Christiane Amanpour On Iran & Trump’s Miscalculations

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2:09Anita:Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.

2:13William:And me, William Durumpil.

2:15Anita:And this week we're actually going to interrupt our usual series. I mean, that sounds terribly formal, BBC. see, because in light of the US-Israeli war with Iran, we think it's really important to bring to you an expert historical view of what's going on in the region right now. And honestly, we couldn't think of anyone better for this extra special episode than the formidable journalist Christiane Amanpour, a CNN anchor, the host of the X-Files podcast with her ex, James Rubin.

2:44William:Best named podcast of the year, definitely.

2:47Anita:And also, she had an escape from Tehran during the 1979 revolution. We're so thrilled to have you, Christiane. Thank you very much for being with us. Growing up in Tehran, I mean, right from the get-go, you have this vantage point that many people listening will not have. Just tell us a little bit about your situation in Iran and what that was like. My mom, English and Christian, my father, Persian and Muslim, got married and they had four girls. I'm the oldest one, and we all grew up and lived in Tehran until the revolution, and actually most of my family, even beyond the revolution. I was in Iran for most of 1978 because I had left high school and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and where to go to university, etc.

3:31And I therefore was able to see the revolution unfolding because 1978 was the year of the uprising against the Shah. And the revolution finally materialized and became an Islamic Republic in early 1979. So I saw all that coming from what everybody of my milieu was, a royalist, monarchist society. We lived under the monarchy. There was no discussion of politics. There was not free speech. There was one state-controlled media. And that's the way it was. But if you were on side, you were on side. And to be fair, there was a lot more rights for women. The Shah was trying to drag the country into a more prosperous future.

4:12It was discovering its oil wealth, and it was a very close ally of not only the United States, but Israel. It was considered a major piece in the chessboard to protect the West from the Soviet Union and communism. Therefore, it was a mega player in the Cold War, and it was a mega oil exporter after the Arab oil embargo over the Israeli wars in the Middle East and became a very important supplier to the West. So all of that. And then all of that was crashed with the revolution.

4:41William:How far did that world totally crumble for you in 1979? Did it feel like an immediate full stop for your family, for your life? For my family and for the system, of course. One day we woke up and we were told that everything we believed in was 180 degrees the wrong thing. The people who we admired were either executed, imprisoned or denigrated. The system that we thought was serving the majority of the people was crashed. It's a revolution. People were turned into refugees, into exiles, and those who stayed gradually realized, particularly women, that their rights were not going to be respected.

5:22Having said that, Iran became a highly, highly literate and educated society. Education was available to a much, much bigger tranche of the population than it had been under the Shah, and women were brought into the system. The Shah started it, but women today have much more rights in Iran than they do in the rest of the Muslim world. They can vote, they can drive, they can work, they're in parliament, they can be elected, etc. But their fundamental legal rights were essentially cast aside. The rights the Shah brought in to protect women under the law, whether it's property rights, whether it's inheritance, whether it's custody, whether it's all of those kinds of rights, the Shah brought in for women.

6:07And the first thing Ayatollah Khomeini did, that was back in 1979, when he took over, was go straight to the Ministry of Women. It was the first created by the Shah and closed it down. Go straight into the streets and tell women, no, sorry, you thought we were going to let you not wear your hijabs if you didn't want to. you thought we were going to bring democracy, but we are not. You will all go back under the veil. And that really made many people who had supported the revolution, even within the middle class, who had supported the revolution thinking it was going to bring democracy after the Shah's monarchy realized that Ayatollah Khomeini had committed a bait and switch in front of all the world's cameras in exile in France.

6:48He had given this lie, basically, that he was bringing democracy and human rights and women's rights to Iran.

6:55Anita:The idea that people have of Iran these days, how does it mismatch with what you think they should know about the Iran that you know? Look, it's really difficult because the revolution coincided with one of the worst acts in diplomatic history, which was the revolutionaries taking the US embassy hostage, holding those hostages for 444 days and making them enemies of America, starting with the death to America, great Satan, all of that stuff, and holding these diplomats hostage in a way that had never, ever been done. It violates all laws of diplomatic immunity and relations between sovereign states, et cetera.

7:33So that basically 47-year-old wound is huge still in America and also in Iran because they did it, the revolutionaries will say they did it because they feared that once the Shah was let into the United States, you remember in 1979 for medical treatment, that that would be a launchpad for a CIA coup against this Islamic revolutionary government to bring the Shah back. Why? Because they remembered the 1953 coup that brought the Shah back and toppled the quasi-democratically nominated Prime Minister Mossadegh. And so they were very concerned about. That was an MI6 and CIA coup to bring the Shah back because MI6 was concerned about the price of oil and the Anglo-Iranian oil company, which had been nationalized, and the Americans were concerned about communism, the Cold War, and losing their peace on that chessboard.

8:29But that created a huge trauma in the Iranian psyche. And so, you know, there's just so much that each side doesn't understand or doesn't realize about each other, and that's playing out right now as well.

8:42William:Christiane, do you think it was the Iran-Iraq war that got the revolutionary regime into this sort of defensive contra-mundi against the world posture, which in a sense, they're still in? I absolutely do. And I do think that if any of the current war planners have not gone back and look at that history, they will be missing a huge piece of vital information and vital knowledge. Because you remember that there was the revolution and then Saddam Hussein, who had always longed to have control of the Shat al-Arab waterway, which is a small piece of waterway that's actually shared by Iran and Iraq on the Persian Gulf that leads then into the Straits of Homoz and allows the export of oil.

9:21Under the Shah, there had been a deal between Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to share that. As soon as the Shah was toppled, Saddam Hussein decided this was an opportunistic moment. Iran is weak. What are these mullahs? What are these ayatollahs? they don't know how to defend, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore, in September 1980, invaded Iran thinking like Vladimir Putin did over Ukraine, like now Israel and the United States think over Iran, that it's just a week at most and the regime will be crushed. And as you know, it lasted eight years and it was ended around the table in a draw. So Salam didn't win.

9:58Iran, by surviving, claimed to have won. But what they did then was form the Basij, really, really entrenched the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. These were formed to guard the revolution. This is a whole ideological military establishment that has lasted those 47 plus years. I remember a documentary for CNN. They had bought this incredible video from an Australian production company, and they had been given access to the front in the mid-'80s. They had gone to see this nascent teenage force of boys called the Basij, whose role was to, into Alia, be human minesweepers to clear the front for the tanks because they didn't have the technology.

10:42But that mentality is what people have to understand now. Khomeini said, no, we're not surrendering. We're going to keep going until finally there was a negotiated end. And he said, we have to drink from the poison chalice to survive and to continue our future.

10:58Anita:We've got an oil crisis now. We've got isolation now. We've got threats of attrition now. I mean, how far is that pattern going to be mirrored now to that of the 1980s, do you think? Well, I think some of it is being mirrored, as you just outlined. I think that many people, and again, I can drag it out of my archives, there were serious Americans and other scholars and experts who had worked on this who believed that Iran might moderate a little bit with the death of Khomeini. You remember that happened in 1989, about a year after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. He died early June 1989. All the hopes, I think, and the wishful thinking of the West and Israel, I guess, were that this would somehow, nobody could match the charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini, which is true.

11:47No leader did match the charisma. But instead, the next supreme leader was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had been president throughout the Iran-Iraq war and who had been wounded by a bomb attack by those who were against the regime. And he is the one who came in and further solidified the strength and the ideology and the mission of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC. And he became so entrenched with them and made the theocracy and the military intertwineable. So this now, what exists in Iran, is not just a theocratic revolutionary regime. It is a theocracy, military, revolutionary government.

12:31All those words, ideological. And people may have thought that when the time comes for Ali Khamenei to pass away in his sleep, he was 86, old and ill, then maybe, maybe it will inevitably lead to a gradual moderation inside Iran. Well, that didn't happen because the US and Israel used that as their first target, wiped him out, wiped the top layer out. And then what happened? They nominated his son. Now, it might not have happened. Mushta Bar Khamenei was not the most popular one. And in fact, Ayatollah Khomeini wrote several times that unlike the monarchy, we are not a hereditary system. We will take the best and the brightest to be our supreme leader.

13:16Well, no, Mushtabah is not the best and the brightest. He wasn't a top, top Ayatollah. He wasn't even an Ayatollah. He's just been labeled that. We don't even know whether he's actually running things right now. We haven't actually seen him. There's all sorts of rumors that he was either very badly wounded in the attack on the first day of the war that killed his father, his mother, his wife, and other family members. He has not been seen. A statement in his name was put out. But importantly, this is a very hard line statement. We will not surrender. The Straits of Hormuz will stay closed. So this is where we are.

13:50And on the oil issue too. That's the only retaliatory point in an asymmetrical war that Iran is using and warned that it would use.

13:58Anita:You know, if we're to carry on that mirror image, does it carry on? Because the 1980s brought decades of insularity, a buildup of pressure in Iran, and also a buildup of pressure in the region, as if this region needed more pressure at all. Is that where we are heading? Is the same calculus going through President Trump's mind that this could be Venezuela, where we have somebody who's friendly to us, who can do business with us? Or are we facing another few decades of a spiraling situation that is going to pull more and more nations in? Hard to know about another few decades. This is not Venezuela, period.

14:36End of story. There's no Delce Rodriguez. And if there was, as Trump himself said, we've killed them all. The people who we thought that we might want to reach out to, maybe could team up with Reza Pallavi, create some kind of transition. For me, it was very scary right now. Unlike the first Gulf War, which we can talk about, and even the second Gulf War in terms of the military, there was a clear mission in terms of the military objective at the beginning. The politics stepped in and basically screwed it all up. But here, there's not even a clear military objective. It keeps getting changed on a daily basis.

15:12If you take President Trump's constant talk to the press in these micro-interviews that he's trying to control the situation and affect the situation on the ground, saying these things and posting these things on social media on a daily, sometimes bi-daily, sometimes hourly basis. There's conflicting missions and endgame strategies articulated from the Pentagon. I just do believe that this is a very, very scary thing. Right now, we can't call it a war in Iran. It's a war that has now engulfed the region, and it just has. Now, President Trump is, I think, demonstrating a certain amount of reality, but maybe a bit of desperation and panic, calling on all these countries, allies and others, including China, who he's been dissing for the whole year.

16:00That he have tariffed. Yes, William, that he's dissed and dismissed the whole year and threatened and bullied. Come and help us open the Straits of Hormuz or else. None of these countries signed up for the war. None of them have their immediate interests at stake, but are going to be very, very caught up in a global recession if that happens, in an ongoing oil crisis, which shows no sign of backing down right now. And there is no Delcy Rodriguez that we see. They called for the IRGC and the Basij to lay down their arms and surrender to the people. How? How does that happen? How? How does that happen?

16:37And let's just not forget that in the first Iraq war, and this is very important because the military was successful. I saw it. I witnessed it from the beginning. It was a three-week military campaign. It did cause Salam Hussein to go, but they had said, very similar to now, to the, then they're called the Republican Guard in Iraq and the police and the normal army, lay down your arms, don't fight us, and after the war, we will partner with you to rebuild a new Iraq. And sure enough, they laid down their arms, they didn't fight. The first thing that the American occupation forces, the CPA, Coalition Provisional Authority did, was to rip up the playbook that the State Department had come up for, rebuilding Iraq after that war, handed over to the Pentagon, and they went into full debaithification, i.e.

17:23they fired all the military, all the security, and created an insurgency. They birthed AQIM, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They birthed eventually ISIS and huge flows of migration. It was a disaster.

17:38William:You've been wonderful on your podcast. You seem to indicate in one of the recent issues that Trump, you think, has completely miscalculated, that he thought there was going to be, that even the threats would bring them to the negotiating table. Do you think he has any understanding of Iran, that he's getting any good advice? Because the impression seems to be that, you know, he's got these two estate agents, Jared Kushner and Wyckoff, providing amateurish and biased information. Do you think that he's flailing from a lack of information and a lack of briefing? Is the State Department being completely ignored?

18:11Anita:Well, yeah, and also the American people being ignored. There are polls that say, you know, 60 % of Americans do not want this war. They do not support this war. Including the MAGA base. So what does this tell us? I mean, who is the Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder here? Well, I think, you know, to Willie's point and your point, I think that this is the big problem. You see, at the beginning, if you remember, they eviscerated the State Department and all the institutions that were full of people who had been studying these issues, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, all of that kind of stuff for decades.

18:42So most of those people essentially have been fired. And in the big positions, the cabinet positions, there are loyalists and sycophants whose jobs depend on appeasing and flattering the president of the United States. I do believe, because it's been reported, I don't know firsthand, but it's been reported, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Cain and others did try to tell President Trump, they wargamed and they said, President, there's this issue of the Straits of Hormuz, there's this, there's that, and there's the other. On top of everything else, the Arab Gulf allies, the Gulf states said to President Trump, please don't do this because Iran will do what it's doing now.

19:19They have come over here and they have told us that this is their retaliation plan. First, we strike Israel, if Israel strikes us. Then we strike American bases in all your countries, if America strikes us. And then if that doesn't give them a message, then sorry, guys, we strike your economic hubs. And that's exactly what they've been doing to the actual point. And they've also said, and we have the Straits of Hormones, and we will close it off to the international oil trade. And that's exactly what they've done. Except remember, now they're saying that we have the trade, the Straits are open to any country that is not at war with us.

19:58The only countries that cannot come through the Straits of Homoz are American and anybody else who's in this war. So I think that this is a real problem. And to William's particular question about the negotiators, Witkoff and Kushner, for me, the only thing you need to know is that on the record, Witkoff told Fox News on the Sunday before the war started, so a week before the war started, just ahead of negotiations, that the president is frustrated, that was the word he used, that the Iranians are not capitulating, that is the word he used, with all these military assets there. Surely they're scared.

20:36Why haven't they capitulated? And this was a week just about before the war started. So this was meant to be to try to get them to the negotiating table. I've also heard that the goalposts around the negotiations about stopping enrichment and all the rest of it, I've heard from very good sources inside and outside of Iran that they were changed at the last minute.

20:56William:By Kushner and by? No, by Trump. Kushner and Wyckoff sent the messages to Trump and he either under consultation with Netanyahu just on his own, changed the goalposts on that issue, on the nuclear issue. So I think that's a problem. They've had bad experiences negotiating with this Trump administration. Of course, the West doesn't believe that Iran negotiates in good faith. I would just point to the last time temperatures were seriously lowered was under the JCPOA the so-called nuclear agreement, which took two years, but was, whether you like it or not, a perfectly adequate for the time arms control agreement.

21:36It did not address everything. It was a nuclear arms control agreement in the manner, without the treaty status, of what the US would do with the USSR.