 On think tech and its history lens, I'm John David and professor of history and I have with me once again Dr. Brian Gibson who's an assistant professor of Hawaii Pacific at Hawaii Pacific University and Brian is a specialist on the US Middle East relations and specific land. We're going to talk today about us in Iran and Brian welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back john I appreciate it. Yeah, great to have you on so Brian we were talking last week about. We went back in time talking about the history of the US Iranian relationship and some of these, what you called a mortal wounds that the that were inflicted on both sides I thought that was a great kind of hook a great concept to kind of get get enough you know an understanding of these important moments so. Let's let's recap a little bit on the contemporary situation then we'll go back and talk about the Iran Iraq war and and developments within Iran developments within the United States and pull it forward. Essentially, where we kind of last left off. Things have actually calmed down quite a bit in the Middle East, it seems. We haven't heard a lot from Iran since the downing of the Ukrainian plane, which is what was absolutely catastrophic especially for you know the Iranians but for the Ukrainians but also a lot of Canadians which I happen to be Canadian. They died in the, in the flight as well, I think 63. So, a real tragedy all around for everyone and the Iranians have been pretty quiet since then. Okay, in the lead up to that it was, it was very intense. It was a very scary moment in the Middle East. It's always pumping in the background now right at the I mean the Iranians are not sitting still and neither is the Trump administration so you see any openings for, you know, potential warming of relations or is just going to stay you know in the in the freezer here. I think that there is always potential for openings. The question is, do the Iranians want to give Trump something like that. I believe that the number one foreign policy goal in Tehran right now is regime change in Washington. They want to see Trump gone so that they can get someone that they can actually negotiate with who's a reasonable rational actor. So the Obama administration was of course, very hostile towards Iran through the first half of his two terms. But then we saw an opening in the second term that led to the Iran nuclear deal and massive de-escalation of the region at a time when ISIS was also posing a major threat to both the United States and Iranian interest. So there was kind of a, the two sides had mutual interests that came together, yes, an alignment of interests, which allowed the situation to de-escalate quite rapidly. I mean, it's a lot easier when your secretary of state can call up the foreign secretary in Iran and say, hey, you just picked up a bunch of our sailors who drifted into your waters. Can you release them and then release the next day. And that's an actual hostage crisis. That actually happened. That happened. Right. Yeah. But it's interesting. You're not going to get that with this current administration. It's interesting that how you describe Iran is wanting a rational player. We usually describe Iran as an irrational, you know, the axis of evil kind of situation. So Iranians are thinking about this in ways that apparently are more rational than, you know, the American administration at this point, which seems to simply want to score political points. You know, the killing of this Iranian general and, you know, kind of trying to raise up anger against Iran so that Trump can get re-elected. That's an interesting juxtaposition. Well, the thing about Iran is that I personally would never describe it as an irrational actor. All of its actions from the revolution through to the present are quite rational and quite strategic in their approach. They're quite clever in their approach to things because a lot of them were trained by the Americans and the Israelis during the period that we discussed last week. So under the Shah's regime. And they're a very intelligent, very cultured society. And they, but they're also fierce. They do not want to be interfered with by foreign powers like the United States or Russia or Britain. They want to have their own independence and they want to be treated like that. So in a way, they're very anti-imperialist. Okay, so that this is as a result of this 20th century mucking about that the Western powers did in Iran. So let's go back and let's talk a bit about the recent history of the U.S. Iranian relations and then we can move it forward. Perfect. Because this will actually give us an opportunity to lay out how rational they actually are. Okay, good. So where we left off, we were talking about the shooting down of Iran air 655, which killed 290 people. And a U.S. military vessel shot it down the U.S. has been sends. And this was a massive tragedy was very is horrific. People were slaughtered needlessly. Now, what's problematic about this is that, well, not problematic, the Iranians then went to the UN Security Council and saw a resolution condemning the Americans for doing this, but when they arrived in New York to meet with to meet with the U.S., they demanded a Security Council resolution. And curiously enough, the candidate in 2009, who was Mir Hussein Musavi, he was the representative who went to the, the UN, so he was part of the whole Green Revolution movement in 2009. Okay. Anyways, so when he got to New York, everyone said we don't care. This war, if it had ended in 1982, now these people would have been dead. And so the UN had no interest in, in working with with Iranians on this and not long afterwards, I had told a Khomeini decided that, you know, the war needed to come to an end. And at this stage Iraq launched a series of devastating offensives against it and reverse the tide of the war and it in August 1988. Okay, now, so Iran took the control of the war at that point. I'm sorry Iraq took control. Yes, with an American backing. Okay, the United States basically gave him a strategy on how to win. And the Iraqis. What was the strategy. I don't know a thing about it. No one really does. It was a operation called surf Fisher. And what it involved was strategic targeting of logistical supply points coming from the center of Iran out to the front. And they hit them in reverse so from the far back, and then gradually move their way towards the front lines, which meant that after a couple of days couple of weeks, the troops at the front had no water had no food and ammunition and no supplies. And that's when the Iraqis launched these devastating offensives which involved interesting, interesting. Okay, yeah. And so the US told them how to do it. So, but in the aftermath of the war, Iraq, of course, maintains its million man army and becomes much more belligerent in the region which leads to its invasion of Kuwait, which is a whole massive topic unto it. Right, right, right. Worth noting though, right that coming out of this you have a strengthened Iraq and Iraq strengthened by the United States. And that's what we've heard of this before. Right. And then, of course, they wage a war and we have to send troops in it to put down the war that they've been. Yeah. But curiously throughout the aftermath of the revolution in Iran, you get some major changes take place where Ayatollah Khomeini who had been leading the country for since the revolution. And there's a change in power which leads to the coming. The new Supreme Leader is Ayatollah Ruhal, not Ruhal, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. And Khomeini is the current Supreme Leader and he's a hardliner. Right. So, with him coming to power is a big shift. But then the new president of Iran is Raf Sanjani. Raf Sanjani is kind of a, he died not that long ago, but he's a revolutionary through and through, but he's also a pragmatist. Right. So during the Iran conflict crisis that we talked about last week, he was one of the so-called moderates that the Reagan administration was looking to work with. And with Raf Sanjani in power, his goal was reconstruction. He's like the country's been destroyed. We don't want to deal with the rest of the region. We don't want to keep picking fights with the United States. Yeah. Let's rebuild our country. Let's rebuild our economy and let's strengthen the revolution by being pragmatic about it. Okay. And what are the dates on Raf Sanjani? So 1989 through to, I think he was in 1996. Okay. No, I think in 1997 he left office and another pragmatist came in. Okay. Now, or moderate came in. Now Raf Sanjani sought to improve relations with the U.S. And he did quite a good job. One of the things when George HW Bush became president is in a state of the union address, he said that, you know, goodwill begets goodwill. In other words, if the Iranians help out and show that they can be reasonable actors in the region, then the United States will respond favorably. Now, Raf Sanjani then gets on a plane and flies to Lebanon. And he secure personally secures the release of a bunch of American hostages that have been held since the mid 1980s. So from his perspective, or from an Iranian perspective, they've followed through with their side of the bargain, right? But the United States never did anything and Brent Scowcroft later on, who is George HW Bush's national security advisor, lamented that this was one of the biggest mistakes of the other administration was that they should have responded more favorably to the Iranians because it could have changed the shape of the relationship moving forward. Now, under the Clinton administration, the tone changed quite considerably. The Iranians were included in a policy known as dual containment, which is an application of that Cold War policy of containment to both Iran and Iraq. Now, in my personal view, this was a huge mistake because Iran and Iraq hate each other. And the easiest way to contain both of them is to pit the two of them against each other. It doesn't cost very much from an American perspective either. This leads to a massive build up of American military hardware in the region and the United States is essentially inserting itself as the regional policemen. In an Iranian perspective, this is another insult as Iran had demobilized since the war, its war, its war economy had all been shifted to domestic production. It wasn't engaged in a lot of various activities, which unlike in the 1980s where they were engaged in a lot and in a lot of ways, the steam of the revolution was starting to slow down. And so the Iranians were quite surprised that they needed to be contained because they weren't doing anything that they felt deserved containment. Yeah, of course, makes sense. Yeah. So, Rafsan Johnny, then of course is undermined by his efforts to try and improve relations with the West are then undermined by conservative elements in the country who don't want to improve relations with the West. And they're like, see, you can't work with the United States. But then in 1997, there's an election because Iran is a pseudo democracy it has elections and the results are often not what you expect it to be, which is all exception of 2009, which was rigged. But that was that instant stands outside of the norm than all the rest of their elections. And this election in 1997 is quite important, because it leads to the coming to power of a moderate. President named Mohammed Khatami. Right. Now, Khatami is an interesting character because Rouhani, the current president, very much models his approach towards the United States on his. Khatami won by a landslide 67% of the vote, and he was not the favorite candidate by the Supreme Leader by a long shot. So he comes to power and has a huge mandate to reform Iran and to improve it relations with the West. And one of the first things he does and this is going to sound familiar is he flies to watch to New York for the General Assembly meeting. He does a very highly publicized interview with Christine M and poor on CNN. And he says hey, I want to work with you guys I'm, I'm not your enemy. I want to improve relations with the US and the Clinton administration which was caught completely off guard by this, because they did not expect someone to from Iran to be so open about improving relations. So they respond quite favorably. Now, I should point out that just before Khomeini comes to power, not Khatami comes to power. There was a bombing attack in Saudi Arabia. And some members of the Clinton administration have tried to link this to Iran. Others have linked it to al Qaeda. They killed our tower complex in Saudi Arabia, and it killed a lot of Americans, and there's a huge tragedy. The Clinton administration said that they had intelligence, they wrote to Khatami, and they said that they had intelligence that Iran was engaged in more nefarious activities that he may or may not be in control of. And they wanted to give them a warning, and to be like hey, but if you work with us we can work with you like let's talk. Listen, Brian, let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk more about this. Yeah, so let's go to it. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and I'm the host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock, and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen. Most of my heart, electric buses and electric vehicles. So please dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Aloha. All right, we're back and we're live and we're with Brian Gibson, Dr. Brian Gibson. I'm no longer choking, so that's a good thing. And Brian, so we were talking about Khadimi and the late 90s kind of an attempt to rapprochement. And so it's interesting, you know, that the Clinton administration, which maybe would have been more dovish, took the same approaches. Maybe every administration since, you know, since Operation Ajax in 1953 and treats Iran as kind of the evil empire. You know, so it's even, even the Democrats are doing this. There's an element of that. But at the same time, when Khadimi came to power, they saw an opportunity and they took it. And so they sent this letter that which I just mentioned. Yeah. But the men, the letter left open an opportunity for, for response for, for them to come back. But hardliners in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hijacked the letter and sent back a really nasty response and that kind of fizzled things out. Okay. So it didn't really go anywhere, but there was an effort that was made. What's curious is that one of the single greatest periods of US Iranian cooperation since the 1979 Revolution, with the strong exception of of course under the Obama administration was under George HW Bush. Okay. So when 911 happened, the Iranian response was quite shocking. So you're talking about George W Bush. That's what I meant. George W Bush. So when 911 happened, Iranians flocked to the streets and they held candlelight vigils where people were sobbing and this was all caught on film and this was a genuine outpouring of grief. Now, I should point out that there's a lot of Iranians who have family members who live in the United States. The Iranian people are actually pretty clued into American culture. Curiously, a lot of actually most of the current president's cabinet have PhDs from American or British universities. So these guys are welcome in English, including the foreign minister. So there is a strong connection between the Iranian people and the American people, but we, we don't tend to talk about that. With this outpouring of grief. What you get is quite fascinating is that as the United States begins its, you know, the start of the war on terror, the first target is Afghanistan and Afghanistan is an enemy of Iran. In 1998. The Taliban stormed the Iranian embassy and killed a bunch of diplomats, Iranian diplomats, and Iran nearly went to war with Afghanistan at this point, specifically with the Taliban. So this is quite important, because when the United States is saying we're going to go in and we're going to take out the Taliban. The Iranians are like, yeah, thank you, we would appreciate that. We're going to join in with the Americans then at that point. And they do. So when CIA special and special forces arrive in northern Afghanistan to link up with the Northern Alliance, which was a group of Uzbeks who are opposed to the Taliban. Who do they find there, but the coulds force, which of course is led by Kasim Soleimani, who the United States just killed. And the coulds force and the Iranian intelligence officers help the CIA and special forces and the Northern Alliance go in and seize Kabul. So they worked with United States to overthrow the Taliban. And then in the aftermath of that, the American and Iranian diplomats wrote the Afghani constitution together. So this isn't this is diplomat sitting down at the bond conference in 2002, writing the constitution that was then implemented in Afghanistan. And this is like a hidden history because I think very few Americans know this or have easily conveniently forgotten about this alliance during very few people understand this other than people who are, we're high level Bush administration State Department officials and CIA and, you know, and people on the National Security Council staff, which the source for this for me is members of the National Security Council staff. Okay. And this cooperation even survives the axis of evil speech, which is quite significant. But what's curious about that is that in the early drafts. Hang on a second. So you're referring to George W Bush's speech after 911 which identifies Iran as one of the three kind of evil countries along with Syria and North Korea with Iraq and North Korea. Oh, pardon me Iraq and North Korea right. Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is that when the CIA and the State Department vetted the speech before it was given. They said you need to take Iran out of this. Because they're working with their cooperating with them on a level that had never occurred before, and they are getting results because their interests are aligned. But the Bush administration didn't have it back and put it in. Right well this is the issue with Iran US Iran in relations I mean it's this stalking horse right of the Americans choosing political convenience over over what looks like it should be an important partner in them in the in the Middle East my gosh wait you know. Anyway, well and that's what's curious is that the the intelligence and diplomatic services are all completely in favor of working with Iran they see the benefit of this because there's an alignment of interest. But guys like Dick Cheney in the White House have no interest in Iran and are very hardline Doctrinary individuals and they essentially veto the this proposal to keep Iran out of the axis of evil. And so Bush goes ahead and gives a speech but the diplomats still keep working. And then of course Iraq is next on the chopping block. From an Iranian perspective, again, if the United States wants to take out Iraq, go right ahead. They find eight year war against this guy who use chemical weapons against them. They hate Saddam. They want him done. Right. And we thought Iran was our enemy and now we're taking out our enemy's enemy. It's very confused and weird situation. But there's two different perspectives in Iran. The one is that the United States is just taking out their enemies and they're happy with so moderates don't have a problem with. Okay, so the country government doesn't have a problem with this. But then there's hardliners who are like, the United States is surrounding us. You have Afghanistan to its southwest, sorry, southeast and then you have Iraq to its west. So the United States has two major militaries or armies on both sides of Iran. Now neither of those conflicts went particularly well. And part of the reason for that is because the Iranians don't want the Americans setting up shop inside Iraq. Now, they may have been happy for Saddam to get taken out and they were happy for the implementation of a democratic system. Yeah, because of course, democracy is the tyranny of the majority, and the majority of Iraq is our Shia, and so are the Iranians. So, in that sense, you have Iran, sorry, the United States handing Iran Iraq on a golden platter. So shooting forward to the present day, you think it's fair to say that that the Iraq war and the American involvement in Iraq has actually emboldened Iran and strengthened Iran in the kind of the Iran Iraq Syria region. Immeasurably. Yes, this is the reason why right now we have essentially a sectarian cold war going on in the Middle East. The removal of Saddam, who is a Sunni over a Shia majority state, flipped the sectarian balance of power in the region against the Sunnis. So the key Sunni player in the region, of course, is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia ascribed to a much more doctrinaire orthodox kind of hard line interpretation. Whereas the Sunnis in Iraq are much, much more like a milder version of that. In getting rid of Saddam and pushing the Sunnis in Iraq into the background and emboldening the Shia, you get a really complicated situation where there's a thing known as the Shia Crescent which runs through Iran, through southern Iraq, and then up into Syria and then down to Lebanon. And this Shia, it's called the Ark or the Shia Crescent, it kind of becomes united because Saddam stood in the way of that. And now Iran has essentially an overland route to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, but also its Alawite allies in Syria. Right, so Brian, we have a little less than a minute left. So what's interesting to me is the United States today has entered into this sectarian war on the side of Saudi Arabia, seemingly. What a foolish foreign policy mistake to take sides in that. I mean that goes way beyond the Middle East. A 1400 year old conflict between the two sects of Islam and taking a side is not a good choice. And the Obama administration was a lot more inclined to just kind of step back and not take a side. But the Trump administration has thrown in everything with the Saudis, and this has put them in a terrible position with the Iranians. Brian, we're going to have to end it there, but thanks a lot for coming on and we'll have you on again. So take care. No problem. Take care. Have a good one.