“Trump has FAILED!” Victor Davis-Hanson vs Professor Roy Casagranda On Iran | With Mohammed Marandi

26:38How do we get that to happen? I'm ready. Well, go ahead. I mean, look at Libya today. It's a complete disaster. So that was a dumb intervention. I oppose that. I was in Libya for – I had a ruptured appendix removed in Libya. You didn't oppose Iraq, and Iraq was a complete disaster. Iraq was a misadventure in the sense that we decided to create a democracy when we should have just removed the regime and allowed a caretaker government to take it. But the idea of nation-building that part of the world was a mistake.

27:10Piers Morgan:But, Victor, on this notion of regime change, you know, the history shows us that it's hardly ever been a successful strategy to try and affect regime change in the Middle East. And Trump himself seemed very aware of that and was like, you know, I'm not going to do this. We're not going to get into, you know, endless wars in the Middle East, very expensive on human life, on the economy and so on. He was very adamant about this and people voted for him because of that. He said, I'm going to be America first, looking after our interests, strong border, strong economy, good cost of living, bring inflation down.

27:45Piers Morgan:Every part of this Iran war so far has flown in the face of everything he campaigned on, hasn't it? I mean, he's gone and chosen the biggest possible Middle Eastern war he could have possibly got involved with. Let me finish my question. In the short term, it's been economically disastrous. I mean, it's pretty much double price of gas at the pump. It's going to inevitably lead to raging inflation on food prices the longer it goes on because of the issue of fertiliser not coming through the Strait of Hormuz. And politically, like you say, it's obviously very toxic politically to the extent that he can't even militarily reopen the strait because politically he can't do it.

28:29Piers Morgan:So I'm really struggling to see a coherent strategy here that is consistent with what Trump promised to do when he was campaigning to be re-elected. Well, he said he was not going to have a war. I think it was an optional ground war in the Middle East. He's done this before, Piers. He killed Soleimani. He killed Baghdadi. He had a sustained bombing campaign that eliminated ICE. He was in Syria. The Wagner Group attacked him. He had a full-fledged war. He killed more Russians in the first term than during the entire Cold War. He removed the Maduro government. So he had done that. And the red line for him apparently was, you don't get in a protracted ground war anywhere.

29:14especially in the Middle East. We haven't done that yet. And we haven't been there as long as we were in Serbia.

29:20Piers Morgan:But if his goal, Victor, if his goal, as he now says, he's now sort of centred it down to one goal, to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon, do you concede that if at the end of these negotiations, which we're told are happening and may lead to some kind of deal, if that does not involve Iran handing over its enriched uranium, then the goal has not been achieved and the war will have failed, won't it? If they do not hand over the nuclear or it's not cemented or it's not on, we don't know where it is. A lot of people have argued you couldn't get it anyway. But if whatever the international adjudicators can tell us where it is and how, whether it's recoverable.

30:06If it is recoverable and we didn't get it, then yes, that was a failure. But the regime, we keep talking about they can do this and they can do that militarily. What can they do militarily? They have no military. And that took them a half century to create it.

30:23Piers Morgan:But they don't have to, do they? Because they can just continue to use the Strait of Hormuz as their most effective weapon. and they can continue... They've still got apparently many hundreds, if not thousands, of ballistic missiles left, so they can still lob a load of those at their neighbouring Gulf states. We don't know how many they have. Right, but it's believed they've still got up to 1 ,000 that they go red. And look, we don't know for sure, obviously. That's the caveat. Well, the key thing is if he's going to negotiate and not destroy the ability for them to make... Yeah. Close the strait, that is, eliminate all the PT boats and get rid of it and eliminate the missiles.

31:04I myself thought when they targeted the UAE and they saw it, we could have replied. We didn't have to go into full-fledged war, but we could have replied in a way that would have given up some deterrence. Yes, that will be a mistake if he negotiates that. But you have to concede, Piers, that when this war is over and people look and go in there and they look at the military and what it was, It's been a devastating loss, and it's been very asymmetrical.

31:37Piers Morgan:Like I said to you, I think there's no doubt at all that the US and Israeli military have inflicted massive damage on Iran's conventional military capability. I agree it will be incomplete if they can't certify that the uranium is unusable for a nuclear weapon. You asked me earlier very quickly about the global ripples, but everybody says that there's these winners. China has no ability to buy sanctioned oil at a discount from Iran now. It was buying 4 million barrels of sanctioned oil from Venezuela, Iran, and other places. It can't do that now. And I don't think after looking at the U.S. Navy and Air Force, it's going to be ready to go into Taiwan, especially given what we see about drone warfare in Ukraine.

32:27Russia has lost 2 million people in Ukraine dead and wounded, and it has no client anymore for the first time in 50 years in the Middle East. It's lost its Syrian client. It's lost any influence with Iran now. It's completely neutered in that express. There is going to be a reappraisal of NATO, and I think it will be a wake-up call, That NATO powers, if they don't want to use their airspace for the Americans to do something that is in the general interest of them and the United States, that's fine. And I don't think we should get out of NATO, but there will be a realistic appraisal where certain coalitions of the willing will be dominant.

33:12And that will be probably Eastern European NATO members. And I will say that if Britain were to ask the United States for all the help, we went on a unilateral expedition to the Falklands again, something like that. Or the French to Chad or the French and British to say, can you join the coalition of the willing in Serbia or our coalition of the willing that we planned for Libya? They're going to say no. OK, that's a big that's a difference.

33:38Piers Morgan:I agree. I think there's been a big shift in sentiment there. Professor Casagrande, what's your response to Victor there, particularly about the, as we go forward, the changing geopolitics of all this? OK, so let me start with the uranium. We knew where the uranium was 10 months ago, and we knew where the uranium was since the JCPOA. When we bombed Iran 10 months ago and completely obliterated and totally destroyed their stockpiles, which, of course, we knew was nonsense at the time, They hit it. They squirreled it away somewhere, deep inside some mountain, probably. We don't know its condition now.

34:20So in other words, what Trump has done by tearing up the JCPOA and then by bombing 10 months ago is he's made it so we don't know where the uranium is. And so the irony is, is this current war, if his goal is to get to the uranium, there's no reason for the Iranians to hand it over. So, again, he's made the situation a disaster, and now he's trying to figure out how to dig himself out of it. As far as NATO goes, Trump has made it absolutely clear, first in his first term, when he refused to acknowledge Article 5 of the NATO treaty. No matter how many times NATO members asked him, if something happens to one of our members, will Article 5 go into effect for the United States?

34:59He refused. Either he didn't know what it was, or he really just hates NATO's guts. But then the whole Greenland thing, I mean, you know you're in trouble when Mertz, who's basically Trump's lapdog, is saying, I think Trump may have just killed NATO. So it's true, there will be a complete realignment inside NATO, because what's happened is France and Germany have woken up and have realized that the United States is no longer a player, that the United States is no longer a partner, that the United States has gone rogue and is doing unjustified wars in the Middle East. And it's no longer playing ball with them, right?

35:40Because, look, the Iraq war, the 2003 war was a complete foolish disaster. There was no reason on earth to do it to begin with. And, you know, we brought in Poland and Great Britain. And we had all the coalition of the willing countries that we browbeat like Tonga into sending help Japan. We forced Japan to break their own constitution and send help. Well, one of the things that Europe was willing to do was turn a blind eye to this foolishness. You know, Gerhard Schroeder said, please don't do this. We did this in 1939. You're the United States. You have a higher standard than the rest of the world.

36:17And, you know, Bush refused to talk to Gerhard Schroeder until the end of his term. And the result was Europe went, we're OK with this. We're going to let them genocide Arabs because, well, they're brown anyway. Who cares? And they're Muslim and we hate Muslims because the United States is going to back us no matter what happens if we get in trouble in Europe. And now they know the United States is actually part of the problem and that the United States isn't probably going to be there in case they get in trouble. And so, yeah, how could it be a shock that Great Britain and the United States? France and Germany didn't want to back the United States in this very quickly.

36:58Donald Trump told the Germans the worst thing you can do is a Nord Stream pipeline. Why are you buying gas from Vladimir Putin and then asking us to defend you when you're profiting him? They said when he came into office, the Biden administration had stopped offensive weapons sales to Ukraine. The Biden administration. the Obama administration. The irony is that he approved weapons sales, offensive weapons sales, in a way that Biden or Obama did not do. He told them not to buy gas. He sanctioned the oligarchs. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal. In fact, when he came in, people had said, you better be very careful.

37:38He's alienating the Russians. But slight the whole thing about Russian collusion. And Russia was in a Russia invaded Ukraine during four administrations, three of them, two administrations. And they invaded Osatia, Georgia during the Bush administration. So for four administration, they left their borders and attacked a quasi European country. And they did not do it during the four years of Donald Trump. And they did not do it. They haven't done it now again, a new nation. There had to be a reason for that. And the reason was they felt that he had been unpredictable. You can use the term, whatever term you use, but they couldn't count on him not doing anything like Joe Biden saying, my reaction will depend on whether it's a minor or major invasion.

38:23Or going over to Putin and say, if you're going to hack U.S. institutions, please lay off humanitarian institutions. So we have given Ukraine about $150 billion. And he did it over the loud objections of his MAGA base. And the Biden administration did it. He continued. He's still helping them stealthily, still helping them. And what he doesn't want to do is to give Ukraine a blank check. And I think if this was a different type of situation, the only way Ukraine really could recover all of its territory would to hit offensive offensively to hit targets in Russia. But Russia has 6500 nuclear weapons.

39:08And we don't know what what the reaction would be. So we've had restraints on them for that. So are the Europeans. And as far as the Europeans, they can say all they want, but they have just barely met the 2 % GDP investment. And that only happened because Donald Trump harangued them. He was obnoxious. That is true. And they're not going to get to 5%. Our neighbor Canada spends 1.7%. It won't even build an icebreaker. And they're completely under the nuclear shield. United States, they can say all they want, but when you talk about the French and the British, Israel has twice the combat aircraft of any one of those three countries, Germany, French, France, or Britain.

39:50We have in the Gulf right now about 2 ,000 aircraft, 800. Israel has that material because France, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany provide them with that material. They wouldn't have that material if they were on their own. And they provide it because unlike the country you're speaking from, they're the only consensual society that have regular, open, transparent elections and free speech. They're an apartheid state. No, they're not. They're so human that they murder on a regular basis. How many Gazans have they just slaughtered? and they're taking on the way for the Arabs in the West Bank by the minute as we're speaking.

40:29Are you going to sit here and tell me that if a person says in Israel, I don't want to be an observant Jew, I want to be a Muslim and I want to have a mosque and I want to be a Christian and have a church, can you go to the UAE or any of the Gulf states and say, I don't want to be a Muslim, I want to be a Christian, or I want to be a Jew and I want to open a church or a synagogue? No, you can't do that. What does that have to do with genocide? It has to do with why— So you're creating the inability to convert from Islam to another religion with, it's okay to slaughter Arabs, and who, by the way, a percentage of them are fish - I'm not going to argue that Israel is the only transparent— It's the only transparent consensual.

41:13I'm not going to get in an argument, because anybody who's empirical knows that Israel is transparent, it has scheduled elections, it has free speech, It has full rights for women. It doesn't have free speech.

41:27Piers Morgan:The point I was going to ask you, Victor, is out of interest, because I've had this debate quite a lot recently, why is it that Israel is not compelled to be transparent about its nuclear capacity in terms of having nuclear weapons? It is. It has 170 nuclear weapons. It's never emitted any. It may be never officially, but everybody knows it. It's allowed people... It discusses that all the time. It has 175 nuclear weapons. But why has it never admitted any of that? Why is it never admitted? Because I think most countries don't admit how many they have. We don't admit exactly how many ready nuclear weapons we have.

42:07When I say there's 6 ,500 Russian nuclear weapons, that's because of intelligence estimates. But the Israelis have never denied it. If you say somebody to even the Netanyahu government, you have 175 nuclear weapons, he'll say no comment. and I think Donald Trump would say no comment, but we know how many we have. It's the official position of all these countries not to talk about how many nuclear weapons.

42:32Piers Morgan:Yeah, but I think my point is Israel don't admit to having any. They don't admit to having any nuclear weapons at all. And I'm not sure why they are allowed to have the only pass on that kind of transparency about whether a country has nuclear weapons. We know nine countries do. That list doesn't include Israel. And I'm just bemused as to why. Do what? Well, officially nine countries in the world have nuclear weapons. That list does not include, officially, Israel. And I've never understood why, if they have 170, as you say, why are they not part of that list? Why are they not country number 10 and transparent about it?

43:12Piers Morgan:You say how transparent they are. Why are they not transparent about their nuclear capacity? Israel has 11 million people, and it's in a sea of 500 people, 500 million Islamic, Arab, and Persians, and they're all in relative degrees hostile to it. That's just a fact, whether you agree with it or not. But why? Why? Because it is a Western democracy, it's a free society. What do you mean by that? That's nonsensical. Yeah, it is. It's nonsensical that anybody would hate Israel just because it had democratic elections. The problem with Israel is it stole the land from the Palestinians. It left them in a state of permanent refugee status.

43:58It does nothing to fix it. And in fact, it's made the situation worse by basically turning Gaza into a giant open air concentration camp and then tearing the West Bank up into little pieces and walling off the Palestinians. I'd ask you, if on October 7th, if terrorists had come into your country and slaughtered, raped, beheaded, tortured 1 ,200 people, and then they had taken 240 hostages back, and then they had built, had subverted UN and American and other European relief and built a billion-dollar subterranean complex whose exits and entries were in schools, mosques, and hospitals and hid as human shields, and then they said when Israel said we would like you to extradite the people who were responsible for this they said no and when you had pictures of people cheering in the streets and trying to hit the hostages and we know now that the hostages were tortured what would you do in response to that?

44:55I mean the Palestinians face the same exact question on a regular basis because Israel does very similar things to the Palestinians and has since 1948. The reality is is that Israel is the attacker and the aggressor in this scenario. And so this idea that somehow they're a Western democracy is, yeah, I guess in the same way that the United States genocided the Native Americans. I don't know. This is getting ridiculous, Piers. I mean, you have to be rational. I mean, what does that have to do? Genocide of the Native Americans? I mean, we're talking about the Middle East in rational terms, but when you bring in all of these other things, you just weaken your case.

45:39Israel, I went on the Stanford campus. Every day I walked across the campus, I saw very affluent Middle Easterners for the first time in their lives, many from where you are now, protesting, screaming, yelling at the government. If they did that in any of these Gulf states, they'd be arrested. And you know that. It's true. There's no protest in the UAE. I'm not going to tell you that one. If you want to say right now, if you said right now, I've had a change of heart about October 7th. I just want to throw it out there. I think it was a horrible act, and I can see why Israel retaliates. If you just said, I have a change of attitude, and I reassess my position, I can see why Israel did it.

46:20It's kind of an ambiguous question. There's arguments, and you'd probably lose your position. You know that. I don't think so. I think you would. Try it. For the record, I think that what the Palestinians did on October 7 was a horrible act. It was murder. It was slaughter. Try it. Who is going to condone that? But what Israel did in response was orders of magnitude worse. Well, I'm just telling you that if you're talking from a country that if anybody wanted to express free speech or exercise religious liberty and choice as they do in Israel, And I've been to Israel many times. They did. I've been to the Arab countries and the Arab population.

47:03Well, all I can know, unfortunately, we've run out of time, unfortunately.

47:09Piers Morgan:All I would say is I've actually broadcast my show uncensored from all over the Middle East in the last two years and talked about all these issues and expressed very strong opinions. And no one has tried to censor me. Nobody's censored me. You're not a citizen. If you were a citizen of those countries, you couldn't do that. You know that. You're a famous guest. So they accommodate you and your free speech. But if you were a citizen, have you ever had a citizen of the UAE and Saudi when you were critical of that government come on your show and attack that government while they were residing in that country?

47:43If you did, I'd like to learn about it.

47:46Piers Morgan:Yeah, I think that's probably fair. I don't think they would tolerate open dissent about the government in the way you're articulating. That's probably fair. We've got to leave it there, gentlemen. A very interesting debate. Thank you both very much indeed. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, there are more mixed messages on the progress of the peace talks. The president told PBS that a deal could include Iran shipping its enriched uranium to the US. Most reporting suggests the US may actually settle for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and dealing with the so-called nuclear dust later. With a view from Tehran, I'm rejoined again by Professor Mohamed Mirandi of Tehran University.

48:21Piers Morgan:Professor Mirandi, welcome back to Uncensored. Thank you very much for having me. Where is this war now, as far as Iran is concerned? Well, the reports from Axios are nonsense. And they believe here it was for market manipulation. And some people probably made a huge amount of money, people close to the White House. The Iranians are not going to send the so-called nuclear... to help Iran's nuclear material will remain in Iran. But what Iran expects is that the United States implement the ceasefire agreement that we had when the fighting stopped on day 39. After that, the two sides agreed that there would be a regional ceasefire.

49:21and Netanyahu immediately started carpet bombing Lebanon, the democratic state that your previous guest was talking about. He carpet bombed Lebanon, murdering hundreds of people within a few minutes, many of them in neighborhoods that were not even sympathetic to the resistance, just so that he could block the ceasefire. And then Trump went and said that Lebanon is not a part of the ceasefire. And of course, the Pakistani government had to come out and say, actually, it is indeed a part of the ceasefire. So there was supposed to be a regional ceasefire, including Lebanon, Gaza, elsewhere. And then ships that belonged, that were affiliated to the five countries helping the United States in the war against Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, they were supposed to be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

50:16Finally, when Netanyahu was forced to accept the ceasefire, even though he, again, afterwards begins the slaughter, then the United States refused to remove the siege on Iranian ports, which is an act of war and a violation of the ceasefire, too. So basically, the ships are not flowing, are not moving because of Netanyahu and then Trump. And I should stress that the Strait of Hormuz is not closed. Countries that did not engage in war with Iran, their ships go through, like Russia, like China, like Iraq. Indian ships have gone through and others. But those that are affiliated to these countries or have goods from these countries, that they're the ones, the five countries that engaged in the war, they are the ones who are limited or restricted.

51:02So how does a deal look like from Tehran's perspective?

51:08Piers Morgan:Donald Trump and his administration have been very bullish about we're very near to getting a deal and most of what the Americans would like out of this deal is going to be agreed. We're just trying to work out who to talk to and so on. But from Tehran's point of view, for example, on that issue of enriched uranium, can you envisage any deal with the United States which involves the voluntary handing over of that enriched uranium or any verbal guarantee to do so on any timeline? Well, I think it's pretty clear that for the Iranians, who didn't start this war, and the Iranians have been much more careful not to kill civilians, even though Iran carried out huge devastation across the Persian Gulf, I think less than 20 people in these five countries were killed, whereas 3 ,400, 500 Iranians were murdered.

52:06And the same is true with the Israeli regime. Very few people were killed there. Iran didn't target synagogues, unlike the synagogue in Tehran that the Israelis bombed. Iran did not target schools, unlike the Americans and Israelis that did target schools, and so on. But the Iranians are saying that when the war started, when the invasion began, Trump was demanding unconditional surrender, like the 12-day war that he started months earlier. And he failed. And by day 39, Trump accepted the Iranian 10-point plan as the basis for negotiations. Why? Because he failed. He lost the war. It's obvious.

52:50Otherwise, he wouldn't have accepted. And so based on that, Iran accepted a ceasefire. So obviously, first we have to have the ceasefire, which the Americans and Netanyahu are violating. And that's why the global economic crisis is getting worse by the hour, because of the siege, which violates the ceasefire, and the slaughter in Lebanon and in Gaza. So once there is a ceasefire, then, which can be implemented now, Trump can right now say, I lift the siege, Netanyahu has to stop killing kids, and then the ships will go through the Strait of Hormuz. It's as simple as that. And then we move on to the 10-point Iranian plan that has to be negotiated.

53:32After all, war was carried out against our people. In just one strike, the Americans murdered 168 little girls in a school. So there has to be compensation. Someone has to pay. The Americans think that since—Trump thinks that since it's an empire, we don't have negotiations. They dictate terms. Iran is not like other countries where the United States bullies and says you have to, you know, abide by our tariffs. That's not how Iran works. And I think Trump by now should have understood that. When he imposed this attempt to starve ordinary Iranians with his siege, that failed too. That's why he was in such a rush to carry out this new operation, which also failed.

54:15And most probably, Trump is going to launch another attack on Iran with his brother-in-arms Netanyahu, and that will fail too. And it's only going to drag the world to an economic collapse, to an economic depression. I assure you, Pierce, the course that the United States is taking for the sake of the Israeli regime, not for the American people. It's all for the sake of Zionism, is dragging the world to economic depression. And this could have ended, this shouldn't have started in the first place. But after the 39-day war, we could have, if they had abided by the ceasefire, the global economic situation would be infinitely different from what it is now.

54:58Piers Morgan:I have had other guests, Victor Davis Hanson just now, who say it's been actually a clear victory for the United States militarily. They've caused enormous damage to Iran's military, which I think is unarguable. And that if they wanted to militarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz, they could do it in a heartbeat. But for political reasons, they're not taking that option at the moment. And that actually no-one's quite sure who's running Iran. The new supreme leader has not been seen in public. and therefore the assumption is that actually it's a rudderless ship and it's far more damaged than Iran would ever care to admit.

55:41Piers Morgan:So my first question about that would be, where is your supreme leader? No one's seen him. Is he alive? Oh, he is alive and well. And, you know, Pierce, I don't think anyone who knows anything about anything takes anything you say seriously, because if Iran has been defeated and if they could take the straight easily. And if Iran has no leaders and things are falling apart and the insulting language that you use about Iran, if that was all correct, then it's over. Then you don't have to have this conversation with me. Go and do what you'd like to do. That's not what's happening, isn't it? The United States has been humiliated and the Zionist regime hasn't been exposed for the genocidal regime that it is.

56:26Of course, last time I asked you three times, What do you think about an ethno-supremacist regime? And you refuse to answer. But the fact is that the United States is doing all of this and destroying the global economy for an ethno-supremacist regime to preserve that. But if they're really worried about the U.S. economy and the world economy, then why don't they just open the strait and take out the oil and take the country? and we'll all be refugees like the Palestinians where you kicked them out of their homes in 1948.

56:59Piers Morgan:I mean, President Trump has indicated that's exactly what he may do if there's no deal. Well, that's because the West is led by monsters and you are friends with those monsters, ethnosupremacists and exceptionalists. Look, you know what? You do this. We have a perfectly civilised conversation and then you can't resist. Hang on, hang on. You said SHIT. You can't resist. And you can't, what you can't resist doing is putting your fake halo on your head and pretending that you yourself do not help prop up a monstrous regime. You talk about, you know, America has to be held accountable for killing people.

57:41Piers Morgan:What about Iran's regime, which for 47 years has killed so many people, not least its own people, as we saw in January? Should they be held accountable for that? Would you like to see your regime held accountable for the thousands of protesters it killed in January, for the Americans it's killed, for the Israelis it's killed, for the way it's propped up Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, to cause endless terrorism all over the Middle East? Would you like your regime to be held accountable for that monstrous activity? You know, Piers, first of all, you used that word that I won't repeat, and that's exactly how you like to frame things, you started insulting Iran, and I gave you a much more civilised response.

58:27What is the word you're talking about? Sorry. You said S-H-I-T. No, I didn't. That's how I heard it. That's not what you said. Sorry, just to be clear. Okay, then I'm mistaken. At no stage of this interview have I said that. Okay, then I'm mistaken. Yeah, you are. Then I'm mistaken. I thought you said... But first of all, I asked you to come to Iran. You could have seen what Iran is like. I've asked you to come here.

58:48Piers Morgan:You haven't come either. So, you know what? Well, I've lived there. I've lived there, Pierce. I've lived there. I've been there many times. I did my PhD there. So there's a bit of a difference, just so you... But you haven't come, and I haven't come. So we're in the same boat. I've been there many times. I was there on the anti... I was actually in that protest that you and I discussed about together in 2003 when you were a somewhat different person than you are now. I wasn't a different person at all. No, I was exactly the same person. Let me respond. Let me respond. And as a person... Well, first of all, I asked you to read that book Going to Tehran by Flint and Hillary Leppard, and I'm sure you didn't bother to do so.

59:28But as a person who survived... To be honest with you, Professor,

59:32Piers Morgan:I know that you think you can just bark out your instructions to me as if somehow I'm beholden to the Iranian regime over what books I should be reading, but I don't really feel that burning desire to read books just because Professor Morandi, the chief propagandist for the Iranian regime, tells me to. Call me naive. Sure. Do what you like. Do what you like. But as a person who survived two chemical attacks that your regime helped give to Saddam Hussein, I don't think you or your government or the regime... I led the campaign against the Iraq war that my government waged in 2003, as you know. No, that's not when they used chemical weapons, Pierce.

1:00:14They used them in the 1980s and your government gave it to Saddam Hussein. Back then, he was your friend. back then he was your ally you you forget that you know you've waged three wars against my country we're the bad guys of course but you you imposed you carried out a coup in 1953 then during the revolution when people on the streets you supported your regime supported the shank gunning down people then after the revolution they encouraged saddam hussein to invade our country. The West gave him chemical weapons. I survived both mustard gas and nerve agents in two separate attacks. Many didn't survive, but that wasn't important in the West back then.

1:00:56Can I ask you one question before we finish?

1:00:59Piers Morgan:There's one question. I'm not responsible for what my government did when I was a teenager, just to be clear. But just one question for you. Of course you are. No, no, I've got a question. Every human being. No, I'm not. Every human being who is politically aware is responsible for that. I'm asking you a question, though. I'm asking you a question. And I am, too. OK, I'm asking you a question, which is one that is put by a lot of my viewers. I'm just curious to be honest. I'm not being accusatory. But you always do these interviews with apparently a full internet signal in a country where many people have had their internet turned off since January.

1:01:31Piers Morgan:How are you doing that? And why is it one rule for you and another for the large majority of the people of Iran? Well, first of all, as I told you, you already asked me this question before. During the war, the Internet was never off. It was off to the international Internet, Iranian Internet and Iranian websites and Iranian apps were used. But back then, during the war, they were using the Internet to find targets in Iran and to murder people and to destroy Iranian infrastructure. So they limited that. Back then, if you recall, and as I explained, I was not using my own internet. Now they've opened up the internet more.

1:02:15They've helped me to be able to use this, to use a better internet connection. But as we speak, I am using a VPN, like most other people. But I think the best thing for you to do is to counter my arguments. Your country bombed my country. The United States slaughtered children, and that's why we had internet restrictions. Otherwise, before the slaughter of our people, of our leaders, of our scientists, of our academics, of schools, of bombing apartment blocks, before that... And you know what? Your own regime, according to many reports,

1:02:59Piers Morgan:slaughtered up to 30 ,000 of its own people, including children, in January. But you will say to me, nothing to see here. They're all heavily armed militants. Do you believe that? Actually, I believe that over you. Yeah. You believe that? You believe it? So you believe it? I do, yeah. I think many thousands of people were slaughtered by your regime. Yeah, I do. Your regime? Because the evidence shows the Iranians gave the names of all the people who were killed, every single one, 3 ,117. Hundreds were police officers or officers of the law. And 2 ,000 of them were people who were caught in the crossfire by people who were armed by your government.

1:03:42Of course. Who said they were armed by your government? They were all killed by the protesters. Channel 14 of Israel. That's right, yeah. Channel 14 of Israel. Yeah. Pompeo, you know these people. Forgive me, Professor Miranda. We've run out of time. But this doesn't show your government killed my people. You know, Professor Miranda, it's always... Your government murdered 3 ,370 people.

1:04:00Piers Morgan:Professor Miranda, is it's always interesting to hear a voice from Tehran talking, and I appreciate you coming on. I take most of what you say with a massive pinch of salt, but I appreciate you... Oh, I take it with kilos of salt when it comes to you. But I appreciate you coming on the programme and to giving a perspective from Tehran. Thank you very much. Thank you. Piers Morgan, our sense that is proudly independent, the only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

1:04:35Piers Morgan:And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it without you.