as anything else like why did he tear up? The Iran nuclear deal right when the great achievements of American diplomacy from the point point of view of American imperialism Why do that if you're a normal imperialist you should be happy with it? It just seems to me that it he's driven by his antipathy for Barack Obama, which is heavily racialized heavily racialized It's the idea that this guy should be shining his shoes is in fact the president now there He's not even a proper American because he's because he's black. So I think a lot of it was that I want to I'm gonna tear this up and I'm gonna replace it with better deal And if you look at what Trump said today Really telling comment. I'll try and remember it exactly. It's something like Iran has never Ran has never won a war and never never lost a negotiation. That was it what he wants. It seems to me You know the interest note you think about this. I don't think he wants an all-out war. I think he wants to exert his exert himself In a quiet sort of you know in that kind of macho way as a kind of demonstration slash tantrum And then he wants them to capitulate and this is a guy frankly who in his you know in his life experience You throw your weight around and you get what you want And he seems to think that in this situation as well is mistaken He was mistaken with career as well But he seems to think that if he throws his weight around people will capitulate they'll come to him begging for a deal He'll sign that deal and then he'll be able to wave that in front the American people and say that Barack Obama signed a terrible deal with the Iranians I Was really tough or threw my way around They capitulated and now got this great deal that seems to me to be what he really wants He doesn't want a war to win an election he wants a deal to win an election and he thinks this is how he goes about Getting it. It's it's not that's not how it's gonna work. That's interesting You David wearing does materialist analysis of the Middle East is saying it's probably just this nutter in Washington But it's a sort of there's other things going to interject in this conversation I want to go to a clip. This is obviously a very popular theory going around Twitter that the reason Trump is doing this now I don't think it's a ridiculous theory either It's because he wants to provoke international conflict or a war before the presidential elections Which will be in November. This is a theory the idea that that a president would start a war with Iran To win a jump to win a presidential election It's not it's not so much conspiracy theory because it was said by the president himself We're gonna go to this clip now. This is from 2011 on I think the Donald Trump have a YouTube channel anyways It's I think it's his YouTube diary from 2011. We'll go to that now Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate He's weak and he's ineffective So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected and it sure as you're sitting there is to start a war with Iran That was Donald Trump Saying that Obama was going to start a war with Iran to win the 2012 presidential elections Obama didn't it looks like Trump is going to I should probably say that it seems some of you are having problems in terms of the The relationship between the audio and the sound apologies for that. We're gonna get that fixed Well, that's happening I mean, do you think that's what this is about on the most basic level is it's just trying to start a war to win A presidential election. No, I think there's a lot more going on I mean, obviously, I think what David's saying that Trump obviously has Invested I mean, he's I mean, he's basically a lot of it is moving against Obama and the president's wish Obama had sent Had set but I do think that actually there's something else also going on I do think that there was very much a major disagreement within sort of Yeah, the heartland of American Empire over how to do with Iran So on the one hand, I think definitely I think Trump would love to have a better deal if he could actually sort of have this You know sort of moment with the photo hand and with the hand in hand with Rohani or something that answered I bested Obama, but then I mean there is sort of Boris Johnson's deal to Theresa Mays Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's definitely going on But I also do think that there's made a huge number of people both in the debt amongst the Democrats the establishment Democrats and the Republicans Answered the broader foreign policy establishment, which find the the very idea of a deal with Iran absolutely Anathema and the main issue that they have I think they're just a fundamental and obviously in concert with obviously the deep penetration of Emirati Saudi and Israeli sort of lobbying in Washington Capitol Hill itself are deeply opposed Fundamentally to the normalization of Iran and its integration to anything like a broader security Architecture in the region. They're fundamentally unwilling to accept that and I mean the reasons for that are undoubtedly very complex They go back to the revolution the overthrow of the Shah the hostage crisis many many things going on and also I mean just I think Many people in Washington as well as in Tel Aviv and Riyadh are fundamentally Opposed to that because obviously I mean they've had 40 years I mean previously the Shah was basically the key pillar in the Nixon doctrine for security You know for basically guaranteeing regional security on America's behalf And then obviously the Saudis have never been able to really fill those shoes Really to the same extent in any event. They're worried that you know, God forbid that an actual Iran which is normalized Could perhaps take up a sort of a bigger role or or just cease being absolutely Anathematized and demonized and having sanctioned and actually how about you know perhaps and again This is not my personal position, but it's sort of instance saying sort of you know, American Corporations going into Tehran potentially and actually, you know using all this heat You know 80 million people highly educated population highly skilled lots of resources Perfect for tourism all these sorts of things obviously there are domestic obstacles to that happening in Iran as well You know there's a domestic push way, but that kind of scenario Is absolutely opposed by both the Democrats and Republicans and many within the foreign policy establishment and obviously having Iran as a convenient Demon is great for Netanyahu is great for Muhammad and Salman is great for whoever happens to be in Washington Because obviously having this boogeyman is just necessitates further American Imperial penetration into the Middle East I mean, it just justifies it says of course we have to be there and we've just seen this actually I mean they've assassinated Rassim Soleimani and they might I mean the Iraqi Parliament might actually end up ejecting them from Iraq Perhaps we have to see but they've already sort of announced that they're gonna send another three hundred three thousand three thousand five hundred Troops into the region. So it's basically just a vicious circle Which always underwrites deeper and deeper American Imperial penetration into the region just keeps generating crisis after crisis after crisis I think that's definitely true. There's a in terms of thinking in Washington. I mean it is a little bit I feel like it's split between I want to get into two sort of technical IR language But basically more sort of conserved I'm trying to say What's the worst saying realist about saying realist like more sort of conservative foreign policy types These are the states you deal with them to the the best advantage you possibly can and in a pragmatic way Yeah, except the world's you find it you do have it in a pragmatic way for one of a better term And Obama was actually a small C conservative. Yeah in foreign policy terms and a pragmatist and he wanted to Tightly approach that look the regime's there. It's been there 40 years. We can't do anything about it We just got to live with it. So let's try and bring them in and have a rapprochement and You know that will stabilize the Middle East to some extent the Middle East will be a less less of a drain on us Geo-strategically militarily and also The Europeans were up for that as well, you know, so there's there's the conservative set within English folks on Washington So in Washington, you've got the more conservative pragmatic types like Obama and Ben wrote his National security advisor the foreign policy advisor who took that approach then you've got more near conservative types Who would they'd set against that for the reasons you described? So what the neocons want is they want to just wholesale refashion the whole world so that it's totally in their image. I think the best way to Distinguish between the two is to say that near conservatives are More radical and they see less They're less able to perceive the limits of what the US can do, right? So if you think about 2003 of invasion of Iraq, they had big dreams for that They were going to transform the whole region Iraq will be over in six months. It'll be a cake walk They'll be you know welcomed with flowers. They were going to turn Iraq into a model democracy I you know heavily overseen by US troops and US trans security personnel and managing all the rest of it So that kind of democracy, but they were going to remake the whole region They thought that was possible We'll just apply military power and we'll change everything will topple this regime will topple that regime will have a whole new bunch of allies We'll have strategic bases across the region. Now, that's a near conservatives to small C old-style concert is a paleo Conservatives if you like a much more circumspect and think actually military power doesn't get Doesn't give us the ability to remake the whole world. We just have to manage it as best we can So that's the clash and when the Iranian when Iran nuclear deal was signed It was a bit of a victory of one side over the other and Obama was able to betray the opponents of his deal as You know throw back to the Iraq war Look these these guys got into just us into this huge mess. Let's be more pragmatic now And he got the deal signed by the way This is worth mentioning because so many people in you know and the left by into this ridiculous Israel lobby theory The fact that the Israel lobby lobbied like mad to get that deal squashed They sent Benjamin yet and Yahoo to the US Congress to speak to both houses of Congress to condemn the US president The Israelis didn't like it. He's well lobby didn't like it. They lobbied like mad against it The sound is didn't like it. The M right is didn't like it and it got signed anyway I think that's a demonstration of the fact that US state power has its own interest It doesn't get dictated to by small regional allies But that's the debate within Washington now the other element I think it's worth bringing in things we're in Europe and we're You know in Britain in particular Is that the Europeans overwhelmingly sided with Obama and their view was Again, this region is on our doorstep We would rather there was less less conflict there Especially because of the quote-unquote refugee crisis not actually refugee crisis It was a European racism crisis. But anyway, they saw it as a refugee crisis always terrible brown people coming over here Isn't it awful? So they want that rich debt They want that region Calm down and secured and they also want and this is the thing you alluded to really important They want European firms in Iran. It's a wonder. Yes an oil interest to him Airlines car Car manufacturer 80 million people as you said highly educated It's a huge untapped global South market one of the last ones the Europeans wanted it and what the JCPOA did to the Iran nuclear did what it did was not only Effective of rapprochement between Iran and everyone else in the region and come things down there But also it was the prelude to opening up that market for the Europeans And what if you think about this in terms of imperialism the US was doing its job as a global hedgeman I was managing the international system on behalf not just of its own interests But the interests of its allies that is to say the key European states and concentrations of capital around those key European states, so you know aircraft manufacturers, etc, etc and It was able to say to the Europeans. We are managing this problematic part of the world Competently and usefully from your point of view You're gonna get this great new market and this source of this region the source of problems this particular region is gonna come down What Trump's done is turn up and act as a completely incompetent manager of the global system He's reintroduced in stability in that region and he's shut off that really appetizing Iranian market to the Europeans So from the European point of view, this is all terrible The Americans are supposed to run the world in a competent manner and they do any exact opposite So there's all this stuff at play. This is all this These are the different kind of you know elements of it and then just looking forward from the European point of view well, I've got to be thinking at this point is we've based our Geopolitical strategy since World War two on American leadership the global system American management of international relations International state interstate relations and international capitalism on the basis these guys know what they're doing and they're reliable Government to government, you know the Republican or Democrat, but if these guys are going to just start electing whimsical semi-fascists Do you know me? Yeah? Yeah, we can't trust them and if we can't trust them How do we because we can't manage the world ourselves as Europe? So it's a real dilemma for the Europeans. I want to switch to the strategic incentive sort of within Iran So they had you know that they signed us a deal Which was going to allow a rapprochement between between Iran and the West North America and in Europe now you've got some guy in the White House who's ripped it up who's provoking the country You know, it's on its knees because of because of sanctions But it doesn't seem like there are any good options I mean if if you don't retaliate then you just suffer in silence and your economy shrinks by 9% etc if you do retaliate you risk a full-blown war with the United States, which I mean The United States won't necessarily win it, but I mean it's not going to be pretty for anyone who lives in Iran Is it so I mean it seems to be stuck between Iraq and a really fucking hard place So so suppose do you have any idea of what are the debates going on within Iran about how? They can respond to American aggression. Well, I mean I think we already have been in basically a war of attrition Already, I mean over with the cyber war is the bombing of actually the Saudi office and it is whether it's you know previous even sort of, you know the US probably with the cooperation of Israel assassinated Iranian Scientists within Iran. I mean So I mean I do think this has been ongoing the sanctions are really I just see them as a form of economic warfare I mean, it's really just about trying to immiserate people so that they will obviously pour into the streets and obviously overthrow the government in some ways. Is there any chance of that? I think that's really a delusion on the part of the state. I think if we squeeze so hard they'll throw over the lull over from the No, I think it's absolutely Completely misconceived. I mean look, they were massive protests in Iran just recently in November And they were obviously in huge number of cities, but they're generally pockets and in the provinces and Really the poor and most emissary toeds Who were just coming out in desperation? And obviously all it does is basically Cause the Iranian government to clamp down on them with an iron fist and obviously lots of just poor Iranians are just getting brutalized by the Iranian state I mean, that's all it essentially does and the thing that was actually interesting for me today And again, it's always difficult to measure the things So I'm not saying they certainly but then even in many of these areas places like I saw Mahshar, which is a person who's Estan another one could put Abdullah and places like this. There were actually Huge but we're actually there were protests there like and significant ones Actually, there was sort of now so people coming out in favor possible money though videos being shed Obviously, you know, it's always to be pursued further and verified But the fact that for instance, he had gone there previously when there was flooding and there was like devastation as Environmental devastation he'd gone and visit to the area. I mean these things actually do kind of count And this is why I do think he's going to be extremely hard to replace I mean, obviously these the IRGC is a very very competent powerful complex set of institutional Organization, which has you know, military economic and many other different components to it So he has already been replaced on the very same day But whether you know someone of that stature who actually manages to sort of embody this kind of Yeah, sort of Iranian nation and national inspiration sort of Iran as a rising power as well Kind of this idea is he more powerful as a martyr though in terms of you know, the Iranian regime shoring up support for itself I mean, it's going to prevent just fodder for them as the Iranian state can just I mean I just sort of mentioned this on the Twitter that it's like graces is created I mean as a martyr, he's far far more powerful than if he's sort of aged and the regime is slowly declined Yeah, exactly and he supported clapdowns are internally I mean this way that legend will always sort of live on and we're probably going to see trade transformation the urban geography of Iran through roads and highways and send like, you know such as being built in his honor So they've given them they've given plenty of Fodder and just to get back to your sort of question No, I mean like Gossam Soleimani's whole genealogy is basically that were basically formulating Iran's sort of strategic doctrine was basically when you have a region When you basically come out of revolution, you have the you enter a war, which was basically one of the most bloody wars in sort of the trenches since the first world War and you don't have access to really cutting edge conventional military hardware because you're basically on arms embargo and then you have like billions and billions and billions being flooded to Saudi and UAE and other sort of rival adversaries sort of states. I mean, like the Saudi budget, the military budgets is sort of like fourfold what Iran says, you know, this sort of then you have to basically formulate a sort of a low cost form of waging or imposing a cost on your adversary. And this is exactly what he did. So Mr. Gossam Soleimani would see, you know, where you find sort of grievances and discontent, whether it's in Lebanon in 82, following, you know, with the Lebanese civil war, which leads to the establishment of Hezbollah eventually, or in Iraq, you know, resisting the occupation, or in the case of the Houthis, which obviously wasn't created by Iran by any means, but obviously sort of in a sense become Iran's support for that organization in many ways become a self fulfilling prophecy. Then obviously the way you actually create deterrence in a very kind of standard kind of real politic fashion is actually working with partners in these areas to say, you know, we'll give you this will train you will allow you to see your own interests. And you know, if we get attacked, there's going to you can actually inflict maybe a cost locally. And this has been that was really his brainchild. That was what he had a big role in for me. So I mean, just so they're influenced in not to cut you off just as their influence in, say Iraq, or Syria is is to gain leverage to defend Iran against its advance. Yeah, I mean, it's the same. I mean, obviously, we can talk about Syria and obviously the really obviously again, it speaks to the very much the and obviously Iraq itself, I mean, the double sidedness of his legacy is obviously he played a decisive role in rolling back ISIS working with the Western powers. Similarly, obviously, even following the invasion of Afghanistan, they played a role even collaborated with the US and rolling back with the Northern Alliance, rolling back to Taliban. So I mean, there's that side of things. And there's also the profound resentment many Iraqis for seeing that, you know, the sort of overbearing influence of Iran interfering in for instance mediating between sort of an unwanted and disliked Iraqi political class, which is seen as you know, more of a mind in corruption and lack of democratic credentials and whatnot. So that double sidedness is definitely part of his legacy. This is what we see actually, I mean, it's very in Twitter itself, you just see this insane sort of polarisation of just complete demonisation versus sacralisation and valorisation. And we have to kind of understand I mean, I'm not interested in that at all. I'm kind of just like, what is the real the repercussions of this? I mean, I think that his security doctrine in a sense. So we want it is going to carry on and they can impose a real cost in on the US. But I do think that unlike Trump, who's obviously very reckless. And he doesn't even care about the repercussions really just sort of okay, the Iranians are going to buy their time and they will see like how they can affect the biggest damage with the least sort of potential cost. Let's talk about the British response. Dominic Rob has said we can probably get the statement up. We have always recognised the aggressive threat posed by the Iranian could force led by Kasem Soleimani. Following his death, we urge all parties to de-escalate further conflict is in none of our interests. A very banal statement there from British Foreign Secretary. It's effectively support, isn't it? That's what that's what you interpret that as effectively support. And do you think the British state would do you think that they didn't wake up and Boris Johnson didn't wake up and say fuck what's Donald Trump done now? Absolutely. Oh, yeah. So he did do that, but he is also willing to completely 100% support what's happened. They didn't they didn't tell the British before they did this and Iraqis or the Iraqis. No, they didn't tell the Iraqis come to that. No, no, no, I didn't tell anyone. I just went ahead and did it. And in fact, they didn't tell the British, the British have 400 troops in Iraq. So the British are targets for any retaliation because they're part of the coalition. The US is leading partner and, you know, a problem for Iran for 100 years. They didn't tell the British if they're 400 troops in Iraq and God knows how many civilians diplomats what have you. They didn't tell the Iraqis who's country is and they didn't tell the Americans because they're American civilians and you know, they don't know any American diplomats. They haven't told the American diplomats in Iran hardly anyone knew anything about it. I suppose it was if you're going to drone strikes on individuals are pretty top secret, aren't they? I guess so. But like, because if it gets leaked, then it's the whole thing fails. As far as I'm aware, the diplomats find out afterwards when they're like, well, OK, now you better leave. But are potentially a bit like Britain and the EU going to be putting, well, I suppose it's happened now, hasn't it? But what what is going to be Britain and the European powers role in any on incoming escalation as it were? Will they be trying to play a deescalating role as they're saying in their statements or what you see happening? So remember what I was saying before about their view of the Iran nuclear deal and how it was actually really good for them. And they're, you know, pretty pissed off that Trump tore it up. Now, since he exited it, what they've been trying to do is maintain the deal by saying to the Iranians, well, the rest of us are going to stay in this deal, us Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese. And you guys as well should stay in it, even though the Americans have left. And it's hard to do that. It's hard to maintain that from the Iranian point of view, because they're not getting any of the benefits. They're nuclear program has been severely curtailed and they're not getting the sanctions relief in return. And the problem for that is because to go back to real basics, the US have applied sanctions on Iran, not the European powers in this case. Secondary sanctions, though, any any basically company, irrespective that wants to deal with Iran is basically potentially subject to the wrath of the US Treasury and being fined like insane amounts. So if you're, if you're BP and you don't buy oil from Iran, even Chinese banks, I mean, it's that serious. Like, I mean, I have just anecdotal, like councils, you know, even sort of credible Chinese banks, like, you know, well, I'm willing to actually work with Iranian firms. I mean, to even lend to, for instance, Chinese companies who then want to work inside Iran. I mean, it's that serious. And like you're talking about oil revenues. I mean, around like from 2.5 million barrels a day to like 400,000, something along those. I mean, it's like just trickling in the revenue. I mean, this is why to go back to the process of November. I mean, this is in large part why the Iranian state basically took this extraordinary measure of basically removing this 30 billion dollar subsidy annually on Iranian oil, which obviously then turns out to be sort of a regressive tax and then punishes basically the poorest initially. They were meant to replace that. I mean, in previously when Ahmadinejad had done a similar thing, they basically timed it. So you had a cash subsidy prior to the removal of the subsidy. So then people would be reimbursed and more so. So it would actually be beneficial to the poorest classes. But I think because of the extent of the fiscal crisis, they weren't actually able to do that. And it was very incompetently done. And they basically tried to do it on our equivalent of like a Friday night, like and just sneak it in. And obviously there was just immense outrage as a result. I mean, the price of oil for people living in Iran rocketed. And that's exactly the kind of thing Americans want, right? Yeah, exactly. Because that's the kind of thing that causes political. What is the desired outcome? So to take it back to his question about what the Europeans are going to do. Not only has Trump sabotaged this deal, he's also in effect not waged economic war on them, but he's preventing them from doing business with Iran, which is kind of none of his business, you know? So it's not just Iran sanctions, as you're saying. It's that anyone who wants to do business of Iran is sanctioned. If you want to do business of Iran, OK, but forget about any access to the American market and forget about any access to the dollar, the world's reserve currency, which people kind of need, you know, firms need it, countries need it. And the Europeans have tried to maintain this deal and they tried to set up a special purpose financial vehicle that will allow companies to trade with Iran and evade US sanctions, but they can't make it work. They want to make it work. So they're interested to make it work, but they can't. So the Europeans, in a way, have tried to stand up to Trump. The British have always been the weak link in this, but there's certainly the French and the Germans, and you're even more generally, have tried to make the deal work. But it's just extremely, extremely hard. But just to add, just to say one point, I mean, they haven't even been able to guarantee humanitarian aid. Like, I mean, people have actually died because they haven't had access to certain medicines, which you can't get. Obviously, Iran is quite self-sufficient in producing medicine, but there's obviously certain specialised things. So actually, children have died. And why haven't they been able to do that? I can see why they're lifting or why are they evading the sanctions. Largely, I mean, you have to go on a case-by-case basis, but I think just companies are essentially worried because it's not simply that they'll be bankrupted because the US Treasury will just find them to the point that they're absolutely bankrupt and they can't do anything. I mean, that's also the fear. Yes, so the carve-out for humanitarian aid apparently exists, but it's actually nominal because you're effectively saying to anyone, these sanctions are so extreme and so tough that, yeah, there's a carve-out for humanitarian stuff. If you want to certain humanitarian stuff, that's obviously fine. We're not monsters, but everyone's like... So far, if you get companies won't provide specialist medicines because they're worried that they'll get... Yeah. They'll find themselves on the wrong side of the US sanctions. It's had a reason for the Swedish company. I mean, it's really horrendous. So, I mean, in a way, this is making it sound like the Europeans are in an impossible situation. What demands should be made of the Europeans? Could they play more hardball? What more could they be doing? Well, the British, for example. I think that's a good question. What do you think? I mean, to be honest, I think maybe in the long term, we'll see a transition against them. Dolo Hogeminis has always been speculated on for decades and decades, and the Chinese are creating this rival geopolitical order. But I mean, this is not something that happens overnight. In the meantime, Iranians are going to be suffering and dying as a result. So, I mean, I do think the Europeans are pretty much helpless to do much. And exactly like David was saying, I mean, we've seen this with the nuclear deal. I mean, Federico Mogherini and various others who was the foreign policy chief at the EU was very adamant about trying to maintain it, to preserve it. And I think she was really well-intentioned and tried everything she could to try and do so. But you know, the hands are tied. I mean, they just can't, this is the thing. I mean, I remember I wrote something just when Trump got in and I had a lot. And I remember the commentary, it comes in, you know, he'd write on Iran sort of saying, you know, they can't do anything. Trump can't do anything. He thought we had to tank this. I'm like, you actually really just undermine exactly what sort of David was sort of saying though, like Trump has sacrificed this sort of role of say, I'm going to organize international capital on behalf of, you know, the world system. He has basically sort of given that role up, but they still have immense power through the Treasury, through international financial organizations, through the hegemony of the dollar. And they can really exact a price. And we've seen this and it was predictable, to be honest. I mean, and I mean, when you first saw his cabinet, it was just packed with neo-conservatives from like Giuliani. And then obviously, so then Bolton came in. I mean, Pompeo himself is like a rabid evangelical. I mean, so it's the thing that people, also the people around, he has his own vision, I guess, but then he's always got like very, very hard line sort of neo-con type sort of personalities around him, which are always kind of pushing him as much as they can without losing their jobs. Do you want to look at how do Europeans and the British are going to approach the next few days and weeks in terms of if a conflict breaks out? Is that where you're asking us? Yeah, well, I was sort of asking in terms of what should be, because lots of people who are viewing this thing and what demands can we make of our government? You know, what would we be, if we were protesting the British government, what would we be protesting? But keep it quick, because I want to go on to the lens which we will view many things on Navarra media over the next few months, which is the Labour leadership election. Right. We should also probably just talk about the left, just generally how it should actually position itself to this issue without, because obviously we're inevitably going to get the typical debates over, you know, obviously not defending the Iranian states, but we're actually worried about the process of war. You know what, let's do this through the lens of the Labour leadership election, because a lot of these issues come up in the tweets. So we are going to start with, so obviously for the next three months, we're going to be looking at the direction that the Labour Party is going to take. It's currently led by an anti-imperialist. We can go to his statement at the end, I think I've put it in here, but all at the moment the various contenders are going to have to respond to various events to try and show us what kind of Labour Party they will be leading, what kind of opposition they will be leading, and potentially that will be leading the left as well. It depends who wins, I suppose. We're going to start with Keir Starmer, who had a very weak one to begin with. He said earlier this morning, this is an extremely serious situation. There's a clear danger of further violence and escalation in the Middle East. We need to engage, not isolate Iran. All sides need to de-escalate tensions and prevent further conflict. That could have been written by a sort of banal centrist bot, couldn't it? And in fact, it matches Jess Phillips, so yes. No, Jess Phillips actually came up with a slightly better statement. Her first statement was pretty banal, wasn't it? Well, Jess Phillips said, I'm changing the order, which folks might be annoyed at, but is that okay? Jess Phillips said, reckless foreign policy does not show strength. It's not a game. The consequences of the escalating tensions between the US and Iran are not to be underestimated, not just once again on the civilians in the region, but on the whole world, I suppose it's pretty similar, isn't it? At least she called it reckless. Well, but she doesn't actually name it here. Kier Starmer just says that everyone should de-escalate and this is an unfortunate series of events. And hers isn't miles off that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. What's interesting is the fact that Kier Starmer makes this really platitudinous, vague statement, not criticized in the fact. Remember what Trump did is a massive escalation. There's these, we didn't talk about the sequence of events leading up to, because he didn't just hit Soleimani out of the blue. There had been drone strikes on, Petahiba Hezbollah in Iraq. Yeah. So just this popular mobilization force, which is sheer militia who have been trained by Soleimani, been trained by the Kurds force to fight amongst other things, ISIS, clashes between them and the US. So first they're hit by drone strikes in the summer, which they blame on the US and Israel, but the US and Israel deny it. Then they start lobbing mortars into US bases. They finally hit, they kill a US contractor recently. Then the Americans hit these guys, this sheer militia bases and kill like 25 militiamen, wound 45. In return, they congregate around the US embassy, laid siege to the US embassy, and it's in retaliation for that, that the US kills Soleimani. So there's just been this ramping up of tensions and tit-for-tat strike. So what the US did in killing Soleimani was escalate it massively. You go from tit-for-tat minor strikes, between... You go from a protest outside an embassy to a state power killing the second most powerful person in Iran, Cairo, and Iraq. Exactly, exactly. And in that context... There's no both sides here really. Exactly, so in that context, Starmer should not be saying, ah, six or one and a half dozen in the oven. He should be identifying the fact that our leading ally has escalated his situation to the point of regional war and he's not able to do that. And what's really interesting is the fact that after everyone else releases their statements, which are a lot more critical, which are directly critical of the US, apart from Jess Phillips, everyone else is more directly critical. He comes back with a whole list of tweets, of like five tweets saying, oh, wasn't it terrible what Trump did? So he comes up later. He's obviously realized at this point that he is running to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party in making banal statements about US imperialism is probably not the best campaigning tactic. I'd say he comes back later in the afternoon. He says, the government's response to Donald Trump's actions is not good enough, blaming someone at least. His name, Donald Trump, that's a start. The UK government should hold him to account for his actions and stand up for international law, not tacitly condone the attack. Trump's actions are as irresponsible as they are counterproductive than he puts in a bit of personal history. Having wholeheartedly opposed the illegal war in Iraq 17 years ago, I am acutely aware of the additional responsibility we have to the Iraqi people to help them secure the safety and stability of their country. I mean, it's pathetic as well. Well, those are a better series of tweets. The problem is that he's put them out because he's worried, because he's had pressure from the left to say that actually these name statements aren't enough. The problem is, if he becomes the Labour Party, the pressure will all be from precisely the opposite direction, which is to make him less critical. Isn't he supposed to be competent? Because a competent person would know from moment one, as did all his rivals. I mean, a couple of them are saying it sincerely. There's a couple of others who aren't, but wouldn't a competent politician know, I'm running to lead the Labour Party, which is full of people who don't like this sort of thing and understand what he should say? Yeah, I mean, whoever's managing his campaign should slap his hand for that tweet. Clive Lewis was an interesting one because this sort of summarises or brings in, as you say, some of these debates that people are having on the left, you allowed to condemn Salimani, whilst at the same time opposing the assassination. We can go to these now, I think. Clive Lewis said, the violent escalation in an already volatile region is a mistake and should not be compounded by UK government support. I call on the PM to condemn this cowboy action and turn immediately to our international institutions to try and de-escalate any war with Iran. The first tweet went down very well with most people. The second tweet, I shed no tears for Salimani. He was a cruel man who unleashed suffering for many, but violence begets violence, especially without a thought about military strategy. I know this from my time in Afghanistan, the UK now lead in being a broker for peace. So you've got a huge debate about whether or not it undermined his first point to say that he'll shed no tears for Salimani. What do you think? I mean, yeah, I mean, you don't have to, exactly, I mean, I think you don't have to shed tears for Salimani, I think people should fall into that trap. And I think there needs to be a focus, obviously, that on the nature of the escalation, that this is something which is just absolutely takes us, hurtles us towards a more sort of serious form of like direct conflict. And apart from that, I mean just the people in the broader region, the implications for them, I mean a duty of care responsibility and so far as I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, Iraqis were all assembling in Tahrir Square and back then protesting for democracy, greater equality and greater accountability. Similarly in Iran, obviously, Iran's system is more complex and all these sorts of things. But you know, people want sort of, again, greater, more accountability, more democracy, want more equality and all these sorts of things. And this is completely overshadows. If anything, I mean, this shifts, I mean, we just saw it actually. I mean, Iran was getting a lot of heat and criticism by Iraqis, many Iraqis within Iraq, until just very recently, then obviously with the bombing of Qataba, has brought like this sort of, this militia, which is part of the popular mobilization unit, which is itself part of the Iraqi army itself. So in a sense, you know, it's just bombing a part of the Iraqi security state as it were, which is a self kind of problematic. And then obviously not even alerting the Iraqi so violation of Iraqi sovereignty. So again, this is a legacy of the Iran war. But then anyway, all of these struggles of ordinary people, it's completely overshadowed now. It takes us closer to war. Their demands now are gonna be completely stripped or sort of, you know, stripped of any sort of legitimacy. They're gonna be absolutely cloaked in sort of this language of securitization. And it's legitimate in a sense. I mean, so far as, you know, the United States has just killed the second highest ranking military figure in Iran, just unilaterally, extra judicially. So I mean, we're gonna see, I think, also in Iran, I mean, also just to move to Iran quickly. I mean, in Iran as well, there's like major selections coming up. And there were sort of, I was the next month. Yeah, so I was expecting these to basically be this really sort of a sullen affair, like no one's gonna turn up and there's gonna be actually a real blow for the Iranian state. And it's gonna be a real blow to, you know, all this sort of sort of decimations about how popular organs testify to our legitimacy and deeper popularity. Now, I mean, it's gonna be the rights, we've got this platform now, which they've got their martyr, they've got the sort of, you know, this absolute affront to sort of national security and basically the dignity of the nation, more broadly speaking, which they can just completely use. So it's not gonna benefit, I mean, reformists can't, I'm gonna capitalize on this. It's gonna be the security platform, which is gonna capitalize on that. It's gonna be ordinary Iranians who do want a better system. They're gonna obviously suffer and the hard right is gonna capitalize. So I mean, the fact that these statements really, I mean, focus on, you know, Qasem Soleimani is evil or he's not or this sort of thing. I actually think a lot of it's just kind of performative sort of politics. It's just like posturing. And these are tweets, it's all posturing. Yeah, no, sure, yeah, it's all posturing, no truth. But I mean, we need something a bit more thoughtful and substantive, which takes in, one takes in, I think, the British legacy in Iraq seriously. And we need to really just stop with this sort of really tedious faciles of saying, oh, we're tired of it. Because Iraqis are still living through the legacy of that devastation, which was wrought in like a million lives of cost. And it's not even that. I mean, the very fact, many of the grievances which Iraqis still have about lack of water, lack of just basic institutions which you need to have a decent life because they've been devastated and absolutely deracinated by, you know, decade of war. I mean, and that's Blair's legacy and that's Bush's legacy and it's ongoing. It's still lived by millions of people in Iraq. The other point about this Clive Larist way, I mean, I don't really say anything one way or the other about Soleimani. Everyone knows what terrible, you know, not just person he is, but the legacy of what Quds Force has done around the region, particularly in Syria, which is just, you know, unspeakable. So say what you like about him, that's fine. My problem with those tweets is one that calls it a mistake. I think it's really important to distinguish between crimes and mistakes. And an extrajudicial killing is a crime and it's an act of war. It's a crime as well, it's an act of aggression. There's nothing justifying it. The Americans, in their early statements, were saying, oh, this will take out a bad guy and only later on would have said, oh, but there's an imminent threat as well. There's no imminent threat and therefore it's criminal. Now you shouldn't be calling something that's a crime a mistake. And the thing he says in his next tweet is this thing about, oh, you've got to have a clear strategy. Well, when you're committing a crime, you've got to have a clear strategy. I mean, I would expect from one of the leftmost candidates, you know, sorry, Clive, if you're watching, I would expect from one of the leftmost candidates in this contest, I would expect something better than this. It just says, oh, we've made an error, we haven't thought it through properly. No, the US has committed a crime. It's serious and it should be treated as such, you know. And this is one of the problems, the way we talk about foreign policy. In the West, in Britain, we talk about it in terms of the underlying assumptions, we're the good guys, we do nothing worse than make mistakes, and people who are criminals and do bad things are the external people, the people out there, the other, you know. And that draws on British patriotism, that default sense of self, we're the good guys, the evil comes from without, we do nothing worse than make mistakes. With Iraq, the way we talk about Iraq, we didn't have an exit strategy, we mucked up on reconstruction, no, it was a crime, it was a act of regression, you know. And if we're not capable of talking about ourselves in those terms, we're not doing our job as a left, it's the left's job to critique that stuff and say, no, the West isn't a benign force for good in the world, you know. And if we can't do it when Donald Trump is doing things like this, and when can we do it? So, you know, I mean, Clive needs to rethink there, and I think it was Rebekah Long-Bailey who got it right. Let's go to Rebekah Long-Bailey's. With this assassination, President Trump is pushing us to the brink of another disastrous war that would cost countless lives, verbally stabilise the region and make us all less safe. Our government should help de-escalate tensions and we must resist any rush to war. For a while, there was, you know, just quite when is Rebekah Long-Bailey going to tweet? She's got a bit of a reputation for, you know, taking her time with these things, but you think it was worth the wait and that was the best one? Yeah, my issue with her is not her politics. My issue with her is, is she going to bring over to any leadership that she has, the same people who screwed up Corbyn's leadership? But as long as she doesn't do that, you know, then politically she's fine. That's not the issue for her. The issue of her is the associations. Let's go with Jeremy Corbyn's to finish. On his way out, the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani is an extremely serious and dangerous escalation of conflict with global significance. The UK government should urge restraint on the part of both Iran and the US and stand up to the belligerent actions and rhetoric coming from the US. He's always good at condemning imperial actions from the United States. It's one of the things he was always excellent at. Yeah, it's his thing, isn't it? That's his thing, exactly. Let's get some questions from the audience. Oh, interesting. This is, I love this, because this is so like 99.9% of people who come on the show would have no idea how to answer this question, but I think you will. Within Iran, it seems to me there is no embryonic party to emerge to take working-class people's struggles forward. Could you comment? Well, I mean, look, I mean, the legacy of the left in Iran historically is really very, very strong one. I mean, it had one of the most, the largest communist party in the course of the Second World War. Then, you know, very, very strong underground sort of guerrilla movement. And then obviously then it re-emerged in 1979, but then it was obviously crushed and absolutely pushed aside by the rise of Islamist and Khomeini and his followers to power. And then subsequently, I mean, there was the reformist movement between 1997 and 2005, which largely had the platform of, let's actually, we need to return constitutionality and basic sort of civic, civil rights and all these sorts of things, the freedom of the press to run and enshrine these institutions in the way, which many of them have been prefigured in the Constitution, but that was obviously pushed back by the right clamp down. I mean, so far as we have like, and you know, many of them have actually very much a blindness on issues of social justice. And one of the irony is actually of the development of Iran's reformists is that many of them actually started to sort of left wing sort of Islamists. And then gradually over the years moved towards a sort of a more liberal sort of perspective and then really had abandoned much of the talk about whether it's imperialism, but also actually questions about exploitation and workers' rights and all these sorts of things. I mean, there is the reality that within Iran itself, we've seen sort of a tilt sort of favoring into sort of domestic capital against labor, sort of greater precaritization, all these sorts of things are definitely in Iran, these things, you know, and obviously historically, I mean Iran, at least through the 80s and whatnot, saw itself somewhat as of a developmental estate which did support, you know, huge education programs, healthcare in the provinces and whatnot, but this has been rolled back in recent years and there is no party, so to speak, within Iran. There are sort of, you know, many sort of students who are very active in the student movement. There's sort of increasingly an awareness that inequality is a problem amongst the reformists, but they're largely politically neutralized. So what we have is really a quite, you know, an opposition in exile, which is profoundly, you know, pathological really, and a lot of it's dependent on US imperialism, pretty much, or other imperialism, or has been NGOized in a sense of the basis, set up NGOs and they've got no broader political platform, let alone a socialist one. So yeah, there isn't really a movement per se to take up sort of workers' rights or a socialist movement because yeah, it's still an authoritarian sort of state and even reformists, people who were deeply invested in the system, have been pushed aside and marginalized. I mean, the former Khomeini's former prime minister throughout the world, Meir Hossein and Moussavi, is under house arrest still, I mean. So yeah, I'm not, I'm quite sort of pessimistic, but I mean, I still see sort of Iranian students and people mobilizing and trying to sort of critique neoliberalism as iteration in Iran, but as for a broader movement, yeah, that's the reason why there's not gonna be that breakthrough or there's not gonna be, you're gonna see a miseration of the poor people who are gonna be scattered, but there's no way of actually more but mobilizing them politically, unless there's an opening, a political opening of some, which obviously isn't gonna happen as long as Iran feels this existential threat from the outside. I mean, this is the problem. So you have a constant threat of actually, any opening is gonna be basically appropriated or taken up by U.S. and Pyrrha powers to basically undermine and destroy and undercut the whole regime. At the same time, you have people within Iran itself, sort of, you know, quite reactionary, political forces and institutions who obviously themselves don't want to be accountable. And then you obviously have the ordinary people and you have reformers who obviously do see the right and the wrong, do see the system of change, but at the moment, we're in a deadlock. So yeah, I'm not very optimistic, to be honest. It's really interesting if you think about the parallels and you're gonna tell me if this is facile, but the parallels between Iran and so many other states in the region where you've got large youth populations and in terms of the economic model, you've got a kind of state-led development model that effectively ran out of roads and then an attempt to neoliberalize to some extent, coupled with a sort of crony capitalist class attached to the state at the top. A parallel potentially control between perhaps Turkey and Egypt, certainly Egypt and Iran in terms of the role that the military plays, not just in politics, but in the economy as well and the corruption around that. The main difference, I mean, I think that Egypt's a very illustrative example insofar as, because it actually speaks to the border of imperialism in the region. And so far, when, for instance, you saw the Arab Spring in Egypt, basically the Obama administration, they basically sought to consolidate the military and ensure, because there's decades of cooperation, so they moved to these kinds of states, which are, in a sense, U.S. allies, they moved to stabilize, where states like that are senior, anti-status quo or adversarial or whatever, they moved to basically throw everything at it to destabilize it. And I think that's exactly what they would do in the case of Iran. I mean, it was similarly what we saw, obviously in Syria and obviously, yeah, on the one hand, we have Iran sort of moving geopolitically to basically support the Syrian regime and it has horrendous consequences for ordinary, millions of ordinary Syrians. And on the other hand, if there's any sort of sense of instability in Iran, we see sort of the U.S. does try very much to capitalize on it. And that convinces obviously Iran that it needs to be very strong and not to open up because any sort of broader opening, any sort of glasno, so to speak, will be sort of manipulated and then you will have it steamrolled into something else, like a form of civil war. And that's exactly what they're very wary of. I've been telling that back to the question that was asked. I mean, there's a crisis of capitalism in the region that actually, I think, transcends the boundary between U.S. allies on the one hand and the so-called axis of resistance on the other, where you've got economic problems in places like Syria and Iran, which is not dissimilar to economic problems in other parts of the world. And it's about the failure of the regional economic model, about the way the region's economic model plugs into global capitalism through imperialism. And in all of these places, their capitalism might be in crisis, but unfortunately, there's been insufficient presence of an organized left. There's been youth movements, but without that kind of real level of organization that allows them to break through seized power, control it and transform these countries. And another thing that's just really interesting is the fact that despite the fact that you've got this, Iran, Saudi, pro-U.S., anti-U.S. fault line in the geopolitics of the region, on both sides, they counter-revolutionary. Like the Iranians playing the counter-revolutionary role in Syria and Saudis playing counter-revolutionary role in Yemen and Bahrain. Yeah, I think these parallels are quite interesting. I also do think I'll just go back to what you're saying. I mean, exactly. So you see sort of, I guess, this anti-colonial often struggles with the Nasserism and Egypt or the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which came out of this sort of broader constellation of anti-colonialism, strong state-led development, all these sorts of things. And then by the time of 89 with the crisis, the collapse of the Soviet Union, that kind of, imaginatively, there's nowhere really to go. Socialism scene has been defeated and the only real option is to actually open up to foreign capital. Iran is obviously in this dilemma because it seems any sort of opening, at least by those sort of unaccounted ones, like the Revolutionary Guard, like the Supreme Leader's office, all these do see foreign capital as a way of basically re-instituting neocolonialism within Iran. So they're very, very hostile. Whereas reformists and those sort of more technocratic class in the political elites have actually often sought to push forward that sort of agenda. So we need to integrate, we need to join the WTO. We need to actually have a good relation with the IMF and these sorts of things. And actually, the recent subsidy reforms in Iran, I mean, if you looked at the Iranian corresponds with the IMF over this, they're very, very positive and rosy. The IMF in favour of removing subsidies. Exactly, yeah. That's classic, isn't it? They're just so invigorating, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Mary Lenn asks, Eskander, do you not acknowledge that in fact, supporters of the Iranian regime are a minority and the footage of mourning in Iran was state propaganda? I mean, I'm sure a lot of it is state propaganda and it happened on a Friday, as I said, during Friday prayers. But I just don't buy this idea that everyone who actually had an outpouring of distress and anger over the assassination of Qasem Soleimani is basically some person who's just been given, it's some client who's been given a free sandwich or something. I mean, I just don't... This is often what you hear in the Iranian ex... I mean, this is why they've been projecting sort of the collapse of the regime for 40 years. I mean, look, you'd have to approve of the regime. You can hate the regime, you can criticise it to the cows come home and you can absolutely upgrade it as much as you like and it's got plenty of reasons for us to do that. But I mean, having some sort of naive sort of misplace, kind of understanding of how it's based work, so how it taps into Iranian nationalism and other things, sources of legitimacy is also, I think, just a full zero. And I mean, we need to have a proper appraisal and we can say, yeah, there's, the Islamic Republic is very weak here, it's very weak there, but it does have certain strengths in a very descriptive sense, which are a source of resilience. And we just have to take that seriously. And as I was sort of saying, it wasn't simply just people in the streets. I mean, I was saying like, everyone from people with dissidents in exile were expressing sympathy for Qasem Soleimani. I mean, I've even seen like royalists actually, like monarchists, because he has this sort of extra sort of national role and it seems projecting Iranian influence. And again, we're not there to approve of this. I mean, we're not here to indulge Iranian nationalism, but that capacity, what he's done, has a lot of cachet, has a lot of support and it can get garner support. I mean, just have to acknowledge it. Is it right to say that here you've got to turn to a large extent to the Iran-Iraq wars, a kind of, almost like a founding myth of the modern republic. And I mean, myth in a sense, it didn't happen. I mean, myth in a sense, it takes on this, it's like similar well to the World War II in Britain, where it becomes part of who we are. We stood alone against the Nazis, we didn't stand alone at all, but we stood alone against the Nazis. And in that case, we stood alone against Iraq, no one was prepared to arm us, everyone was prepared in Iraq. And we- Did Iran stand alone in that war? Did they have- I mean, the reason for the Syrian regime is exactly because Syria was the only real Arab state which stood with Iran as well. So even that has sort of a historical sort of link. And again, it's like, it's not about sort of indulging or approving, but then you have to sort of take that part of the story very seriously. We can also say, okay, the war also facilitated the consolidation of the Islamic Republic and the annihilation of dissidents and other voices which emerged at the point of the revolution. I mean, that there was like a massive coalition. And as we see, they progressively are just erased from the story and it basically allowed the Khomeinis to really colonize that story, that stuff. But it also became a national story because basically when you have millions of people of mobilizing throughout the entirety of the country, the whole reason that is basically to defend the country's borders because they were invaded. I mean, we invaded by Saddam Hussein. It wasn't Iran initiated it. It wasn't Iran invaded Iraq. It was invaded by Saddam Hussein and obviously supported. I mean, the legacy of that's still with us. I mean, he's like, Soleimani was a veteran. We still have veterans who are basically suffering from chemical burns because the chemical weapons which were used against them and which the United States actually provided satellite footage to basically to facilitate that being targeted by Saddam Hussein. I mean, we have to accept like, this is like part of the social fabric of that country. There's lots of other stories as well. There's lots of stories of, you know, youth in cafes who love Kim Kardashian. I mean, you know, there's that. Again, it's a very, very complex society like any society. Thank you both so much for that. I've learned a lot. I hope you have too. You've been watching Tisky Sour. As you know, this show is only possible because of your kind support. If you are already subscribed, thank you very much. If not, please go to support.nivoramedia.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. We'll be back on Monday. We're gonna do shows four nights a week for January as a little experiment. It'll be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It's financially viable. It will continue forever. If not, it'll be an experiment for January. In any case, see you next week. Good night.