 And it's history lens. I'm John David and professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University, and we're here to talk today about Middle Eastern politics and US Iranian relations. And it's great because I have with us today, a real expert on this, my colleague Dr. Brian Gibson, who's also a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and Brian, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me, John. Yeah, so you take the time to speak to me. Yeah, it's excellent to have you on because you know a lot about this region and it has been a lot of course, we just went through a period of pretty serious tensions with Iran and the United States I mean, missiles were fired. And, and so you know this is a really serious topic and, and it's, it's kind of there's there's a level of volatility here that I don't see this disappearing much at all in the next, you know, next five, six years, unfortunately. So can you can you give you know, your, your, well, first of all, Brian studied the Kurds right you wrote your dissertation on the Kurds and have a couple of books. Yeah. So my best piece is the kind of triangular relationship between the United States and its policy towards Iran, Iraq and the Kurds. Okay, so my, my work folks is mainly in a historical context, but I've also gone and, and done a lot of work on like the Iran nuclear deal for example I wrote a report for the London School of Economics on that in 2015 and that that took about three or four years of research and writing to complete. So, I've been working on this topic for a long time. Iran is a course, sorry is a subject that I'm intimately familiar with Iraq I'm also equally as familiar with it and the Kurds are my particular area of expertise at this point. Yeah, so I mean, give us some background on sorry give us put first of all, bring us up to date on what's going on in that region between the United States and the Iran Iraq the Kurds. Well, of course, you have the situation where a Shia militia group that the Iranians have been backing for a long time were hit with air strikes. So these guys have been targeting the United States for quite some time, and they were hit with some air strikes by the United States government. They, this group called Hashdashabi, then attacked the US Embassy and but only got kind of in the first, like the consular services area, and you know caused a bit of a ruckus, and no one got hurt in that process. But in the aftermath of that the United States assassinated Kasim Soleimani, who is arguably the second most powerful figure in Iran. So we're talking. Some people have equated him to the Vice President but that's not quite accurate because that position doesn't really exist the Supreme Leader of Iran. He is the most powerful and there's no named successor to him right now, but Kasim Soleimani led the Kurds force which is essentially the Iranian equivalent to the special forces in the United States. But he was extraordinarily popular like most people couldn't name the head of JSOC right now, but it would be much more along the lines of someone of fame along the lines of, say, Mike Pence. So you know who he is, he's a regular feature in Iranian politics, but unlike Mike Pence who isn't particularly popular, this guy was massively popular. And the United States killed him in a drone strike. And this resulted in the Iranians retaliating by launching a series of missiles at an American military base in Iraq that now sounds like about 50 American servicemen ended up with traumatic brain injuries. The number has creeped up bit by bit, but at first Trump, President Trump downplayed the significance of that and said a couple of people had headaches or at first there was no one got hurt. And then it was a couple of people might have some headaches. The Pentagon was like actually a lot of people got hurt pretty bad. They may not have gotten killed, but you know, when you smash a cruise missile into the ground, that's going to create an immense shockwave. You do that a bunch of times and that's going to be a lot of people hurt. So he tried to downplay it, but the military has been standing great firm on the significance of it. So let's go back and let's talk about the history because the big question is why, why all this tension. I mean, you know, I argued in a in a recent history lens that these that Iran and the United States are naturally should be natural allies and yet they're sworn enemies. So give us the history on this and you know, just kind of recent history, you know, your specialty. Yeah, okay, so the thing that the way that this is best understood is the idea of a mortal wound, like something where we're once you've inflicted it you can't really come back from it. So, in the case of the United States, the first mortal wound was the 1953 coup which saw the overthrow a democratically elected government that was trying to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, and to essentially regain sovereignty over Iran's natural resources. Now, I think a really important thing to understand in the broader context of Iranian history is that the Persians and the Iranians which are the same group of people just a different name the name changed in the 1930s. But they have had a history of foreign interference in their country. So, it's been typically the British and the Russians the Russians that were always kind of coming in from the north, and the British were coming in through the south through the south and we're always seeking to gain concessions and gain control over Iranian resources, of which Iran has a lot. Now, this history of tension is really important because when the British kind of fell off the map in the 1960s as being significant like a significant international player, and the United States had emerged as being the, you know, global superpower, and with the Soviet Union being the rival. At this point, the United States just kind of in the eyes of Iranians, the United States just took over Britain's role. The 1953 coup is really important because when you're looking at that particular instance, a democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosaddek was overthrown and it was replaced by an autocratic monarch who is deeply tied to the United States during the 1950s, the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s. And this is really important because the United States helped train its military and sold it an absolute ton of arms. The United States also trained its intelligence service, which was notorious for kidnapping and torturing people. So from the Iranian people's perspective, the United States is complicit in the torture of thousands and thousands of Iranians, a lot of whom were just disappeared in the night and never seen again. Okay, so if you're a family member who lost someone in this process, the United States is an enemy of yours. Not only did they overthrow your democratic chances in the 1950s, but then you were complicit in torturing their people. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's disturbing, man. It is disturbing. I'm trying to paint how the Iranians view this because the American perspective is a little bit better understood, but I'm going to get into that as well. So then you have the, the revolution in 1979 and what's really important about that was that the Iranian people were actually very enthusiastic about the election of Jimmy Carter, because Jimmy Carter ran on a campaign platform of basically tying American weapons sales to human rights records of which Iran had an absolutely abysmal one. So they thought that the United States was going to limit its arms sales to Iran. And they're like, this is fantastic. This is a guy that we can fully support. He's going to back the people. This is couldn't be more the type of president that the Iranian people wanted. But then right after the election, Jimmy Carter, so on New Year's Eve, 1977. So 77 to 78. Jimmy Carter goes to Iran and spends New Year's with the Shah, Muhammad Revza Pavlavi. Right. And he gives this speech where he describes Iran as an island of stability, ostensibly in a sea of chaos, which was the Middle East at that point. So why did Carter do this anyhow? I mean, you know, because Iran was incredibly important as an American ally against the Soviet Union. The United States also had established listening posts along its board because it had a very long border with the Soviet Union, of which the United States established intelligence posts all along it, which allowed them to monitor communications going on inside the Soviet Union. In particular, keeping track of its nuclear developments. So hugely important place strategically for the United States. And it's one thing for a candidate to campaign on something like human rights, and then they come into office and they're like, yeah, this guy is really important to us. So we have to placate him, we have to maybe not follow through with what we said. So not long after this meeting in Tehran, Carter approves a massive arms sale to the Iranians. Okay. And the Iranian people are like, what the heck. Right, right. So you're supposed to be, whatever happened to your campaign pledge. The enemy of my enemy is my friend all of a sudden, right? Exactly. And so the Iranian people protested. Some students went out and protest and were mowed down by the Iranian military. And then in Shia Islam, there's a 40 day cycle of mourning. And so 40 days later, protesters go out in the streets again, and they get mowed down. And then 40 days after that, they go out and protest, and even more people go out and they get mowed down. And so you get this cycle of essentially funeral cycle of 40 days that then culminates in September 1978, where a million people march through the street of Tehran and the government opens up, unleashes the military against them, and it's a bloodbath. So this is a horrific situation. The Shah, who we now know was dying of cancer at the time, is kind of doesn't know what to do and he's asking the United States for assistance. The American ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan writes a cable to Washington saying, you know, we need to actually rethink what's going on here. We need to start thinking the unthinkable, which is the Shah is going to fall. And we need to be prepared for that. But the Carter administration kind of dismisses this. Okay. And doesn't pay a lot of attention to it. And the whole situation escalates over the fall of 1978 and into 1971 and the Shah eventually. 1979. This is sorry, January 1979, and the Shah abdicates and hands over power to a provisional government and leaves. So this leads to the return of Ayatollah Ruhala Khomeini, who's then imposes the system that he came up with known as Valletta Faki, which is essentially the idea of having a religious scholar, the supreme leader, essentially, of Iran, vet any legislation passed by the the Majlis, which is the parliament, right, to ensure that it aligns with Islamic principles. In reality, what this is, is you're taking the Shah who had dictator autocratic power, and you're replacing him with an Ayatollah who has Okay, okay. But it is true that Iran has a democracy today. Right. I mean, they do have. Yes. Yeah. A very vibrant one. In fact, one of the more vibrant democracies in the Middle East, next to the Israelis. Turkey would have been higher on that list, but Turkey has declined into. Yeah. Right. Right. Turkey is still a democracy, but it's it's much more autocratic democracy Turkey, I'm referring to. Yes. Iran is is an autocratic democracy as well. But right. They do have elections and the elections often return results that the government that the supreme leader doesn't necessarily want. Right. For example, in the 1990s, a guy came out of nowhere named Mohammed Khatmi. And he won the election by landslide 67. So a super majority. Sure. 67% of the vote. No one saw this coming, not even the CIA. Right. This blew everyone's mind. This was a moderate. Yeah, right. So, and he was not liked by the regime. The regime did not like him and try to sideline him as much as he could. Right. And which is one of the interesting things that, that happened. Right. So, Brian, Brian, hang on to that thought we're going to have to go to break. Okay. And then we'll be back with more from history lens. Aloha and welcome. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the C program. Every other Monday at one o'clock. I am here on deck with various guests talking about different topics of the world and the ocean and international law, different areas where we all have seen and want to travel to and learn about. Please join me for my next law across the C program. Aloha. I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's vegan world, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1pm. Aloha. All right. We're back and we're live with Dr. Brian Gibson, who's a professor, assistant professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University and a specialist on the Middle East. And Brian, we were talking about the Iranian Revolution actually of 1979, the rise of the Ayatollah and the situation in Iran. And so can you give us a little bit more information because this causes a tremendous transformation in Iran and really impacts the entire Middle East. Yeah. So in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, what's really quite curious is that the United States didn't think all was lost. They thought that they could potentially still maintain a relationship with the Iranian regime, with the new Iranian regime and establish a fruitful beneficial relationship to both sides because as you said earlier on, they're kind of natural allies. Right. Much of the problems in the Middle East at this stage were actually stemming from Iraq, which the Iranians don't like and I'm going to get to that in a moment. Okay. So in the aftermath of the revolution, the United States sought to cultivate a relationship. Now they had two points of leverage. The first one is that under the Shah, the Shah bought billions and billions and billions of dollars of American weaponry. So that meant that they had an arms supply relationship where the U.S. could leverage its arms supply relationship, the sale of weapons to Iran because all of Iran's weapons were American. And if they need spare parts, there's only one place to get it, the United States. That's not real. Yeah. Yeah. Now what gets really quite curious here is that the second one is intelligence. The United States had a pretty good read on what was going on in the region at the time and had good intelligence on what was going on in Iraq, particularly through its contacts in the Kurdish minority that lives in northern Iraq. Now, in the early 19th, throughout 1979, things are kind of quiet. The United States is trying to pass intelligence. One thing that it passes on through the provisional government was that the Iraqis were actually planning on invading Iraq. Now, Iran is imploding at this point. You see situations where the military is being purged, where people are being killed and hung in the street, people who are concerned, collaborators. It's a violent, violent revolution, which a lot of revolutions are. Yeah, interesting. Now, the situation with the United States changes dramatically on November 4th, 1979. And that's when a group of students storm the U.S. embassy and seize control of it and take 55 Americans hostage for 444 days. Now, one of the curious little sidebars to that is that they actually let go all of the black Americans that were in the embassy at the time because they didn't view African-Americans as being American. If you white people as being Americans, like our problem isn't with you, you guys can go. And one of them happened to be a very senior intelligence officer. Oh, that's really interesting. Their own kind of racism, which worked out to the benefit of the black guys who were in the embassy, black guys and women, ended up getting rid of a very important individual. And then, of course, there's the whole Canadian caper that involved the spiriting out of a bunch of Americans, which we saw in the movie Argo. Right. Now, this situation is devastating for the Carter administration, like just devastating. They spent 444 days trying to get the Americans hostages out. They tried a dramatic rescue attempt that failed miserably with resulting in the deaths of a number of special forces. And that was in April, 1980. And things escalated. Meanwhile, things were escalating with Iraq all along its border where by April, 1980, they're shelling each other regularly. And I told Khomeini had announced his intention to export the revolution abroad. Then you start seeing assassination attempts against Iraqi officials. You see the seizing of the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia. And everyone in the region amongst the Arabs, especially are deeply concerned that Iran is exporting its revolution and is trying to overthrow everyone. Yeah, right. Saddam Hussein, however, had just seized control of power in Iraq. Now, he had always been the shaker and mover behind the scenes from 1968 to 1979. And in 1979, he overthrew his uncle in a quite daring coup. And his story is quite crazy, essentially. He walked in with a bunch of guards into the president's palace and was like, you're stepping down. And he was like, what the heck? Hassan al-Bakr, the president's son, who is Saddam's cousin, pulled out a gun and he said, just so you know, we have your families right now. And if you don't step down, they will die. Okay. It was a family affair, apparently. It was a family affair. And so Saddam seizes control. You know, we know Saddam to be a megalomaniac, and he's not someone who is going to just let go of power. Right. Which is an important theme throughout this in the next eight years. And so he has seized control of power, and then you see Iran trying to overthrow him. And so Saddam launches an invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980. And this war is essentially first world war style warfare, but with modern weapons. Okay. Okay. So it's wave after wave of soldiers just going and getting mowed down. But so the Iraqi side was very heavily fortified. So they invaded Iraq and got bogged down very quickly in their campaign. So they made it, you know, not even in the hundreds of miles into Iran, they did not make it particularly far before they, they slowed down because of the winter rains. And then over 1981 and then into June 1982, Iran regrouped and managed to get a lot of people who are very, very passionate and very dare I say suicidal. Okay. Because there within Shia Islam, there's a kind of a cult of martyrdom where to, to die on behalf of Islam. You're going to heaven. That's why there's suicide bombers and things like that, which are prevalent within as a means of Islamic warfare. Now, so they would have where does the United States stand in this I'm just about to get to that. Okay. So the Iranians regroup and they launched these offensives with like 300,000 people armed with handguns, cocktails and AK-47, well, M16s, and they started throwing themselves at the Iraqis and they managed to secure a series of victories. And by June 1982, they are on the border with Iraq and they are ready to invade. This spooks the Reagan administration because the Iranians have built up 300,000 troops outside of Basra, which is in the southeastern corner of Iraq. But it's also really close to Iraq's largest oil fields. And worse, it's really close to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Okay. And so the concern was that if Iran hammers through at Basra, seizes control that establishes a Shia puppet state that's beholden to Iran. Right. If it pushes further south, takes the oil fields, well, then you're adding Iraq's oil to Iran's oil, which makes them the largest producer in the world. Yes. Then even slightly further to the south, they have Kuwait, which has one of the largest oil fields in the region. And if they push further beyond that, they have all the region's oil. Yeah. Right. So now from an American perspective, that's unacceptable. Right. They would dictate the global price of oil. Right. That, and they could raise it as high as they want, tip the United States into a massive economic recession in Europe. They would have everyone in the world, you know, by the marvels. I can't think of them better. Yeah. Right. So to speak. So I know you've done some research in this. And so did the Americans, did they acknowledge the whole strategic situation? I mean, there is a lot of oil and it's concentrated right in that area. Right. So do you see this in the cables that the Americans are sending back and forth? You see it much more in the National Security Council level diplomatic, well not like traffic. Okay. So the big concern was exactly what I just described is that they could seize all of this. Yeah. So the real concern there was not that they would seize all of that was that the United States was going to have to go to war with Iran. To protect it. Like think of Saddam taking Kuwait and the response that occurred to that. Right. Magnify that by a lot. Right. Okay. So the United States didn't want to have to get sucked into a Middle Eastern war in 1982. That was going to be absolutely brutal. Right. Right. So this led to a lot of discussion and debate to try and figure out what to do that wouldn't involve the United States sending troops to the region. Okay. And what they concluded was that providing Iraq with intelligence that pinpointed where the Iranian troops were just deployed and what kind of military hardware they had. This would allow the Iraqis to then build really strong defenses in those areas in preparation for these offensives. Oh, okay. And so this led to an intelligence sharing program that lasted through to 1986. Oh, really? Iraq and the United States sharing intelligence. Yes. Yes. The United States provided them. It's a bit scandalous in and of itself. It is, but it makes sense from a geostrategic point of view. When you're looking at the American perspective, this makes sense because Iran is posing the greater threat. Right. And Iraq is on the defensive. Now, so for the next several years, Iran launches a spring offensive every year and the United States tipped off the Iraqis where that was going to come. Right, right. But in the mid 1980s, the Iranians begin kidnapping Americans all throughout the Middle East and not just American, French and British and Germans as well. Yeah. So this creates a hostage crisis. Right. And this led to Israeli proposal to trade weapons to Iran. In exchange for the release of hostages. Now remember, Iran needs American weaponry. They need hardware. Right. And so the United States agrees to this. This ends up being the basis for the Iran-Contra scandal. This is the Iran-Contra affair, right? Right. So, Brian, we have a little more than a minute left. So can you give us, kind of draw this up to the present and how these historical events actually are playing into the present-day relationship? So towards the very end of the war, the United States backs Iraq to the hilt and gives them intelligence on how to defeat Iran. Okay. At the same time that Iraq starts to launch a series of offensives, which ends up winning the war for them, the United States engages in a naval engagement with the Iranians in the Persian Gulf and ends up shooting down an Iranian plane, killing 298 on board. And this is another one of those mortal wounds. But this time the United States inflicted it on Iran. Right, right, right. So this is kind of retaliation for the hostage crisis. So by my count, you've got two mortal wounds inflicted by the Americans and one by the Iraqis. Is that fair? The Iranians, yeah. Yeah, the Iranians. Yeah, so far. Right. So, okay. So we're ahead of them in the mortal ruin department. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, Brian. We'll bring you back again and we'll have more discussion on this such important region of the world. And, you know, we just, we really appreciate you being on the show and thanks again. No problem. Okay. Take care.