Barbara Slavin: Fire Under the Ashes
Episode Notes
Transcript
Women’s rights and hijab rules are at the center of widespread protests in Iran, but the demonstrations quickly evolved and are now the most serious threat to the regime in decades. Barbara Slavin joins Charlie Sykes on today’s podcast.
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to the Bullework podcast on Treleys sites. It is election day. So just a quick heads up. Really nobody knows what’s going to happen. So most of the puncture key today is gonna be a little bit like like riding a bicycle as slowly as possible without falling off.
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So I think I have hours and hours and hours of fact, free, foe, certainty, you know, clashing with some wish casting, and there’ll be lots and lots of speculation, the occasional burst of hysteria, endless repetition. And then about late afternoon, sometime we’ll get those exit polls. Which are certainly going to be BS, but which we are not going to be able to resist commenting on. But you can safely ignore them. So given the fact that nobody knows any of them, and by the time many of you listen to this, you will be much smarter than us.
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I thought we’d do a little bit of counter programming. We talk about something that I’ve been really embarrassed that I haven’t spent more time on what’s going on in Iran where, you know, we we talk here about democracy being on the ballot. Well, obviously, human rights is a play around the world and perhaps no place more dramatically than the streets of Iran right now. So we are joined by Barbara Slavin director of the future of Iran initiative at the Atlantic Council, also a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington University and the author of the book. Bitter friends bosom enemies, Iran, the US, and the twisted path to confrontation.
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So happy election day, Barbara. Thank you. Thank you. And I’m, you know,
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I’ll take any excuse to talk about Iran, including including US elections. So, pleasure being with you.
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Well, if if you could indulge me for a moment, I I don’t wanna, you know, wallow on the election, but we we did have the the former president’s speaking in Ohio last night. And I know that’s gonna be the same old same old. And yet there’s still something jarring I I think listening to the former and perhaps future president of the United States expressing his open admiration for the Chinese and the regime in Singapore. And his enthusiasm for the execution, the summary execution of of drug dealers. He said this before, I have to say there was just there’s something about it’s not just the bloodlust, but also the the admiration for authoritarian totalitarian societies.
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And here’s a little bit of what Trump said. Again, not all of this is new. However, I don’t think I’d heard the the the dazzling detail about sending the families of the dead drug dealers, the bullet that was used to kill them. Like, the the sending them the bullet thing was kind of a new twist at least for me. This is the former president last night.
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This is
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a trial that takes approximately two hours. And if they’re guilty, they are executed and the and the bullet. And you know the bullet, I don’t know if anybody wants to know this. It a little bit too graphic. But the bullet is sent to their families.
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You know that. Right? You know that? It’s actually sent to their families. It’s pretty tough stuff.
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There’s no games. So they have no drug problem whatsoever. He actually thought it was a foolish question. I said, do you have a drug problem? Absolutely not.
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What are you talking about? Of course, we don’t because we don’t play games. You look at Singapore, you look at other countries, wherever they have the death penalty, zero drug problems. Drugs are causing us tremendous problem.
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So, blah blah blah. I just you know, and and he and he tells the story over and over again. He’s talking to President Xi, and President Xi is just explaining how the Chinese have this down. They don’t have this rule of law, appeals, messy stuff which Trump refers to as games.
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You know, you know, it’s fascinating to me that there are people who are very worried that there are more and more authoritarian regimes in the world and somehow Democratic regimes will fall in in competition with these countries, but I have a new phrase, which I’m calling the axis of users. Iran Russia and China, I put in this axis of losers. Normally, I don’t like to have these broad brush you know, epithets about countries. So
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I’m here for it.
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You know, I was very opposed to the access of evil, and we can talk about all the mistakes we’ve made in US policy to Iran over the years. But Iran has doubled down on its relationship with Putin, who is losing the war in Ukraine, who has lost perhaps perhaps a hundred thousand soldiers — Mhmm. — just extraordinary waste of his own country. In this ridiculous pursuit of hegemony in in Ukraine. And then she, I just read a piece this morning about how all of these incredibly talented, hardworking Chinese entrepreneurs, particularly tech entrepreneurs.
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Are looking to get the hell out of China because Xi is ruining that country with his COVID lockdowns with his monopolization of power. He’s just come out of a party congress with a a third term and he has eliminated all dissident voices within the Communist Party. In Iran, we’ve had this consolidation of power where Those who advocated better relations with the West, those who supported the nuclear deal, have been largely sidelined, purged, and we’ve seen this hideous crackdown on people who are demanding basic human rights, particularly young women. And, you know, they all think this is going to keep them in power forever,
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but
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it’s not. These are these are the techniques used by people who are narcissistic and who are also at some level, I think, terrified of losing. And that applies to Donald Trump as well, doesn’t it? So you you put on this image of that tough guy, you know, kill all my opponents. Right?
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Kill the drug dealers, but it it shows your own vulnerability. It doesn’t show that you’re strong. Well,
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that is one of the subtexts here that he seems to think that they the arc of history is bending toward authoritarians, that they have it right, that they get it. And and there is a stream, you know, a stream of thought now, you know, that that that the future belongs to people like Victor Orban or these other countries that impose their their will. So I I I think your access of losers is a very interesting. What about all
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of them? Bossierno bossierno just lost, and he didn’t lose by much, but he lost. And
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when quietly,
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Well, let’s hope so. But
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So so far. Yeah.
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So far.
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Yeah. Again, this is the the paradox somebody like like Donald Trump, although that seems like too fancy a word to use to to describe his his thinking on all of this. That he wants to pose as the tough man against China that, you know, I one who can stand up against China, but he deeply admires China, like he deeply admires Vladimir Putin. You know, I was thinking about when he was talking about sending the bullet know, that’s used to kill the drug dealers after their two hour trial without appeal, apparently, to the families. No.
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He’s got a he’s had a fascination with this kind of thing for a long time. Back in twenty sixteen, I don’t know if you remember this. He used to talk about this this fake story from World War of World War one or that era where General Black Jack, Pershing, was said, it’s not true, but it was was said to have murdered Muslim terrorists or criminals, shooting them with bullets dipped in pigs blood Yeah. Because that would be and and and he told that story over and over again with great relish because you not only would kill them, you would file them. And this was a form of sort of counter terrorism.
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And again, it was, you know, like like many of his stories, a fake story. But it is interesting the through line how much relishes the not just the power of the authoritarian regimes, but the cruelty of the authoritarian regimes.
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Yeah. It’s not a nice person.
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No. And and and you reminded me before we started this that last night he also referred to in Nancy Pelosi as an animal, which, you know, given his track record, you almost tempted to kinda drug your shoulders and say, same old, same old, but this comes a week and a half after the attack on her husband. And and he can’t can even access whatever’s remaining of humanity to say, maybe I shouldn’t refer to another human being. I political opponent as an animal. Yeah.
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But no. Alright. So let’s let’s talk about Iran. Because I think this is really an extraordinary story, and you’ve been writing about this for some time. You first went there as a journalist for USA Today back in nineteen ninety six and you were reporting on plight of the women in in the Muslim world.
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The Iranian regime granted you a visa thinking that it had this great way to tell about the status of women there in in contrast to the Taliban who had, you know, just consolidated their power in Afghanistan for the first time and weren’t letting women go to work or girls go to school. So so tell me about we’re gonna get to where we’re at now, but tell me about what the status of women was when you first got there to Iran, give us let’s do this timeline.
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Yeah. You know, it was a fascinating trip, and you know, the stereotypes of Iran are all these women dressed in black and who have no rights and son. But, you know, even in nineteen ninety six, that wasn’t true. And there was a sort of paradox in in the Islamic revolution of nineteen seventy nine. It took away a lot of the legal rights that women had, but it actually empowered all of these young women who came from traditional families, women who hadn’t gone to university before for because their parents didn’t want them mixing with with men or mixing with young women who were wearing mini skirts, you know, under the shaw.
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And so all of these women started flooding the universities, and they became incredibly well educated. I think Iran has one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East, and that includes women. And so needless to say they began to chafe at restrictions that had been imposed on them. And in nineteen ninety six, I went, I interviewed the editor of a women’s magazine. They had a quite quite a number of women journalists even then.
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I interviewed the daughter of Iran’s president the time a guy named Raf Sanjani. She has become a dissident, by the way, and I think she’s in prison now. Mhmm. She’s a hush me. And, you know, all of these incredibly vibrant women who were doing just amazing things.
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And they, you know, at that time, you had to to cover yourself quite conservatively. I had this drab gray raincoat, which I called my Iran raincoat because I only used it when I
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went
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there. Completely shapeless and drab, and you’d put a big dark scarf on over your head. And the women there said, look, we don’t like this this dress this veiling, but, you know, it’s the least of our worries. We’re more worried about custody of our children in the event of divorce, being able to get divorced. Having equal inheritance rights, increasing the age at which women marry or girls marry from from what at the time was nine to they guided up to thirteen.
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It had been eighteen under the Shaw. These were the kinds of of issues that women were focused on at the time, getting more women into the Iranian part on it, that sort of thing. And so now fast forward, and we’re in a situation where Gen Z women are they want it all. They want all their rights as citizens of Iran. They want to be able to do any job that they are qualified for.
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And by the way, they don’t want to have the compulsory veil anymore. Even though that veil has shrunk to a token little scarf on top of often dyed blonde hair, you know. It’s just what I saw in my last trip to Iran. Women in many parts of the capital letting the scar fall down from their hair onto their shoulders. I mean, draconian nature of the required costume had changed a lot even over twenty five years.
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Now these young Gen Z women say to hell with that, we are going to act in public the way we act in private. We’re going to walk around wearing the clothes. We want to wear because we’re on social media and we see what the rest of the world looks like, particularly the young women in the west and we edify with them not with this bunch of old, out of touch ideologues who’ve been in charge of our country for the last four years.
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So quarter of a century after you first went there and the Iranians were anxious to make the contrast with the Taliban, the ironies that Iran and and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world that enforce these headscarf rules. And and they are now literally killing women and girls for having the courage to take off their head scarves. So I I think you’ve explained the motivation, but, you know, I just wanna talk about what’s happening right now. So the the headscarf is gonna sound naïve, but I but I just I I wanna draw you out on this. Is the the headscarf is not about the headscarf.
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Is it? No.
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It’s about the subjugation of women. It’s about protecting men from their vices. By by making sure that women do not look provocative to by making sure that women look as unattractive as possible. This is supposed to somehow keep the man from sinning.
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Yeah. Because they would not be able to control themselves. Right? I mean, they would they would not be able to restrain their animal instincts if they could actually see hair. See,
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a woman normally dressed or her hair is showing. You know, and and this, by the way, is not just in fundamentalist long. We see this also in in fundamentalist Christianity. Let’s face it, you know, and they the comparisons, you know, with the handmade and all the rest that a lot of people have made that somehow it is the job of the woman to prevent the man. From misbehaving.
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Now, you know, a lot of this is cultural in the Middle East. Women have always worn loose fitting clothing, that sort of thing. It’s more cultural and tribal even than Islamic because the Quran does not demand that women veil. It’s simply it it wants women to be modest. It wants men to be modest.
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But over time, this has become, you know, an iron law of certain Islamic fundamentalist societies. And it is a way of of, yes, branding women and keeping them down. So this
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has obviously been building for a long time before September when the so called morality police is there actually a thing called the morality police? What I mean — Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. — that’s the morality police.
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Yeah. So around with the police arrested this twenty two year old young woman and, you know, for violating the headscarf rule and her family and eyewitnesses then said that officer eat her to death in a police van and reports it surfaced. She’d experience multiple blows to the head. And and that’s what sparked these protests. So, I mean, obviously, the fire had already been been laid, had been had you had you had a sense that this was this was bubbling up the the the Oh, yeah.
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Yeah. And so the this was the match. This set off everything.
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Yeah. You know, Iran has had a series of protests since the revolution, nineteen ninety nine student protests. Two thousand nine, a massive series of demonstrations in protest called the green movement after a fraud tainted election. And I remember when the green movement subsided after that took really about a year or so before it finally subsided. And the regime was able to to crack down.
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People kept talking about this Persian expression fire under the ashes. Fire under the ashes. And so the fire has been under the ashes smoldering for, I would argue, decades. You know, look at what look at what this government has given Iran or rather not given Iran. There is a there has been a consolidation of powers since presidential elections in twenty twenty one.
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And so called hardline factions are now in control of every branch, every nook and cranny of the Iranian government. Parliament, presidency, judiciary. Obviously, the the office of the supreme leader, we can talk about him. And so any legitimate legal outlet for protest has basically been shut off. But meanwhile, you have record inflation.
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You know, we complain about eight percent in Iran at sixty percent or higher. Their currency is collapsing. They’re under US economic sanctions. They had an opportunity to revive the twenty fifteen Iran nuclear deal, which would have given them sanctions relief and they hesitated and now it’s not clear whether this deal can be still revived given everything that’s happened. They have gotten themselves embroiled in an alliance with Russia against Ukraine, providing drones to kill Ukrainian civilians and destroy Ukrainian infrastructure.
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They have made every wrong step possible And then in September, this poor young woman Masa Amini comes to town from to Tehran from
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Kurdistan. Comes
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out of the metro in Tehran and maybe there’s a little too much hair showing under her scarf. She was wearing a scarf. Maybe her pants that were hanging out from her cloak were were too tight. Who knows? Somebody had to fulfill their quota in the morality police and grab yet another woman.
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So they snatch her up. They they hit her in the head. They bang her head against the walls of the van. She goes into a coma, she dies two days later. And bingo, that’s the fire under the ashes and and the match.
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So people are people are, yes, they’re demanding an end to enforced vailing, an end to the morality police. Who even need such a thing. But they’re also
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calling
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for the downfall of the entire regime. Death to the dictator, they keep chanting. Margar Dicatore. Margar Dicatore. You know, they’re made to chant, death to America at at official demonstrations that they’re chanting death to their dictator who is the supreme leader of the country Ayatollah Khamenei.
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So
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these first protests broke out after the funeral when women ripped off their their their their hiccups in in solidarity. And as as you described, they it has become much, much, much bigger. What has been the level of violence by the regime in in response to all of this. How did this escalate to the point where the the regime is literally killing young women, which seems to obviously be counterproductive from their point of view? Yes,
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very much so because in shia islam, forty days after someone dies, you have a commemorative occasion. So what’s happening is that every time they kill someone,
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forty days
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later, there’s another demonstration. And if they kill someone then, forty days later, another big demonstration, this is how the original nineteen seventy eight seventy nine revolution against the Shaw succeeded. Through these these forty day rituals that kept the momentum going and going and going. So they have killed now, estimates are about three hundred people, which believe it or not is relatively restrained In two thousand nineteen, there were protests over over poor economic conditions and there are different estimates, but some people think at least a thousand or more people were killed during those demonstrations, which just went on a couple of weeks. So, you know, but there have been deaths.
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Yes. They have have used bullets and there have beat others to death, but there have also been deaths among the security services, something like thirty or forty police have been killed by the demonstrators. Sometimes, with rocks, there’s been a lot of violence and particular in the ethnic minority peripheral areas of Iran. Because remember Iran is, you know, the old Persia, which was a great empire. So their Kurdish areas, the the young woman who was killed Masayani was Kurdish.
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There are areas near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a province called Caesar and Baluchistan. These people are generally sunni Muslims, not shiey Muslims, so you have the sectarian. Element as well, and there’s been a lot of violence in those areas directed against the government and directed against police. So it’s been quite volatile.
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In the midst of all of this, there was also an ISIS attack in the Iranian city of Shiraz on a mosque that killed a number of people. Iran is not a very stable place right now. It is very much a country on
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Now, you said on
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a recent podcast that the compulsory rule is now effectively dead and Iran women are just ignoring it. They’re showing their hair. They’re walking down the street or cutting their hair and burning their scars. And that I was intrigued. You said, you can’t arrest them all, you can’t beat them all to death.
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So the regime isn’t going to announce that it’s caving in. It’s just capitulating because they can’t stop it. Is that where we’re at here basically that sort of just a soft overthrow of the rule I
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think so. I think that they they understand now how out of touch. You know, it it’s it’s fascinating because I mentioned, you know, over the last twenty five year there’s been a gradual relaxation of the rules. I mean, I remember one year I went to Iran in two thousand five and all the women were wearing pink for some reason. I think because it was the antithesis of black, which is, of course, the preferred color.
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And, you know, so this has been happening and happening and happening And by and large, you know, there’d be sporadic arbitrary crackdowns, but by and large, the regime allowed it to happen. And then this idiot Ibrahim Razi, the president who was elected in twenty twenty one, decides that he is going to prove is his Islamic bona fides by reactivating and reenergizing the so called morality police and sending them out on the streets to to arbitrarily go after young women. And and young men too because, you know, young men who gel their hair or have too many tattoos whatever dress into western fashion they could be harassed to, but it was primarily women. So at the exact moment, when this guy who’s incredibly unpopular, by the way, he was elected with the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic. Barely a third of of of the electorate voted for him, and the turnout was under well under forty percent.
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In fact, spoiled ballots came in second to him in this election. He, this unpopular man, who’s presiding over an economy that is continuing to deteriorate under sanctions. That is someone who’s really not welcome in the West because he has blood on his hands. He was a prosecutor in nineteen eighty eight when Iran summarily executed five thousand political prisoners. There are people who wanna haul him before before some sort of court for human rights violations even predating all of this.
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This is the guy who decides, let’s crack down on women now, you know? I mean, you can’t imagine a dumber a dumber move. So it’s just And then, of course, we have the drones to Russia, you know, and the galloping nuclear program, which we haven’t talked about. So it’s so where where does the triple learning? But where does this
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go? I I I saw an interview you gave to, you know, the Minneapolis star Tribune where you did not think that this would lead to the end of the religious regime that took over in the Islamic revolution. So you you where does this end? If it’s not counter revolution or revolution, where are we going here? Well,
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look, let’s be humble here. We can’t say for sure. I think that if
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if this
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regime wants to survive, it has to bend. And it has to give its young people, in particular, a little bit more room to breathe. Otherwise, these confrontations are going to continue they’re going to accelerate. The other thing is I think they have to start rethinking their foreign policy national security strategy. Because this alliance with Russia and China, you know, it may allow them to survive, but they’re not going to be able to provide any additional economic benefits to their people.
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It is
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interesting, yeah, that the they’ve chosen this moment to go all in with their aid to Russia. I mean, you you you thought that after Trump left office, we’d seen the worst that we would see in Iran, but after actually they’ve ratcheted it up? Well, you know,
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we do have to put blame at Trump’s door for quitting the Iran nuclear deal in twenty eighteen when Iran was still in full compliance with it. This undercut all of those who had supported the deal in the Iranian government. And it it paved the way for Ibrahim Razi to become president of Iran because the so called pragmatists were discredited by Trump’s action. And, you know, so it’s difficult for them to trust American promises. I understand that, and there’s a tremendous fear of coming back into this nuclear deal and then having the next president of the United States, god forbid if it’s Trump again withdraw again from the agreement and make them look like fools.
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But, you know, encompass station, they have doubled down on this policy of, you know, the axis of losers, the axis of authoritarians, whatever you want to call it. And I don’t think this is a winning strategy. It’s not popular in Iran, Iranian stone, trust Russians. You know, these are two old empires that historically did not get along very well, and Russia, in fact, peeled off big hunks of what used to be, the Persian empire. Georgia Armenia, those were parts of the Persian empire, that that czarist Russia took over, and of course, they continued on into into the Soviet Union.
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So this is not an alliance that makes sense in many ways for for Iranian public opinion. I think that this that the regime is going to have to adjust somehow. The the other thing that we didn’t talk about is that the supreme leader This clerical ruler is eighty three has cancer. There were rumors that he died not long ago. But he’s not in great health.
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So when he does, I think that is going to create a crisis, a succession crisis. For the regime and it may open the way for some change. There’s some people who think there might be a military coup. Who knows? But but this is a country that is ripe for change.
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So, you know, will it be a popular revolution the guns are still in the hands of the regime. We have not seen a significant crack in the security establishment yet, but there is a lot of ferment and the furloughed is going to continue.
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So what should American foreign policy be toward Iran? At this point, it seems especially with these protests and with the drones being sent to Russia, it seems highly unlikely that we’re ever going to revive that nuclear deal. So what should America be doing right now? What should the Biden administration be doing especially given the fact that they may only have two years in order to change direction.
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Yeah. I think they’re doing a pretty good job, actually. I mean, they came out very quickly and port of the protesters, which is something Obama didn’t do in two thousand and nine and was criticized over. They’ve they’re trying to help provide high-tech equipment to Iranian so they can continue to communicate with each other and the outside world they’ve they’ve eased sanctions on on all sorts of high-tech gear, access to the cloud, access to virtual private networks. They’re trying to convince Elon Musk to provide StarLink to Iran, of course, Elon Musk is busy destroying Twitter.
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So — Yeah. — sure if he’s gonna have a good luck with that. Yeah. Good luck with that. They are sanctioning individuals who are identified with acts of repression and institutions like the so called morality police but they are also keeping the door open to diplomacy, which I think is a good idea because right now, it’s Iran that has been hesitating about reviving this nuclear deal.
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The US was ready, and Iran hesitated. And maybe we’ve lost this opportunity. It’s entirely possible. But Iran now has tens of thousands of tons of enriched uranium, highly enriched uranium, which it could turn into a nuclear weapon. And of course, the last thing we want is for a country with a regime like that to have nuclear weapons, which really would make it perhaps bulletproof certainly from outside intervention.
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I don’t know that it would save the regime, but we do have the example of North Korea. Which left a nuclear agreement with the United States after the George W. Bush administration pulled out. We should say, and developed a nuclear arsenal and of course Kim Jong Un, one of Donald Trump’s most favorite dictators in the world is still very much in power in in North Korea. So I think, you know, you don’t shut the door to diplomacy because we have to engage with all kinds of regimes.
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If we can talk to Vladimir Putin, you know, we can talk even to either heme or the supreme leader, of course, doesn’t want to talk to Americans, but we can continue to say, look, you wanna deal, this is what you have to do, and you know that. Was that
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the trade off that the Obama administration made though that they were going to stand down on the green revolution, not support it, not talk about it because they were so anxious to get the nuclear deal. And was was that a legitimate trade off to basically surrender support for human rights in Iran in order to get this deal? I don’t
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think they surrendered support for human rights. I mean, they did take steps to try to help, particularly on the Internet and social media side. They just didn’t, you know, they just didn’t touted, and they didn’t call for the downfall of the regime in explicit terms. Yet, it’s it’s a fine line. This has to be a movement by Iranians for Iran.
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It’s not something that the US can do for them. So we can amplify, we can express solidarity, we can call out the regime for its grow test human rights abuses, but we’re not going to, you know, parachute in and overthrow the region. We learned our lesson. In Afghanistan and Iraq, hopefully, about that kind of behavior. And and the American people wouldn’t support that either.
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The question is, you know, is there more that we can do to to support these people and they’re very legitimate aspirations while at the same time preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and prevent Iran from increasing its footprint in the Middle East because this is a country that interferes in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen, that tries to project influence throughout the region. So, you know, it takes intelligence. I mean, to buy this spoke the other night when he said we were going to liberate Iran. He quickly corrected himself and said the Iranian people will liberate Iran. And of course, the White House had to, you know, do clean up on aisle one, you know, as they often do for Joe.
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There was a lot of clean up
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from that speech. Yeah. They often have
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to do that for Joe. He got carried away, and I had to explain that to Iranian. He got carried away. Of course, we would all love to see a better government for Iran. It would be wonderful for the people.
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It would be wonderful for the region. It would be wonderful for the world. But we can’t do it for them.
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I wanna double back
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on something you said about, you know, the the precedent created by countries like North Korea becoming nuclear. There’s also the counter example of Ukraine, isn’t there a country that gave up the nuclear weapons that it had after independence. In return for what either some sort of guarantees, security guarantees, which turned out to be completely useless. And and I’m guessing that there have been moments where the Ukrainians are going, okay, explain what we were thinking when we decided to give away our nuclear deterrent because the world would be a very different place, had they not? And obviously, countries like Iran are looking at that as well.
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Aren’t they? Yeah. And of course, Iran is also looking at
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a country like Libya. Yeah. I was gonna say Libya. Moe and Marche duffy had a very small nuclear program, which he basically bought off the shelf from a guy named AQ Con in Pakistan. Who’s the world’s greatest proliferator.
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He died about a year ago. And, yeah, I mean, a
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lot of
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this stuff was still in boxes, you know. They’ve been unpacking. But Khadafi got scared after the US invaded Iraq in two thousand three, and he wanted to get out from under sanctions. And so he agreed to give this up. And of course, fast forward two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve, you had the Arab spring and kadafi met a very ugly fate.
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So I think that’s another, you know, precedent that that that folks think about. Particularly in Iran, and there are some within the security establishment who do wanna push all the way in develop nuclear weapons because they think if they go all the way, that will protect them. Against the outside world and against their own own people. I don’t think it’s gonna protect them against their own people because you can’t use nuclear weapons on your own people. So the only thing that’s going to protect them against their own people is if they if they change their ways.
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And I don’t know if they’re capable. There are people now who say that this regime is not capable of reform. But I think that there are still people within the establishment in Iran. Maybe they’re sidelined, maybe they’re under house arrest, like the candidates for the presidential election in two thousand nine who were not allowed to win, but they’re still there and there is still debate. One thing that distinguishes Iran from a lot of other authoritarian states is that there is still a debate.
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There are still a few newspapers that — This is right.
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— that can
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print, you know, debates I’ve given interviews to Iranian newspapers where they print everything I say, including where I say, you know, why are you so opposed to Israel? If you drop that, nobody would are what you do. Which is true? Because look, you know, countries with egregious human rights policies that don’t call for the downfall of of Israel get away with it. They get away with murder, literally, but Iran can’t have a nuclear program call for the destruction of Israel and get away with
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it. Well, this is something I try to figure out because they as you mentioned, in Iran, they have elections, but they’re clearly not a democracy. They are an authoritarian regime, but they do have some free flow of information. And like just yesterday, you retweeted a Guardian’s story about disagreements breaking out over helping Russia in its aggression against Ukraine. There’s a conservative cleric and a newspaper editors are saying that Russia’s the aggressor and Iran should stop supplying them weapons.
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I mean, this is the kind of debate that you wouldn’t expect. You certainly wouldn’t see in a country like China. So there’s something different about the political environment in in Iran. Yeah. I mean, how do you describe how do you describe that?
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I I’m I’m trying to get my head around what they are willing to tolerate, what they’re not willing to tolerate?
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Howard Bauchner:
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It’s a very curious system that they have. I mean, they have allegedly clerical control over everything and vetting of candidates for elected office so that a very narrow spectrum is represented, that sort of thing. But, you know, there is there are the bones of what could be a more representative system if you get rid of the supreme leader. And if you simply go with the elected institutions, the president, the parliament, the city councils, you could have a fairly vibrant kind of of of representative system. I don’t know if I’d call it Democratic exactly.
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But certainly more democratic than than other countries in the region. Iran had its first constitutional revolution in nineteen o six. Against the Venshall and set up the very first elected parliament in the Middle East. So this is a country that has a history of heatedly trying to establish a more representative government, you know, interrupted by long periods of dictatorship. And, you know, have they reached a point now especially with such an educated society that is so plugged into what goes on in the rest of the world.
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Where they’re really ready for this? That is a real question that I have, but I think they have the capability. I think they have individuals who can lead this movement within Iran, not outside. You know, all these people who were saying, you know, bring back the the son of the shah, who left when he was seventeen, hasn’t been dexxa. No.
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They have people with in Iran who are perfectly capable of of leading a movement like that if only the government would open up. And and, you know, they’re afraid, look, they don’t wanna lose their hold on power. They don’t wanna lose their economic monopolies. Their corruption, their smuggling networks. You know, the revolutionary we haven’t talked about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is this you know, power behind the throne and they don’t wanna lose their privileges, certainly not the leadership of that.
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But they know that something has to change. It just cannot continue to go on like this. So are they
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an independent power center? Well,
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they are defenders of the Islamic revolution. They are defenders of the supreme leader and the clerical in institutions that nominally control power in Iran. And there is, you know, there is a there used to be, anyway, a consensus that would be formed among the commanders of the various military branches, the senior clerics, the senior elected officials, over what course Iran should take, whether it was to have a nuclear agreement with the with the international community or have trade agreements with China or, you know, providing drones to Russia, a lot of people suggest that because the supreme leader is not well, that there’s been a kind of paralysis now in the decision making and that the the circle of decision makers has become extremely narrow and so they are making the wrong decisions because they are not allowing opposition voices, dissenting voices, into the discussion. And, you know, they can open that circle again if they want. That is up to them.
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And it’s just a question of whether they think they can survive like this, or do they think something has to change? Alright. So you you made it clear that you
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do not think this is gonna lead to the downfall of the Islamic Republic. Or a counter
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resolution. But well,
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they would have okay. But having said that that it’s not likely or probable, what would be something that you would look for? What would be a sign that in fact the regime is at risk of losing power? What would what would have to happen? Well, to
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make this a true revolution, you would need massive strikes particularly in the oil industry and petrochemical industry, the kind of strikes we saw in nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine before the overthrow of the Shaw. And you would need to see members of the security establishment, the cops on the street, the so called Vasige, who are the ones who are cracking heads, you would need to see them defect to the opposition, to the protesters. That happened, you know, toward the end of nineteen seventy eight, you had a thousand soldiers a day leaving the Iranian military and joining the revolution. We don’t see that yet. You see that, then yes, this is a revolution.
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That would make it a
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real revolution.
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But as I mentioned, there are steps we could see short of that. We could see the, you know, the reformists who are under house arrest, including former president Mohammed Houghtony the leaders of the green movement. We could see them freed from house arrest allowed openly to speak and contribute. We could see journalists who are in prison let go. We could see lawyers who are in prison let go.
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We could see the disappearance of the morality police entirely. We could see a number of steps like that. Unfortunately, Iran doesn’t have presidential elections again until twenty twenty five, but let’s see. It has parliamentary elections in twenty twenty four. We have a ways to wait.
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But, you know, you could begin to see a little bit more oxygen allowed into the room. If if they’re interested in in cooling these protests, certainly an end to to the crackdowns. You know, no more no more shooting people in their cars, no more beating young women to death. You know, I just don’t know if they’re capable of stopping that because this may be all that they have now. In which case, the protest will go on and on and on
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and You
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know, it could turn into a revolution in the end. Barbara Slavin
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is director of the future of Iran initiative at the Atlantic Council and in international affairs at George Washington University, she’s also the author of bitter friends, bosom enemies, Iran, the US, and the twisted path to confrontation, Barbara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you. It’s real pleasure to to
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talk to you. Thank you. And thank you all for listening
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to
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this election day podcast I’m early sites. We’ll be back tomorrow and we’ll be so much smarter than we are today. Right?
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