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I want to welcome everyone back to the Peaking Yona show,
Fearos Modod returns. How are you doing for us?
Speaker 2: I'm very well, very well, thanks for having me on again.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're welcome, You're welcome. And another returning guest, doctor
field House. How are you doing, doctor?
Speaker 3: Doing well?
Speaker 1: All right? I had two. I want to have two
guys here. One who has done, you know, a lot
of historical study on what's going on in Iran right
now and Iranian politics. And Farris, who is really looking
at what's happening on the ground today and the current
affairs happening in Iran. So let's talk about Iran. Gentlemen, Farris,
why don't you start us off and give us some
first impressions of what you see happening.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, there are sort of several strands of protests
that are being wrapped into this. One of them is
protests by the merchant class, which has traditionally been loyal
to the regime. Supportive of the regime. They get usually
privileged access to dollars so that they can continue their business.
And the collapse of the Iranian real the continuous collapse
of the reel has really upset this group to a
significant extent. And these are guys who are relatively devout practicing.
They accept the regime as it is and they have
bargains with it, kind of like the commercial class in
Syria in the days of Assad, who were on good
enough terms with the regime and could continue functioning. So
these guys are upset over the currency crisis. There is
a bunch of other strands relating to the fact that
Iran is an environmental disaster zone. The dams projects that
have been overseen by the IRGC led to a lot
of water systems collapsing, a lot of drought didn't work
out as planned, et cetera. That's one strand, pollution in
the cities and how it affects people's lives. The JJEB
issue general discontent with the regime, and this is all
happening under an umbrella where basically the Islamic Revolution lost.
The promise of Romeni's revolution was that they would come
in and unify the Muslim world under their leadership and
expel the American and Zionist presence from the region. And
over the course of the war that started on the
seven of October, that has been dismantled, especially with the
decapitation of Hesbalah and its severe weakening and with the
loss of Syria into the hands of Turkey, and so
the regional Iranian project was something that the leadership could
sell to the public as saying, look, we know that
you're suffering, but we've been able to build up a
bunch of industries. We've been able to reduce our dependence
on imports. We developed all kinds of indigenous capabilities, and
we're using those to show the West that we are
its equal. And in a way, the Iranian nuclear program
played a big part in that, because merely having the
Big Five plus Germany sit down at the table with
the Iranian leadership meant that Iran was now a great power.
With their defeats in Syria and Lebanon and okay, they
were able to hurt the Israelis in their missile attacks,
it showed that basically this was for nothing and that
what's needed now is a nationalist readjustment to focus on
protecting their interest in the Gulf and in Iraq and
protecting the Shi'a and the pan Islamist stuff. And what's
worth remembering is that this is an old tendency in Iran.
So some guys linked to the IRGC would tell you
that we were serving Iran in the days of the Shah,
we continued serving Iran under the days of the Islamic Revolution,
and we will always serve Dan. And this nationalist strand
was expressed in the two thousand and eight period by
Mahmud ahmadina Zhand, who got into a bunch of conflicts
with the religious leadership because he wanted to be more
of a nationalist to the extent that one of his
I believe it was his vice president who ended up
in jail because he was saying things about how Islam
had usurped traditional Persian culture. So this old Persian identity
is being asserted that the Pan Islamic identity has failed.
And these protests are different from the ninety nine protests,
or the two thousand and eight protests, or the you know,
twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one protests. In all
of these years, the rings experience unrest, but they still
had a narrative of victory to spin. Now the regime
doesn't have a justification for its existence. And the way
that these things work, and I want to be careful
about about making predictions here, but the way that these
regimes operate. Is that when the guys on the ground
lose their confidence and lose the spirit that allows them
to go around and shoot protesters and break the back
of protests, the whole thing falls apart. Like when law
enforcement isn't willing to maintain order, things fall apart, especially
in these kinds of systems.
Speaker 3: Sorry to interrupt, but it almost sounds like a situation
in Russia right before the Russian Revolution that you're describing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sort of, sort of. The defeat hasn't been that spectacular,
and they were able to bloody these radi's nose, especially
with the high Fight refinery attack and especially with the
attack on the Weisman Institute, and they did manage to
deplete fifty percent of all fat interceptors in the Twelve
Day War, so it's not like they were helpless. It
just wasn't enough to spin a tale of victory.
Speaker 3: I was actually thinking more about what you were saying
about the internal law enforcement, but right, I wasn't even
thinking about the external threat there. But yeah, that makes sense, sir.
Speaker 2: Right, right, Yeah, So that's a brief overview of the situation.
Speaker 3: In Again, and tell me if I'm interrupting too much.
But one of the questions are things that stood out
to me as an American to the limited extent we
have any information that you know isn't coming from Lindsey
Graham on Fox News. Is this sounds a lot like
what Stephen Kinser described the anti Mosedek coup by the Shah,
or at least how that group of American scholars historians
describe it. And again, I'm an American and I've got,
you know, weird relations with Iran. But that's just how
it looks to a complete outsider.
Speaker 2: Look the Masatic thing. He had lost a lot of
popularity internity, which is what made the coup possible in
the first place. And now, in a sense, what's being
offered as a reversal, it's the Islamic Republic that has
become unpopular. Crucially, the Supreme leader saying Ali Kamini is
eighty five years old, I think eighty six or eighty five,
eighty seven years old, and he's delivered in a lot
of ways, but not where it matters, Like the collapse
in living standards is a big deal, and the unpopularity
has become i'd say real, and you have this radical
group within Iran and look like these Raelis are saying
that we the MOCADE, are backing this and that we
are helping them organize and that we are or at
least if you believe people who say that they speak
to them, that we're giving them starlink and we're making
sure that they're connected and we're giving them advice and
so on and so forth. So there is that external
element that's involved as well. And we saw from the
last word that these Raelis have really penetrated Iran quite deeply,
to the extent that they had drone production facilities inside
Iran and the Iranian television was broadcasting raids on these locations.
So that does exist, like the sort of foreign element
that you saw during the Masotic days that helped UH
bring the coup to fruition, that that exists, you're you're
you're absolutely right about that, doctor Field has. But the
there is in both cases something real underneath it, as in,
you're only vulnerable to this kind of external intervention if
you have built up a series of domestic and external problems,
and that's pretty much what the Iranians have done.
Speaker 3: Understood. The other thing that does stand out, to the extent
that the Mosotic coup is relevant. Is It's no secret
that the CIA was heavily involved in their multiple history
books about it. It was Theodore Roosevelt's grandson who is organizing
on that, Yeah, Kermit Roosevelt. But even the people that
the CIA was backing and sponsoring and pushing to attempt
them to organiz as activities, a lot of those are
guys who became anti US intervention to a huge extent.
I mean Ruhala Komeni being the greatest example, which is
an American. The thing I try to stress is, yeah,
even if we are even if the CIA is directly
engaging and influencing mobs, it doesn't mean that things are
going to come out the way we want because they
definitely didn't last time.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And although the way that I'm thinking about it
is this now, the threat facing the Iranian nation is
coming from as out of Asia and its alliance with Turkey.
It's coming from Turkey and the Turkish influence over their
northern border after the Armenia as at Aaijan War. It's
coming from the Kurds, and pretty much everybody in the
region agrees that the Kurds need to be kept in
their place. It's coming from the Arabs, et cetera. It's
coming from the evolution surgency. And so the answer to
it can't be Panislamism and revolutionary. The answer to it
has to be nationalistic, and a nationalistic Dan wants to
contain Turkish ambitions and wants to contain Arab ambitions. And
guess who shares that precise objective.
Speaker 3: Israel, which again brings up interesting parallels to the most
of the exactly yeah, because again the average American doesn't
probably understand it under the shop. And again the coup
is essentially a reassertion of the soll because it was
a constitutional monarchy before then. Any he directly ruled as
the executive is incorrect me if I'm wrong. But the
nationalistic aspects, I had a question about that because my
understanding is Persians. Ethnic Persians are a shrinking part of
the Iranian popular to the point they're only like fifty
seven percent today, aren't they. Yeah, with the Azaris being
like the growing the Yeah, the largest growing aspect of
our portion of that.
Speaker 2: I was corrected about this the other day. I was
of the view that the assets were twenty five percent,
and I was told that it's closer to fifteen or
sixteen percent, and that the Assets are the most Persianized
of the groups that are within Idan, and Hameniti is
half Asadi. So I don't know what the correct percentages
are because in a country like that, you're going to
get a lot of obfuscation. You're also going to get
a lot of people sort of shifting identities as they
move from rural areas into urban areas, sort of blend
into the national Persian identity.
Speaker 3: Just as it happens in the air world, people becomes
Arabs when they move into the city.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, So I don't have a lot of
confidence in that. What I can see is that the
Iranian regime itself was very afraid of the Armenia as
at a Beijan war, and their interests were more naturally
aligned with Armenia, but they had to side with the
Assets because of public opinion.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting case since they also have a large
Armenian population as well, don't.
Speaker 2: They, Yes, they do, but the Armenians don't mobilize in
the same way because Christians don't riot in the same way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially ones in Iran.
Speaker 2: Especially ones, and I especially was in Iran exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But it is my also understanding that most of
these other minority groups in Iran, probably with the exception
of the ethnic Arabs and Khuzistan, most there's not really
a whole lot of separatists action other than, as you said,
the currents in the Blue Cheese, the.
Speaker 2: Kurds, the Belushies, the Arabs have the history of protesting
for Arab separatism that tends to ebb and flow, and
a lot of the Arab areas have been persianized by
moving Persians into them. You still get some Arab unrest
every few years, and it's still an issue. But if
you're a sane Arab and you look next door at Iraq,
you don't say, well, I'd like to join Iraq, Like yeah,
Idan is an industrial powers in some senses. It builds
its own cars, It builds gas turbines that even exports
to Russia. It builds missiles, it builds drones, it builds
all kinds of things. They have decent steel production, they
have a good refining capability, they have a decent chemicals industry,
et cetera, et cetera. Iraq is a basket case. And
so even if you're an Arab nationalist. You're not really thinking, well,
I'd want to join my brethren over the border because
they are just like Iraq is a fully failed state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on that note, just pure anecdote. But when I
was stationed there in two thousand and six two thousand
and seven, I was an advisor of the Iraqi Army,
and one of our function was you know, local expense
accounts in which we were allowed to purchase items off
the economy for Iraqi unit. And it was no secret
that almost all the stuff that I purchased, the computers
being like the best example, you know, we're talking about
the Windows computers. You could look at me, you could
see there were fabricated you know, manufactured in Iran, and
we weren't. I wasn't doing business with Iran, but the
people I was doing business with, you know, the only
place they had to get these things was Iran. And
it was it's no secret that you would have everything
from computers, the beer, to the processed food to you know,
the beer. Like I said, those are the kinds of
things you bought in Iraq that came from Irans.
Speaker 2: I mean that would have probably come through Dubai and
then into Iran and then into but yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 1: Can we talk a little bit about the color revolution
angle here?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: John and I were talking the other day about we
saw a video of blush allegedly the the head the
commander of the police station at an ansharh macmood hak
Kat just being assassinated in his being assassinated in his
car while driving. And it seemed said he was famous
for cracking down on anti regime blushes, and John said
that it were that historically if he saw BLUSH activity
he would think that the CIA was the CIA was involved.
Speaker 2: Well, I would assume that there is a level of involvement.
And the blush right now are incredibly useful because you
use them in Pakistan to target the Chinese and you
could use them in Iran to mess with the regime.
And so if you are the CIA and you're not
using them ALUs, then you're just not being competent at it.
So we're seeing an escalation attacks in Pakistan that are
targeting the Chinese. We just saw an attack in Afghanistan
targeting the Chinese and targeting a Chinese mining company and
burning their equipment and killing a bunch of people. And
so there is every interest for the United States in
using the withdrawal from Afghanistan to main to build on
the networks that they had pre withdrawal, and to use
that as a launchpad for destabilizing activity across that region,
targeting both Pakistan and it on. So I would I
don't know if they would be giving them specific targets
and saying go after that police officer, but if they
weren't at least training them, funding them, equipping them, they
would be remiss.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And just so we're clarifying, I've never worked with
the Central Intelligence Agency and I only had tangential interaction
with them, so I have no access to a classified
information that I could release. But the other thing that
I was going to say that stood out about that
attack were literally, it's a it's a regular vehicle that
pulls aside, and the guy shooting in ak and there,
And the other thing I thought is this was clearly
done in order to produce video content. Because if you're
a serious insurgency and you're trying to eliminate security force leadership,
you do it quickly and cleanly in a way that
you're not going to actually compromise your own assets. You know,
you kill people, we blow up their cars or you
kill them at their houses, and that it just that's
the kind of thing you would do because you want
that video that looks like an action film out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would assume that too, because you saw them
sort of driving up to the car and just spraying
it with an AKA. Your objective in doing that kind
of thing is to inspire others who would do it
on their own, and to show clearly that you can
reach individual commanders, and that is intended to sort of
deter these commanders from cracking down on the protest movement
too hard, because the message that you're sending is that
this could be you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. On that note, there's reports in America media, which
again I don't trust at all, that police in some
locations are actually joining the protesters. Do you have any
information where we or the other and then.
Speaker 2: Honestly, getting anything verified these days is possible. The pro
euron accounts are showing protests that are supposedly supportive of
the regime, and they're doing various vox pop clips where
they're interviewing people who are saying, if you want a protest,
it's fine, don't do it by burning police stations. And
attacking IRGC buildings and so on. He has confirmed that
a bunch of buildings have been attacked and burned, and
so the videos showing these attacks look like they're credible.
We are at an age where we just don't know
exactly what's coming out unless you have a very robust
network on the ground, which I don't claim to have.
And so what we're seeing is a narrative war with
both sides doing their best to exaggerate the support for
their side of the story. Getting a good read on
it is very difficult. What I can say with some
confidence is that the regime looks exhausted and that there
is doesn't look like it's retained the will to do this.
And the way Jamene he phrased it, he phrased it
as some people burned buildings in order to serve Trump
because the American president told them to What you're saying
is that there are factions within Iran who would prefer
Donald Trump to you. That's a bad look and that's
a bad defense to begin with, instead of saying that
these are just you know, criminal elements, foreign agents, and
we've wrapped it up and it's done. Like he's presenting
it in a bad way. Some of the videos of
the unrest do look quite significant, and that is happening
in Tahran, among other places. There is also a lot
of information warfare saying that the Iranian Foreign minister's family
has moved to Lebanon, and that so and so has
been attacked, and so and so is like it's difficult
to verify. It's really hard to say with any act
you receive what's real and what isn't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say it's been identified that
confirmed in the last twenty four hours that the internet
was shut down. Yes, so, yeah, So the one thing
we do know is that individual civilians on the ground,
unless they have starlik, there's very little chance that this
is very recent as in the same day reporting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, all that you have right now is what
the protesters are posting, which, given the internet shutdown, would
presumably be done by people who have been given internet access.
If you remember, during the early days of the Syian
Civil War, the first thing that was done was to
give these protesters satellite phones, and to give these protesters
cameras and media training and the equipment and support that
they would need to spit a narrative that would build
into a civil war. That was the first thing that
was done in Syria, the first bits of aid, before
the military stuff, before all the weapons. It was the
media war, and Facebook helped them, and all of the
social media giants help them. In Egypt, Google was helping
the protesters. In Iran in two thousand and eight, it
was Twitter at the time that was helping the protesters.
So when the Internet shuts down, you're only left with
the two most extreme narratives. That are the protesters who
have been given access to the Internet by an external power.
This time, it seems through starlink and that of the regime,
which is still broadcasting through official media and trying to
say it's all fine. The public still supports us da
da da da.
Speaker 3: Da Yeah, which I think ironically probably supports the feeds
into the worst habits of either side, because it really
does sort of encourage mob psychology, because everybody's going to
interpret the worst, because why would you not.
Speaker 2: Yep, and you keep seeing these videos either of the
police beating of protesters or of the protesters beating up
security forces, and this is intentional. You want to spread
the message that this whole thing is falling apart and
you want to pick a side. And incidentally, that's where
Venezuela comes in.
Speaker 1: Keep going, keep going with that.
Speaker 2: So with Venezuela, what happened wasn't regime change. What happened
was leadership decapitation to convince the regime to change its behavior.
And now the Venezuelans face a choice. Either of the
US strikes them again and keeps up the embargo and
pretty much collapses the Venezuelan economy because nobody can do
anything to get oil out of Venezuela if the US
Navy doesn't want them to. In that context, you know,
Dulci Rodriguez could be next, or the Minister of Defense
could be next. And it doesn't have to be clean
and tidy kidnapping. It could just be a bomb falling
on their heads. And so the message that's been sent
through Venezuela is that we can touch you as individual leaders,
and we can get you as individual leaders. And you
have two options. Either you play ball and you governed
Venezuela and a quarters with our wishes, or we will
go after you as individuals and collapse your economy. With
the Iranians, this is a little more difficult because they
start going after Iranian tankers on the high seas. The
Iranians could choose the suicide option, which is the Hoemus option,
But it is a suicide option because even if they
shut down the energy of everyone else, one of the
consequences that everything they have also gets shut down. Not
only that, when they start targeting golf countries, there's one
hundred and fifty fifteen sitting there in Saudi Arabia, there's
a one hundred Western jets sitting there in the UAE.
All of these would be turned over to American command
and would be used against Ita. So for the Iranians
to retaliate to a tanker war is for them to
trigger a suicide option. And it's the same with the
nuclear If they try to build a nuclear weapon, like,
it's pretty hopeless for them. They can't deal with the retaliation. Yeah,
they can't make this.
Speaker 3: It's not a quick I'm sorry, it's not a quick
action either. It's not like you build one in five minutes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And they've shown that their leadership is
so heavily penetrated by US and is raetiing intelligence that
they themselves as decision makers can't be certain that this
decision won't be immediately discovered by the United States, so
they have no confidence in doing that. So they're being
given option a suicide option b Jmeni is going to die,
get rid of him, and change the regime yourselves to
go down the nationalist route. And if you go down
the nationalist route, that leads you to partnership with Israel.
Maybe under the table, maybe over the table, it doesn't matter,
but it does mean that your threats become your own
borders and Turkey, and you're a functional partner of Israel.
And so we're no longer dealing with regime change where
the Americans come in and depatify the Iraqi state and
dismantle the Iraqi Army. We are dealing with a regime
change that keeps the personnel, keeps the state structures, but
forces them to make different choices as they govern.
Speaker 1: And those those choices would be more along the lines
of historic Persian rather than an Islamic republic precisely.
Speaker 3: At least not a pan Islamic. I mean, the point
I would make to Americans is a lot of places
Persians they're Muslim, and we didn't even say devout Muslim,
but there their religiosity in terms of their politics is
sort of like Italians and Catholicism. It's ever present, but
it doesn't mean that the pope you know, decides how
traffic tickets work in Italy. It's in some ways that
would almost be better for the religious establishment, because they
have more authority when they're not micromanaging, which has basically
been the whole theory behind you know, European monarchs, since
I don't know there in Westphalia.
Speaker 2: Not just that the traditional Shi'a model didn't involve a
very active clergy. This is a relatively modern thing that
had origins theoretically in Iraq under Mohammad Baka a Sadhar,
and then was adopted by the Dawa party in Iraq,
and was adopted by Hisaballah and was adopted by the Iranians.
So these, like the the tradition is different for the shi'ah.
They're less active in politics. In addition, when you remember
somebody like Ali Sistani, where does his power come from?
It comes from the fact that he rarely ever speaks,
and then getting a meeting with him is absolutely impossible,
and so other people speak for him. His sons in
law are heavily involved in the corruption in Iraq and
all of that stuff. But he himself, in a way,
his power comes from his silence. And you remember when
he disciplined both Maliki and Mohtala Sadar. All he had
to do was say that he was driving from Nadavu
Kabella and his convoy moved at like five kilometers an hour,
and everybody, like I think it was a million people
who actually walked with him all the way. And that's it.
The fighting between Maliki and sada ended because Cistani came
to the city. He didn't say that he was going
to mediate, he didn't say he was going to solve this.
He didn't say what they should do. He just said
I'm coming. What he'd done before was go to do
Britain for treatment, if I remember correctly, when the crisis started.
Then he comes back and says, well, I'm just going
to take a drive, and that's it. The fighting ends.
And so these clerics who know how to stay quiet
end up becoming a lot more powerful than very verbose
clerics like you know, Francis comes to mind, because of
their silence.
Speaker 1: We hear that they're having water issues.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 1: I think there's a water shortage there. Have we confirmed
whether that's due to drought, whether it was due to
anything that Israel, you know, the bombing, did or enjoy
We have any information on that.
Speaker 2: It's a long standing issue. It's a very long standing issue.
We were reading about it in twenty ten something like that,
and the IRGC's bid to build a lot of these
dams was in response to it. But it seems that
the dam has made everything worse. So it's not a
new thing. I don't know if some but he did
something to make some particular aspect of it worse. Like
I don't have that kind of information, but I do
know that it's a long standing issue.
Speaker 3: It is the Middle East. Water is an issue everywhere,
even when everything works exactly. On that note, the engineering
capacity that the IRGC got for that, how did they
get that? Was it just their engineers of their own?
Do they get them from the former Soviet Union?
Speaker 2: I don't know about that, actually, I honestly don't know
about that in detail. What I can tell you is
that you saw a lot of people who are connected
to the regime studying in Western universities and that they
did get Russian help for a whole range of things,
and that the Uranians are genuinely creative and scientific and
capable people. So this is built with developed indigenous capacity
for a whole range of things, including in the oil industry. Yeah,
and in weapons manufacturing, where was a combination of foreign
help people studying abroad. People were studying abroad to learn
how to do better engines for Iranian drones. We had
people I think in Britain who were doing research on
that on behalf of the Iranians, and they themselves are capable,
and the chefs and people are brought to study and
this sort of continued.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on that note, as a digression, were the people
that were sent behind the Shah to study in the
US were was there any kind of acceptance of them?
Speaker 2: Were they ever.
Speaker 3: Treated as or accepted by the new regime? I asked
that because I went to school who some of the
people whose fathers were actually Iranian officers trained at American
military academies. And one of the issues, obviously is a
lot of the American training officers were purged, so I
didn't know if they were ever allowed to if professionals
of that type were actually integrated into the new regime
as far.
Speaker 2: As I can tell somewhere, but I can't sort of
speak with a lot of confidence about this, but I
think some were because some went not back, but back
and forth, and so some ended up getting acceptance into
the regime. Yeah, the Iran Iraq War was a wonderful
thing for the Iranian revolution because it forced them to
become pragmatic, and it forced them to sort of put
a break on their own radical tendencies to focus on surviving.
And you know, they hoped winning the war, which didn't happen.
But the Iran Iraq War was the best thing that
could have happened to the revolutionary regime because it was
sort of like stalin the Second World War. He had
to turn to the older officers and we had to
turn to the capable men that he could find and say, okay,
just go and do your thing and I'll sort of
relieve you from the pressure of the commissars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in least the Soviet case. I mean that's how
some of the survivings areist officers were rehabilitated. So yeah,
I did know that the Iran Iraq War had the
effect in part in Iran and integrating a lot of
the minorities more fully into the Iranian mainstream, I mean,
famously Iranian Jews. There are there are memorials to Iranian
Jewish military dead of the Iran Iraq War, which is
the kind of weird thing the average American wouldn't expect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the Jewish community in Iran tends
to speak out against Israel quite frequently. Part of it
is that they have to. Part of it is that
they didn't buy into the whole Zionist idea and they
accepted that, Look, the exile is there for a reason,
and this is still the Babylonian exile, Like there's still
an ancient babylon as far as they're concerned. So it's
a bit of a different tradition for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. As a side, I know, since the seventies there
were some minority movements throughout the Middle East of Misrahi
and other minority Jews either returning to the countries of
origin or leaving Israel, partly just because there was a
big complaint that essentially modern Israel is an Ashkenazi run institution,
that there was huge disaffection among large part of that population.
Speaker 2: And a lot of the conflict that you see in
Israel today is coming from Mizrahi and Sephardig Jews asserting
themselves against the ashke Nazi secular elite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they make babies. I'm sorry, they make babies.
So they have a majority in some places now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And so you're seeing this change within Israel.
And part of the explanation for it is that the
Eastern Jews are asserting themselves against the Western Jews, and
Natanieho is sort of playing that game and playing all
sides in order to stay relevant.
Speaker 1: But yes, absolutely, well, I guess when you see all
this happening. The death of the Islamic Republic has been
announced many many times. For those who know their history
like you, I would assume mister field OUs knows it
better than I do. I assume you do too. Is
this difference.
Speaker 2: My sense of it is that this is different, and
also in part because there is no succession plan right now.
If you remember the death of the Easy he went
through the judiciary, and in his role in the judiciary,
he would have dealt with a lot of the sensitive
subjects and been informed of what the intelligence guys were
doing and what they wanted then he became president, and
he was obviously being groomed as a successor to Hamene
as a sort of reliable religious hardliner who could take
the mantle. He wasn't Asayid, so he wasn't descended from
the profit of Islam, and he didn't wear a black turban.
He wore a white turban. But he was seen as
the kind of person who would be able to keep
this thing together in partnership with the IRGC. The way
that a lot of Islamic states operate is that they
begin with a religious zeal and then they end up
in the hands of military men. And that's what happened
to Mambluk Egypt, and that's what happened to the ambassad Caliphate,
and that is a lesson that keeps on recurring in
Muslim history. And so the natural evolution of Iran is
for the IRGC to take over even more fully. But
the IRGC is fully loyal and obedient to Ramene. They
wouldn't be loyal and obedient to his successor unless he
was properly groomed and prepared and given the levers of
power in an orderly manner. And the whole intention behind
making an AC president was to enable that. So the
AC dies or gets killed or whatever it was that
happened to his helicopter, and the succession plan falls apart.
And the only other person who understands the levers of
power well enough and can wield them and retain the
loyalty of the IRGC is much his son. The issue
is that if you're going to make this into a
hereditary thing, why not have the Shah? How are you
different from the Shah? And so it's not a viable
plan to put him in charge even though he has
these levers of power, because in terms of credibility and
public acceptance, it just doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say Islam has a weird history when
systems become hereditary, and that usually marks the decline of
a lot of caliphates and systems.
Speaker 2: I mean, the Abbassids did it for a while, the
Ottomans did it for a while. It works, The hereditary
system works. But if you're claiming that this is a
new thing completely and this is a revolutionary regime, you're
going back to the most traditional thing and the most
natural thing, which is one archy, and you can't have
like you know, that was part of the problem in Syria.
That was the reason that Mobadak, that was the reason
that the army allowed to overthrow of Obadak. In Egypt,
he was planning on making Jamal Mubadak's successor, and the
army was like, no, who are you. We're still going
to keep it in the mam Luke Wad is still
going to be a general and we're going to choose
which general and so that like it doesn't sell to
let Muzdavahmeni become the supreme leader of Idan after his father.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was saying on that note, I mean the
Plavi dynasty. They actually became the Shaw of our Iran
because it was it. Resa Shaw's father was a military
officer who exactly was central the coup and he it
was probably performative, but he essentially stood stepped away after
the coup and required there to be mass proclamation that
he should Shaw before he actually took the throne, and
that was probably for show, but that was part of
how he became. So, you know, a military coup, and
at least in an Iranian society can become a legitimate,
a legitimate monarchy.
Speaker 1: So if the if the regime falls and there is
no success or, and the IRGC, I assume, will fight
to the end to defend the regime, but there will
be IRGC left over. What happens to them is that
what is that the do they become an insurgency? Is
that who Israel? Israeli and the United States planes will
be going after after that? Is that? How does that work?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where it gets very murky as a
movement for revolution, Like you can't say that you're still
a revolutionary regime fifty years into the damn thing. It
just doesn't work after the first ten years if the
revolution isn't done, like, that's it. It's the establishment and
what is there to revolt for? Exactly? You've got the
Turks becoming a power with big ambitions on They've taken
northern Syria, they're in the process of consolidating there. They
have very obvious ambitions on Iraq. This is a problem
for the Iranians because you have all kinds of clients
in Iraq. They have a plan with Katar to sort
of develop a new kind of transport corridor and infrastructure
corridor that would fully integrate Iraq into Turkey on the
economic level, on the energy level, on the power level,
all of it would go through Turkey. If you're you know,
and this is a nightmare, and you want to do
everything that you can to stop that and to assert
control over southern Iraq because this is the only place
from which you could get invaded unless Jekiska comes back,
you know. So you have a very real problem, and
so what is the impetus for an insurgency? So if
the Americans are being very good at their diplomacy, they
would be trying to reach out to the IRGC and say, look, guys,
the top echelon has already been killed off, or a
lot of it was killed off in the last wave
of strikes by the Israelis. Do you want to follow
Jmene to the grave or do you want to stay
in power and maybe have Rasasha has a figurehead, maybe
have one of your own as a military dictator, whatever
you decide, But that implies a change in direction. And
in that new direction, you won't have the Chinese constantly
buying everything from you at a massive discount and not
actually investing in the country. You signed this twenty five
year partnership with the Chinese. Where are the Chinese investments
in Itdaan they haven't materialized because they don't want to
cross American sanctions and because they like the US is
keeping China away from it. And so do you want
to take the alternative pathway and stay in power as
we did with Venezuela as what happened in Venezuela. And
so if you're one of these guys in the IRGC,
you're watching what's happening in Venezuela quite carefully. The problem
is that the IERGC could fragment, it could turn into
a criminal enterprise. If they put the Shah, he will
only be a figurehead because it's not obviously that he
has real connections within the military establishment of Itdan. There's
always been a conflict with the IRGC and the ASH,
the Iranian army. How does that play out? And do
the various ethnic groups try to assert themselves, do the
asides in Azadavijia and decide we want to help the
assets in Iran along our border and we want to
expand our territory. So there are all kinds of possibilities
that come from the removal of this regime, or at
least from the removal of the Islamic Revolution part and
heading of this regime. The most peaceful outcome would be
the IRGC saying we're in charge, that's it, and we're
going to rebrand. We're gonna keep the same brand but
follow completely different behavior. We're gonna do whatever, and that's
the most peaceful outcome. But it's obvious that there is
no need for a guy with a turban at the top.
If you look at the Uranian Constitution outside of the
Supreme Leader, it's actually a work of genius with these
various appointed and elected bodies that do ensure a level
of participation and that allow a competent leader to wield
power effectively and to include very many swathes of society
in decision making through the Parliament, through the Assembly of Experts,
less so through the Guardian Council, et cetera, et cetera.
So if you just remove the Guardian Council and the
Supreme Leader and you have a president with enormous powers,
with a Parliament and the Assembly of expert becoming a
kind of Senate that oversees Parliament as a sort of
a sort of upper chamber, you have a very functional system.
But it will always require a secret police that is
very strong to make sure that these ethnic minorities don't
get ideas, So it's never going to be a proper
democratic system that can't work in a diverse country like Iran.
So that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario
is some combination of ethnic insurgencies, civil war, conflict between
the different military branches, etcetera, etcetera, chaos, which is a
very real possibility in a very diverse country with this
kind of geography.
Speaker 3: That's not an optimistic Yeah, the one thing I was
going to say that for an audience is we tend
to think of the IRGC as just like one organization
or just the army and just the special forces. But
as I tell people, it's it's a parallel institution. There's
a regular Army, there's the IRGC Army, there's Air Force,
in navy, they have regular and they have i ERGC
plus the Kods Force. They're special ops guys who control
a lot of their are direct a lot of the
they're Allied insurgents, which is extremely professional and disciplined, as
well as some other forces. So, yeah, the IRGC is
big and it's fairly cohesive, but it's not like it's
just one organization. It's this hierarchy of interlocked organization. It's
the way that you know, the KGB was in the
Soviet Union they had its own army and police force,
or the ss was in Germany that had its own
police force and a separate ground army.
Speaker 2: So and there is the economic wing of the IRGC
through Amba, which is a whole massive construction company. And
then there is the religious endowments that are under the
control of Amenity through the Bonyads, which are a massive
economic power in the country. And then there's the traditional
merchant class. And then there's you know, the peasants and
the workers and the youth and all of these groups.
So there are genuinely very many different centers of power
in Itdan and Hamenei did a decent job of centralizing
that power around him, but he had thirty forty years
to do so. And whoever comes in on top, if
he doesn't understand the system, and if he doesn't truly
understand the centers of power and how to manage them
and how to navigate them, and how to give all
of them a stake in the country, it can fall apart,
which is why Asha worries me. I don't know how
much he is deeply involved with these centers of power
and able to speak to them, and nobody has a
good read on the internal politics of the IERGC, like
we know which centers of power exist. We know that
the Aerospace force is getting a lot of resources. We
know that the HUTS force gets a lot of resources.
The Navy, the IERGC navy gets some resources, et cetera,
et cetera, but we don't get the full picture. And
one of the reasons for that is that during the
early two thousands color revolution season, the IRGC realized that
they could be next, and so they proved the country
against color revolutions and against the capitation strikes by dispersing
regional commands. And so if you remember the Ukrainian that
was shut down, part of the reason for that shootdown,
if you don't want to believe the conspiracy theories, is
that the Iranians refuse to have a fully integrated air
defense because they believe that would be more vulnerable. Then
this war taught them otherwise. And now you're talking to
the Chinese about acquiring some kind of turnkey capability that
would cover the whole country. We hear reports that maybe
they've gotten the HQ nine and bits and pieces of
Chinese air defense, or that they haven't gotten them. We
don't like. I can't tell you that with any confidence
if they have them, if they don't have them. But
their own internal politics within the IRGC ended up dictating
a level of decentralization, and so you could have a
province rebelling because the local iergy C commander decided that
he and his men are going to rebel. So there are.
It's a very difficult country. It's a very difficult country
to navigate them to get your head around it, which
is why it needed to be a monarchy with a
very strong secret police.
Speaker 1: I guess the next question I would ask is you
know the reason Syria fell so quickly is because they
were abandoned by their allies. That was pretty clear. How's
Russia going to play in all this? I mean, in
Russia and Iran are trade partners and their allies. So
where does Russia come in on this?
Speaker 2: I don't think they can influence the internal dynamics too much.
I don't think they can influence the internal dynamics. I'm
sure they have a good read of the different ethnic
groups because Russian sociologists and these guys who sort of
study these countries tend to be quite exceptional and incredibly talented,
and they learned the languages and they master them and
they sort of end up loving the culture that they're studying.
So they do that quite well. But I don't think
that they are able to influence this too much. They
can't provide them with an air defense that would check
the Americans this much.
Speaker 3: We know.
Speaker 2: They would be all right with Idan turning nationalists so
long as it remains stable, because then they would have
an intersection of interests in the CAUCUSUS and in Central
Asia aimed at containing both Turkey and China. So they
don't mind so long as there are military and intelligence
people that they can speak to and cooperate with, and
so long as they can keep the North South corridor going,
because the Russian ambition is to just be able to
get to Iran and then get to Persia and get
to India and be able to sort of contain China
that way, the whole Chinese, the whole Indian Russian relationship
is all about containing China and a naturalist India, a
naturalist Iran, and a naturalist Russia are very natural partners
working mainly against Pakistan in Turkey and China, and so
you're going back to Huntington's prophecy of the Muslim world
siding with China against the West, and everything keeps pointing
towards that direction.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything, mister phil has no.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like, how would you even be able
to summarize all that? It definitely sounds like Russia is
very concerned, but at least they have the discipline to
understand that medline creates more problems and at least from
their perspective. It's a lot of this comes back to
the beginning. Like I said, my biggest concern is America,
for our American establishment interfering in something it doesn't understand
and making it worse, especially since people like me go
and die when our country does stuff like that. So yeah,
that remains my issue. I just hope the United States
doesn't decide that we're somehow going to remake this country
in our own image and then spend it, you know,
a decade, trying to turn it into Connecticut, like we
tried to do with Iraq.
Speaker 2: I think those days are over. I think that these
kinds of liberal delusions are over, not of military intervention,
not of imperialism. But you know, as someone who's from Lebanon,
like all of the empires come and fight in Lebanon
at some point or the other. All I want in
life is competent imperialism. Like, give me competent in imperialism
and you will have my undying loyalty.
Speaker 3: You may not want to expect that.
Speaker 2: America, Well, the Venezuela example does suggest a different story,
like it's genuinely genius to go and kidnap a president
in the middle of the night, grab him by the
scruff of the neck and parade him literally parade him
in New York and say to everyone else in Latin America, look, guys,
this could be you, and then use that as an
example to say to a regime like the Iranian regime,
look guys, you can still be in charge. We just
want this one thing, this crazy ideology which you accept
has failed. We want that gone and we'll do business.
This is this is competent imperialism, in part because the
system as it now exists, the challenge from China as
it now exists, imposes on the United States restraint, like
you can't go now and just shoot goat fuckers in Afghanistan. Sorry,
but you can't go do that kind of thing and
try to sort of turn the Loyat into a parliament.
That's not going to happen anymore. You can't afford it.
The threat from China is too big and it's too real,
and so in this multipolar world, to the extent that
it is multipolar, the Americans have to act with restraint,
and they're at least in Venezuela, acting with restraint and creativity.
It's still too soon to tell. It could still go south,
it could still go badly in all kinds of ways.
I fully accept that, but I do take it as
a good sign. I do take it as a positive sign.
Speaker 3: Well, that was optimism I didn't expect, so I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well sometimes sometimes I can be optimistic sometimes, but
don't ask me to do it too often. It wearies me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I don't know if you saw this
one this morning, but Trump said that he was the
US will be conducting land strikes against the cartels and quote,
we are going to start it now, hitting land with
regards to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico.
Speaker 3: I was going to say on that that we spoke
the other day, Pete. It's at least the context of
which I heard it. It's like that seemed to be
Trump shooting from the hip when he was asked direct questions,
and just by the body language off of Rubio and Hexath,
you kind of got the sense that they had no
idea what he was talking about. And I kind of
hope that's the case, just because I think that is
completely unfeasible. But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I was only thinking that, you know,
we're told to cheer what happened in Venezuela, and you know,
maybe I am just way too have seen this movie
play before and the promise of everything being cheaper, and
maybe it's different now with the liberal world order dying.
But you know, I said that if this would have
been Mexico, if it would have been you know, we're
going to destroy, We're going to do and it would
take boots on the ground and men would die. But
it seems like that's the more the more pressing threat
to the United States, even though obviously the cartels work
with a work with certain factions in the CIA, and yeah,
I mean, it's just a big, big, mess.
Speaker 3: It's an existential risk.
Speaker 2: Look Mexico, it's a lot harder to do things without
the Mexican government being willing to cooperate and without the
US being able to just flood the zone with drones.
Speaker 3: YEA.
Speaker 2: One of the important things about Venezuela is the sheer
volume of natural resources available there.
Speaker 1: As an It's not they say about Ukraine. That's what
they say about Ukraine as Yeah, that's Ukraine as well.
Speaker 2: That's Ukraine as well. That's Ukraine as well. The sheer
amount of natural resources that are extractable from Venezuela and
from Ukraine is just insane. And so if you're thinking
about a war with China, getting all of your oil
supply and your mineral supply from a Caribbean country means
that your supply chains are immune and are a lot
more resilient than they would be if you were getting
them from Africa or if you were getting them from
even the rest of Latin America. So there is that
supply chain element that is linked to Venezuela that makes
it particularly important and then enables action in other theaters
that might be long term, be that China or Mexico.
But the United States is obviously is in an imperial
consolidation phase. The other part of the story is not
just the imperial consolidation, it's taking away China's allies. And
so if the Chinese don't have allies, they then have
a much bigger problem. And one of those not allies,
because the Chinese are different in how they think about
the world. But one of those partners that the Chinese
have is Venezuela and another one is Iraan, and between
them they might account for twenty to twenty five percent
of Chinese oil imports. And so if you've gain control
over that, you've slowed down the Chinese economy. It's given
you breathing space to do other things in other parts
of the world, including a place like Mexico. And by
showing Shine bound that look, one day she could just
end up on a plane and find herself on trial
in New York. That's the kind of threat that focuses
the mind. So this is the kind of approach that
says to these leaders, you have personal skin the game.
It's not going to be you know, my soldiers killing
your soldiers and just people from Appalachia dying. No, no, no,
it's going to be you the guy in charge, and
you're going to live your life in humiliation or in
a jail cell, or your life is going to end.
But now you must think as someone with a lot
more skin in the game and act accordingly. And that
is a more competent way of doing things, because that
capability to reach these people exists. You've demonstrated that it exists,
and you forced everybody involved to maybe change their thinking.
And in a way, what Shinbaum has been doing in
Mexico is trying to get the cartels into the legal economy.
Like part of the logic of the hugs nut bullets
is that maybe in twenty years time, these guys will
go down the Godfather route and will want to become
legitimate businessmen and get out of this dirty business. And
that might be the only way to do it because
they've become too powerful. Well, okay, that's a nice carrot,
you have to pair it with a stick. And so
if the offer is look, you could become a Mexican oligarch.
You don't have to be a Mexican drug dealer, and
you can sit on this well and you have to
sacrifice a bunch of your men, who you know are
a bunch of rapist and murderers anyway, just like you. Well, okay,
I'll become legitimate and my family will have a legacy
and I'll be rid of these guys. So it's not
what I'm saying is that there is reason for some optimism.
Speaker 1: I'll take that, Yeah, I know, and without saying.
Speaker 2: That it's going to work this way or that there's
not going to be a glitch or that it's going
to be you know, all wonderful. But if you're deploying
these kinds of tools, a combination of skin in the
game and an offer of redemption, yeah, okay, this is
you have to become a liberal Democrat.
Speaker 3: There is some coherence there. Hopefully it works, but there
is going to Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess the one you know, one thing I think
about is okay, all of this works out really well
and everything, then well you have we have it, we
have elections here. Then someone comes into power who you know,
That's the I'm not saying you don't try, you don't
try to make things. You don't try to make your
neighborhood better. But if you're if there's a possibility in
three years somebody is going to come into power, who
is going to seek to dismantle all of this. It's like,
we got to get rid of this system so quick.
Speaker 2: One of the many reasons why I'm a monarchist through
and through.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. As Americans, it's nothing but harping if we were
to say that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I can tell you I'm a monarchist, but as an American,
it doesn't mean anything. Concrete Mexico, we don't.
Speaker 2: You can can sort of try a genuine we've tried.
You could try at January sixth that the liberals imagined
that January sixth was and put Baron Trump on the throne. Yeah, no,
I'm joking.
Speaker 1: Obviously, Benny Mary is the princess of Norway and Greenland's
not a problem. There you go.
Speaker 3: How about Iceland? I went Iceland?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like Iceland. I've been there. It's a it's
a wonderful a wonderful place.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and that not to digress too much,
but my favorite was in i Afghanistan. Iceland stepped up
and deployed an infantry battalion to help there, which was
a very big contribution since the country has no army.
But they never let the fact they didn't have an
army stop them from deploying a battalion of infantry.
Speaker 2: That's very impressive. That's very impressive.
Speaker 3: I was impressed.
Speaker 1: I landed when I landed in Reikievic. When we touched
down and I looked to my right, first thing I
saw was a an American C one thirty. So yeah,
they then you then everybody pretty much speaks English, and
you're like, oh, I mean, besides the fact that everybody
here is like fourth and fifth cousins, this is pretty
much seems like home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which made you the most eligible bachelor on the
island that night.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, gentlemen, we can we can go on
like we go on like this forever. But you know,
thank you and uh fear us to your plugs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you could find me on moder geopolitics dot
com and Dad on on X and Pete thank you
very much for inviting me back.
Speaker 1: Home, of course, of course, Uh, doctor field House, you
got anything, I've.
Speaker 3: Got a substack. Sometime somebody else started publishing on that.
Until then, watch repeat reading Martyr made uh read uh
dark Enlightenment stuff. Those are my friends until then, all
Speaker 1: Right, thank you, gentlemen, Thank you,