Should Donald Trump 'Make Iran Great Again'?

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast Podcast.

0:20These are the blood-curdling sounds from the streets of Tehran. And the heavy gunfire is not gunfire going into the sky. It's aimed at the protesters. And the death toll is incredible. The Iranian authorities are admitting to 2 ,000 dead. The numbers are probably way higher than that. President Trump is said to be weighing the prospect of military action to try and destabilise further the regime and aid the protesters. But will that achieve the desired effect? Or is there a risk that that is exactly what the regime wants? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:05The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And you keep thinking it cannot get any worse than what you heard from the day before. And yet the numbers now being spoken about who may have died and the opposition are saying 12 ,000 people have been killed by the security services in the past three or four days. That is unbelievable. Iranians firing on Iranians and these are people that are just out protesting about the cost of living and wanting a change of government they want Khamenei to go and they want to see a change in how they are ruled so that they can have a better economic future and the brutality the savagery being meted out by Khamenei's men is just something that is actually quite hard to fathom.

2:07Yeah and even if that number is wrong and even if it is at the number that the regime itself has put out which is 2000 which they say includes security service personnel one way or another it's a massacre it's a massacre that's been taking place across Iran across this enormous country sprawling across West Asia. It is a huge political story for the whole world. We are going to get into some of the causes of that. We're going to be speaking to an Iranian who knows the country really well for his insights on it and sort of weighing up exactly what Trump might do or he might not do in terms of military action.

2:39Before we do that, we are aware that Iran, for many listeners, for many viewers, Iran is a country which is quite unknowable and quite impenetrable. And we're aware that you might not be completely aware of the history. And that's completely understandable not least because part of this story is the fact that iran has literally been impenetrable and unknowable for a very long time closed off from much of the rest of the world for very very deliberately which is a huge part of this story and actually part of the story of the protests as well which is that iran actually historically was such as a country which was more liberal very interconnected with its region and the wider world with a very big middle class population which has been on the contradictions because you've got this islamic republic so he thought that it might be helpful to just give a brief sort of history of the last 50 years of Iran just to sort of get you up to speed on it because it is important so modern Iran basically begins really in 1979 that is when the Shah the king basically who was a US backed western backed secular autocrat he is overthrown by a revolution in the country and what replaced him was completely unique really it wasn't a monarchy it wasn't a conventional dictatorship either it was an Islamic republic and we're going to hear that term a lot in terms of the coverage on this is a hybrid system Iran has with elections and a parliament but where ultimate power basically sits with an unelected supreme leader and that is the Ayatollah currently the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as John was saying now almost immediately that country Iran the new Iran the Islamic Republic defined itself really against the United States having been a close ally of the West under the Shah they seized famously the US embassy.

4:16There was a 444 day hostage crisis and the state was basically almost hardwired to have hostility to the West into the system. Relations with Israel collapsed almost immediately too and Iran basically started, as we've seen for the last 50 years, the process of backing proxy groups across the Middle East like Hezbollah, Hamas, as part of a permanent confrontation with Israel and with the West. And what makes Iran really unusual today, as we've just been talking about is you've got that tension between the state which is so conservative ultra conservative very controlling very religious and its population which is young urban middle class often more liberal by temperament that's not to say the regime doesn't have support because it really does but it is got a highly educated population globally connected and that is what we're seeing play out now we've seen it play out over the years when there have been other protests as well though these seem bigger and that just very briefly i think is why iran matters so much why this story matters so much is that if it were to fall if and it's a huge if if it were to fall it would redraw the geopolitical map of the middle east it would reshape the relationship between the country with the west and israel and send shockwaves across the world yeah there is one name that you keep hearing in all of this who stands on the outside who could become the next ruler of iran or interim ruler And that is Reza Pahlavi, who is the son of the Shah of Iran.

5:44Now, Iran in the 60s and 70s was liberal, progressive, outward going, cool, trendy. Although the regime under the Shah had lots of problems. Oh, yes. And the regime had a brutal secret police who were kind of relentless in dealing with opponents. It became more and more autocratic. and the Shah in the end became almost an absolute monarch, you know, divine right to rule. And so that is why there was the revolution in 79 with Ayatollah Khomeini, who has been in Paris in exile, kind of returns as a hero in 79. But now, as you say, it is repressive. It is anti-liberal. Women have to wear a hijab.

6:32Homosexuality is not tolerated. it is a very brutal place and the economy has been going downhill and part of that is to do with sanctions but also part of it is to do with corruption within the government where people have not been managing the economy well and that all this oil wealth has been squandered and so you've now got a situation where people are saying death to the dictator that has been said before but they are calling as well for a return of Reza Pahlavi, who's been in exile in America, to come back to rule Iran, maybe on an interim basis, while perhaps there are elections. That is still to be worked out.

7:14And that is the cocktail that is bringing so many people out onto the streets now and leading to this bloodbath that is taking place before Western eyes. And with Donald Trump weighing, is now the time for me to bomb or not would it help would it be counterproductive

7:39well we're joined now in the studio by ali hamadani who is a british iranian journalist and the director of persian mix radio i think you left iran in 2009 and we'll come to this you also spent time in prison there. I know you've been speaking to a lot of people who've just recently got out of Tehran and have managed to contact some people who are still there. The situation sounds utterly horrific. Yes, I mean, the stories that I'm hearing, especially remember that there is no internet since four days ago, five days ago. No international calls, nothing. You cannot call to Iran. It is only today that some people started calling from inside Iran to abroad.

8:27But no international call, no internet. I mean, the regime started jamming Starlink signals, which is quite rare. Everybody is like, what exactly happened? How are they doing it? But apparently they are jamming the GPS system. So the Starlink devices cannot find the satellite. So no internet at all. And remember, owning a Starlink is bad. You could get executed for it. But some people own Starlink devices and they were sharing loads of videos and stories and I was talking to them. Since Sunday, when they started, Sunday evenings, when they started jamming Starlink signals, there was no video at all, nothing at all, no news at all.

9:03So the only way to talk to people who were in Iran on Sunday onward was actually meeting them or talking to those people who are leaving the country or just left the country. So I managed to talk to a couple of them. These people who traveled out of Iran, from Tehran, were sharing the Sunday night. Sunday, the reason that I'm mentioning Sunday, because the crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, who actually started putting statements out, are calling for people to start protesting against the regime, not leaving streets, that this new call to action was released for Saturday and Sunday. and Sunday was critical because many people were like, okay, so this is going to be four nights in a row that people are in streets and they do not want to leave.

9:49So that's the moment that everybody was like, okay, so we were asking, we were measuring and trying to basically foresee in the future. Are they going to stay? And then all of a sudden, all communications went off. So just take us through what these people that you've managed to speak to have been telling you. So the first question that I have for them, and I have my mobile phone because I asked them a couple of questions and I have their answers here. Were there any protests on Sunday? Are you still on streets? Are people still protesting against the regime? And the answer was yes, we didn't know.

10:22Genuinely, we did not know because we didn't hear anything from them. So he said people are still there, but the number of security forces suddenly doubled. Even before any crowd had formed, they began firing into the air and creating chaos. That is their new method. Despite these protesters gathered from small streets and they managed to get to the central, downtown Tehran. When neighbours heard the chants, many shouted slogans from their windows or came down to join. Demonstrations on Sunday evening continued until two in the morning on Monday. The most striking thing was the courage of the teenagers.

11:02This is the guy who spoke to me. I'm 43 and have lived in several countries, but I've never seen anything like it. 17 and 18 year olds were saying, at worst, I'll be killed, but at least the next generation won't have to live like this. Their demands go beyond freedom. They are showing their love for Iran and for their identity. Drones circled overhead. Once they moved away, security forces attacked and started firing. Yet the young protesters didn't move. Everyone was filming. But there is one deep fear. With the internet cut, their voice was enrich other cities or the outside world, and people would think the protests are over.

11:44So this is the conversation that I had with the guy, and he just left Iran, and he was crying. And other people that I spoke to who left Iran, they are in a state of shock. They cannot believe the brutality they saw. There have been other protests over the years, other large-scale demonstrations. how do you rank what we're seeing now by comparison to those and how scared would you say the regime is because again they are you know clearly they're despotic regimes appalling regime in all sorts of ways but they're very well entrenched have been for a long time how scared do you think they are so there is a difference between this one and the previous ones including the women life freedom movement in 2022 we kept hearing death to the dictator death to islamic republic it was clear that many people, protesters, didn't want this regime.

12:37What was not clear was, OK, what do they want next? And this round is the first round that you keep hearing a replacement. You keep hearing the slogan, Javid Shah, long live the king, the Shah. So bring back the Shah? Well, his son. Or what they are saying to me is basically the Shah is a symbol of Iran, which was wealthy, which had a good reputation around the world, which was connected to the world, which was modern. But isn't that the problem with the protests at the moment and why people think that the brutality of the regime might prevail is that he's not a unifying figure that everyone in Iran can get behind.

13:26and there is no, it's not like there is an opposition that is ready to take over tomorrow. Or do you think Reza Pahlavi is? It's not about what I think, Anah. I think we need to be quite cautious here because I think there's no other names. You keep hearing his name on the streets and no one else's name. So that is fact, right? You keep hearing his name, death to dictator, death to Islamic Republic, death to Khamenei, and his name, and his father's name, more than him, his father's name, the Pahlavi dynasty. So I think Jovi Chok, yes, it is about the crown prince. It is more about what the Pahlevies were presenting before.

14:03And that's interesting, isn't it? Because presumably a lot of the people on the streets are young. They will have no memory whatsoever of the Shah and his government and the monarchy because it was deposed in 1979, long before they were born. And yet they are saying that. So presumably that's because in their own heads, at least, and maybe this is new, the Shah and what came before has come to denote or mean something that Patsy didn't. Okay, so this is a missing concept in Western media. Let me tell you, I was born in 1995, after the Islamic Revolution. I grew up under Iran and Iraq war, right?

14:36So television was full of revolutionary content, showing Khomeini, showing the Revolutionary Guards, showing the war. But my parents didn't want us to grow up consuming that propaganda. we had secret VHS tapes from before Islamic Revolution television. We were watching Norman, Jerry Lewis, all of these international movies dubbed in Persian from Iranian television before the Islamic Revolution. All of those pop musicians, all of those content. So that is how I grew up. That is how I got to know about Pahlavi because that was how my parents, my generation's parents, try to counter the regime's propaganda.

15:22When we move forward, during internet era, satellite televisions era, loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of content were broadcast to Iran about how it was. It was not a democratic country. Nobody's saying that. It had a lot of problems. But people now are comparing Iran half a century ago with today Saudi, with today UAE, that people can leave. Comparing to the wealth of those countries. And also the ability to be part of the world. Iranians could travel under Iranian passport to the UK with no visa. 50 ,000 Iranian students were in the US on exchange programs. No one claims that it was a democratic country at the time, but at least it was connected to the world.

16:10People were not suffering from poverty. So Ali, for someone like yourself, could you go back to Iran? No. No way. No, when I left in 2009 because I was a gay man talking about gay man. Did you know there was a gay wedding before Islamic revolution in Iran? No, I didn't. And the court, the queen, former queen, she's still alive, sent somebody to represent her there. As a gay man, I was arrested. I was working as a freelancer for the BBC World Service at the time. So I was an MI6 gay spy trying to spread the bad virus of homosexuality. And when did this happen? 2008. night. And how long were you in prison for?

16:48On and off. So basically the interrogation started at the time the Iranian regime was trying to force the BBC Persian service not to launch a Persian television. And because I was working as a journalist in Iran doing loads of radio, they arrested me. And on and off, five months. Tortured, mock executed, and sexually assaulted. And I was not put, I was not into politics at all. Do you know what I was doing? reporting from underground music scene, reporting about underground gay parties. And that's the level of social repression that exists under the regime. Yeah, still. Still. So when you see protests, as there were on the street, in support of the Islamic Republic, which there's yesterday, are these people hired?

17:39Is there still a genuine support? is it a very different thing in the urban areas in Tehran to the rural areas where there is still maybe strong support for them? I don't say they do not have supporters. It's a fact. They have a core of supporters. That's a fact. But all of these rallies, I always say, I always compare them to North Korea. All of those North Korean rallies where students and families gather and go and do different things. It is like that. if you're a student in school, they just come and grab you and take you there. They grab many people, especially from poorer areas, poorer cities, suburb Tehran.

18:20They put them in bus. They offer them food. They offer them. These are facts. They offer them something. They offer them a bag of rice and they come. And if you don't go as a government employee, either it is believed that it is not going to be good for you in future, or you are going to be punished. So basically you live in some sort of paranoid way, paranoid world, where you don't know, am I going to get punished? Because I did not go to that rally, or you may get punished. So if you had to, just for a sort of outsider, trying to understand the psychology of Iran now and what's going on now, and why now, why this moment?

18:58Tell me if I'm wrong here, but is it what you're saying, that the reason this is taking place now in the way that it is now is a sort of confluence between, there's the economic factors, which have been widely discussed, the inflationary problems that there are. There's a sort of technological thing that you're talking about, the kind of memory of the Shah, the content era, the comparison to other parts of West Asia. But also as well, perhaps something slightly wider that's going on, which is obviously the geopolitics, which is that Trump in particular has made the regime more frail politically.

19:28Yeah, yeah. It's the arena that they're in. Do you remember his speech in Saudi when he started comparing Iran now and Iran in the past? when he was signing all of those deals with Saudis, everybody inside Iran was talking about it because he mentioned the name Iran and Iran was great. Iran doesn't have water. Iran doesn't have electricity. Did you give Trump some credit for this? I, okay, this is interesting, right? I do not want to say that I give the credit to Iranian people. Yes, of course. I give the credit to Iranian people. I give the credit to these young people who are saying that they want to have a normal life.

20:07And that's all. Normal life. That doesn't mean that they want to become, overnight they want to become like a UK democratic style. They want to have a normal life. But has Trump helped to contribute towards the conditions? Okay, I have a picture for you and I want you to read it out loud. Okay, this works better on the YouTube version, but that's all right. Please, this is two nights ago in Tehran. so um there's a picture you just handed me your phone and there's a picture of a protester in a mask he's holding one placard that says trump underscored and the second one that says help so it says trump help so obviously this is a live discussion that's going on in washington right now we're told that the you know that the president is having these asking for briefings about what the options might be do you think he should bomb the regime do you think it would be helpful or might it be counterproductive i think i'm not in the position to answer that question because If I say yes, then I would undermine the fact that maybe some ordinary people could get killed.

21:05If I say no, I'm not in a position to undermine what's going on on Iranian streets. That guy clearly wants Trump to do something. People are getting killed on Iranian streets. I think I understand why they want help from outside the world. I think I now know why the war between Israel and Islamic Republic ended by Trump intervention. Everybody was annoyed. Many people were annoyed inside Iran because they were like, oh, I wish he could finish the job. Ali, just help me understand this. You talked about the number of people who've been killed. Even the official channels in Iran are saying 2 ,000 in three or four days of protest.

21:46Let's assume it's probably a multiple of that if they're admitting to 2 ,000. That is a massacre. that is widespread slaughter what i find i suppose struggle to understand is how iranian people iranian who've grown up who've joined the security services can turn guns on their own brothers and sisters and have wholesale slaughter of people who are on the streets they must have a firm grip on these people that they're prepared to do that. There was a video on social media in a very small town. Remember in Tehran, maybe you don't get to know who is shooting at you. But in small towns and villages, maybe that is a family member of you.

22:30And the video was showing a discussion that the two guys were having. One was a protester. The other one was a security soldier. I know you. You're my relative. Why are you doing it? And he was trying to encourage him to join the protesters. And then other security forces basically stopped him. I think I keep asking these questions since many... I remember that I had this with my own torturer. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I was blindfolded. But I said, how could you do this to me? I'm like you. I'm Iranian. I'm young. I don't know how old are you. I'm 23 at the time. I don't know how you can do it to me.

23:08I remember that conversation. And I still don't have any answer. Final question. Do you think that the... You think of the protests that were taking place weekly over some of the ghastly stuff that the Israeli government was doing in Gaza, the Israeli defence forces. The rate of death seems to be even higher of what's happening from what we can understand in Iran. The protests, have they been there in the same way? Are people protesting in the same way? That is my question as well. Where are they? Where are they? I mean, we've seen a couple of protests here in London, right? But I keep asking this question from many people.

23:49Iranians are getting killed. They are very vulnerable. They coped with this regime for five decades. A war happened in Iran and Iraq. They went on a war. Then reformists came. Okay, let's give the regime this chance to reform. Okay, you're going to talk to the United States. Okay, Britain is going to have the first ambassador of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. okay let's go and talk let's do jcpoa fine jcpoa didn't work because trump jumped out of it and here we are here we are people are getting killed and still we it's hard to get allies it's hard to find allies i don't understand those people who were of course it is horrible to see people getting getting killed anywhere in the world whether it is sudan or gaza or the west Bank, but why don't they see Iranians?

24:45Why don't they see Iranians? I don't get it. I just don't understand it. And I don't dare to ask them this question. I don't dare to go to them and say, hey, I'm Iranian. My people are getting killed in Iran. I do understand that you're on the streets. But do you know what we see as Iranians? We see Iranian regime paid loads and loads and loads of different Palestinian groups, Lebanese groups, to fight with Israel. That was our money and that's why we are starving and that's why we are on streets chanting. You don't support us? Ali Hamadani, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.

25:27Thank you.

25:37the newsagents. So we heard from Ali there, the sort of remarkable sort of human story, which is taking place in a sense, all across Iran and those sort of personal dilemmas. There is obviously a huge strategic military dilemma that Trump is weighing up, which is whether or not, as we were discussing there with Ali, whether he should respond to the calls from some in Iran, from many of the protesters to intervene militarily. And of course, this would come off the back of not so long ago, Trump making that huge decision to send, you'll remember everyone talking about at the time, the famous bunker busting bombs to try and disarm, to try and damage and weaken Iran's nuclear capabilities insofar as they exist.

26:18Now, Trump, of course, claims that they've been completely destroyed. Analysts, I think, have a slightly more nuanced view about that. But one way or another, not so long ago, with Israel's support, of course, Trump took, you know, significant military action against Iran. This would be very different. This would clearly be. And Trump has set up the warning and sent the warning to the regime that if they continue to use violence against their own people might think a little bit ironic in the wake of what happened in minnesota last week but nonetheless if they continue to use violence against their own people excessive violence then he would retaliate it is obviously he's also fresh off the back of a very successful or he feels very successful military operation in venezuela this is fraught with so much more risk though because there is first of all the question of exactly where you bomb and who you bomb and whether you can do that without actually ending up killing civilians that you want to on paper want to try and protect but also whether in the end what they're able to do if you end up bombing the regime that that is counterproductive and you end up strengthening the regime because when this has happened in in the past what the iranian government have sought to do is link the protesters with the americans and with the west and say that they are stooges of the west and they're acting on behalf of the west and they're trying to undermine the country and when iran was bombed last time with the nuclear physicists there was according to independent experts some evidence of a rallying around the flag phenomenon with obviously people not liking the regime but disliking american military intervention even more and also donald trump doesn't want to get himself into the sort of iraq 2003 position where you topple the ruler and end up with total bloody chaos and you know kind of the old pottery barn mantra that shop in America where if you break it, you own it.

27:58And if Trump is seen to be the force that has broken the Iranian regime and then you get civil war erupting in Iran, does Donald Trump want to be seen as George W. Bush was later seen as having had a plan to get rid of something, but no plan of what to put in its place? And so I think there'll be an awful lot of attention on whether Reza Pahlavi can be this sort of interim figure that can take control. There's one other aspect of it as well militarily that i think that they will be weighing which is what are the assets military assets that they have in the region right now it's quite limited huge amount of focus huge amount of the military hardware has been off the caribbean coast of venezuela and so you would normally have a carrier group in the eastern mediterranean to act as a sort of shield because if iran starts firing ballistic missiles towards israel american fleet in the eastern mediterranean played a pretty critical role, as well as Israel's own Iron Dome, to protect the country from ballistic missile attack.

29:02And Iran has said it will retaliate against American assets in the region. And you can be sure that part of that would be to launch missiles at Israel. So there's a hugely complicated picture of weighing up what the pros and cons are of this as he sits in the situation room and decides whether he's going to give the order to go. Yeah, and as you say, you made the Iraq comparison, John. I mean, Iraq is a complicated country. Iran is an even more complicated country of 92 million people. You know, it is a massive geographically sprawling, as you say, difficult geographically to access by comparison for military hardware, by comparison to certainly Venezuela or even other parts of the region.

29:41So it's it's and the Iranians have been clear that if they are attacked, then they will respond in kind against American, Western and Israeli military assets across the region. And now, what their capability is of doing that. They, of course, did that in retaliation to the bunker busting strike last time, and they weren't able to do very much. But as you say, I think quite a few things have moved around militarily for the US since then. So perhaps they're not in the position that they were. It's clear there are many, many variables. I think the one thing you can say is that Trump, I think, undoubtedly feels that on the international stage, he is on a roll.