488. Is Iran on the Edge of Revolution?

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1:55Welcome to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we're going to have a bit of a Middle Eastern day, I think, today, Rory. We're going to talk about Iran and we're going to talk about Yemen. I feel bad, actually, we haven't talked about Iran more before this because you sort of sense something really big was happening. But it's so hard actually to find out the truth about what's happening inside Iran. But I think what we're seeing now is some very significant protests and especially today, I think, and yesterday, very, very significant crackdown. Absolutely.

2:26For people who have not been concentrating minute by minute on what's happening in Iran, essentially, on the 28th of December, a series of protests began in the bazaars of Tehran, essentially around the fact that the gas prices had gone up and the currency had collapsed. Bank governor resigned. And then from the 2nd of January onwards, it began to really spread. So by about the 6th, you had 200 separate protests taking place in almost all the provinces of Iran. And the regime then has responded with blackouts. People have started to be killed in large numbers. Trump has now said repeatedly that if the regime continues to kill, he will be intervening with military strikes.

3:05And a lot of this is now associated with the figurehead of the son of the previous Shah of Iran, the crown prince from the United States, who to many people's astonishment, particularly mine, is now appearing on more and more signs of young Iranians, particularly protesting against the regime. And the question, I guess, that we're going to be getting into is, what does this mean? What's going to happen? I'm speaking to this slightly anonymous hotel room that I'm in. In fact, I'm in Damascus in Syria, where you and I were last year. So I'm in a way thinking a lot about this, because the reason we were here last year, is that the Bashar al-Assad regime, he and his father had been in place since the 1970s, collapsed.

3:44And the question, I guess, in Iran is, is the same going to happen there? So to remind people, the Shah of Iran, who was a pretty autocratic human rights abusing ruler, but who was on the American side, was toppled by an Iranian revolution in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini came in, big Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini goes, Khomeini takes over as the new Grand Ayatollah. And almost for as long as I can remember, people have been expecting the regime to fall because it's unbelievably unpopular with so many parts of Iranian society. And in many ways, this extremely conservative theocracy is at odds with a culture where, particularly in urban areas, has a very, very kind of quite liberal, educated, middle class, more nationalist and religious.

4:29However, if you go back to the different uprisings, so there was one in 1999, there was a big one in 2005 that I remember, there was another one that people remember 2009, which was the Green Revolution. And we, of course, covered 2022 to 23, which was Masa Amini, which was the huge demonstration after the killing of a woman who refused to wear a head scuff. All of those times, Iranians outside the country have assumed this was the end of the regime. And on none of those occasions was it. However, this time it may be. I suspect that even on the last, at least two of those previous, almost half a dozen now, sort of waves of protests, I think people have said this probably is going to be the end.

5:12And lots of people are saying it now. I think it's probably wise to be fairly cautious about that because the regime still does have phenomenal powers of repression. And I think we're seeing this. I've got a friend who's Iranian who just sent me a video that's circulating on Instagram of families looking in a morgue, just all these zipped bodies where they've unzipped the face and people just going around trying to see if it's their relative. And it's pretty horrible. So there's some very, very horrible stuff going on. I think what makes this different, maybe, to the previous one, so we're seeing the protests, and the protest essentially was sparked by a rise in inflation, collapse in the currency that saw prices going up, it saw products suddenly not being available in the main shops and supermarkets.

5:58And the other thing I think is really interesting about Iran, say, compared to Russia, is when we talk about sanctions, the sanctions actually do affect ordinary people because they can't get access to any money that's held inside, often inside foreign banks. That's a lot of people have money inside foreign banks, whereas Russia, when we talk about sanctions, is really the rich guys that get hit. And, of course, they get around it. And the other thing that's interesting about this, so it was started really by the Bazaaris, the people who run the kind of the bazaars and they're the traders. And if you go back to when the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the Bazaaris played a big role in that.

6:37And in tune with the in line with the clergy, they were funding quite a lot of what was what was going on. But I think there's one thing I think is really worth thinking about. We see the protests and we've seen the protests before and they've been crushed. This time, there are other things going on alongside it. So the first thing to point out is that the Americans and the Israelis have weakened them militarily. They are weaker than they were. They're still very strong. They're stronger than most other forces in the region, but they're weaker. The second thing is the economic sanctions are hurting them.

7:07But the other thing I think is really interesting, you mentioned the Shah, and of course, his son, the crown prince, is based in America. He's putting out these videos. He seems to be sort of getting the protests going. but they've also been running this really interesting defections strategy they're advertising for defectors on independent television and you go on i think you should try it or it's right up your street you go on you get a qr code and you feed in a few details you get taken to this supposedly secure platform it's obviously been flooded by spies all of these things are sort of coming together and that's what made me think maybe 24 hours ago maybe this thing will be different.

7:44I hate to kind of be so pessimistic. I've kind of moved backwards in the last 24 hours because I think the forces of repression, which are very, very powerful, I think they've now decided we're going for it. I think what held them back a little bit in the first phase of this protest was the fact that Donald Trump said, you know, we're locked and loaded, we're ready to go and all that. So I think it's very, very tense. I think this will only lead to regime change and the collapse of the regime if it goes on for months and months and months. One of the amazing things we're talking about here, I guess, which we almost might want to get our colleagues and the rest is history involved, is this question of revolutions and when a regime falls and when it doesn't.

8:23And basically, the story often is these regimes are completely secure, totally in place until in an instant, they suddenly aren't. Yeah. Bashar al-Assad is a good example. Absolutely. A lot of people were on the record in back just over a year ago saying he's never going to be toppled. Don't be ridiculous. There's no way a small group of al-Qaeda fighters from the Northwest are going to be able to take the whole country. And of course, regimes, when they want to really oppress people, they can do it. We saw it in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the Cold War. And then we saw the opposite, of course, from 1989, where regimes that seemed like East German regime with millions of people in the Stasis suddenly fold.

9:06So what are the only ways of trying to work out what the likelihood is here. I think the first thing is to look at ideology. So one of the things that's different about this regime compared to the communist regimes in Poland or Hungary in 1989 is that the ideology is still very strong amongst the true believers. There still is a hard core of clergymen, revolutionary guards people, the Basic militia, which is more kind of village level extremist militia. 13 million of them voted for the more hardline candidates in the last elections. And certainly the guy at the top, Ayatollah Khamenei, is somebody who was badly wounded in the revolution and gives every impression of being a true believer who's not about to flit off to Moscow on a plane.

9:56So it's a bit different, I guess, to an exhausted communist regime or Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein or even Bashar al-Assad towards the end, which had become all sort of personalist regimes. That doesn't mean, though, that you mightn't, for example, find the army, which is much less ideologically motivated traditionally than the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, beginning to defect and split. Any other thoughts on how you can tell whether regimes have had a fall or not? Look, I think you're absolutely right that sometimes it just takes a tipping point, and it's never obvious what it is. So one of the reasons why we were so keen to go to Syria last year and to interview Al-Shara was because the whole thing was so fast moving.

10:34It literally had, you know, a week earlier, people were saying, well, in fact, people weren't even talking about it. It just sort of suddenly happened. You mentioned how regimes get tired. I mean, Khamenei has been there now since 1989. I mean, this is a guy who's been around for a very, very long time. Older than Donald Trump? Older than Donald Trump. He almost is insulting to his opponents as Donald Trump as well. And it's very interesting. One of the things they've done progressively through these various stages of protest is they're they're pretty good they've got very very good i think at shutting down the internet insofar as it helps the protesters but keeping the internet open insofar as it helps them so i see he still manages to tweet somebody's designing cartoons for him of trump collapsing trump's sort of whole body coming apart inside a coffin and meanwhile he's out there sort of saying the things he has to say but i i think the other thing that i think is worth thinking about is what you see i think sometimes with iran now i'm on the left of politics i'm a progressive i think that because israel and trump are so voluble about iran i think sometimes my side of the political fence finds it hard to come out and actually say this is a truly awful regime and we should be standing up for the people of iran there are people on the left that kind of i'm not saying corbyn himself i can't remember the things he said about Iran, but certainly the Corbynista wing, you know, basically you sometimes feel they're standing up for the regime in Iran rather than the people.

12:10I think the one thing that might turn this into a different place is if the Trump-Netanyahu approach is matched alongside it by more progressive political voices saying these guys have got their days numbered. But I think the only thing they probably are worried about is whether there will be another military attack. I think they feel they've got the capacity to quell the protest is whether and what would happen if Trump and or Netanyahu decided to have another pot. I was looking at the mini revolution, do you remember, against Gorbachev? So 1991, where suddenly the tanks rolled out and there was a coup d 'etat and the head of the KGB and everybody toppled him.

12:49And then Yeltsin appeared on tanks and women marched along the bridge in Moscow. And it turned out that in the end, the soldiers were not prepared to fire. And this is what I saw in Indonesia. I was in Indonesia in 98 when Suharto, the dictator general, fell after 32 years. And I remember being with the crowd moving forward towards the soldiers. And initially, they were firing live ammunition, plastic bullets. But you were getting a sense of a swell, bigger and bigger and bigger, the police had abandoned the streets. And again, I remember this is May 98, people saying, suharto will fight to the last bullet he'll retire into the hills like a banana republic dictator with his own revolver and actually he didn't he just quit he just announced that he was he was stuffing down let me just jump in there because the the thing you mentioned about gorbachev and yeltsin one of the books i read over christmas this amazing book written written by a russian critic of putin called mikhal ziga it's called dark side of the earth honestly from steven steelberg down the filmmakers of the world should get the story of gorbachev to yeltsin and all the things that could have gone in a different direction you just mentioned one of them that yeltsin bravado could have gone anywhere could have gone absolutely anywhere but it didn't it went exactly where he his instinct said it was going to go so i think the other the the big difference with this and this is why i think the crown prince in washington is getting so much attention is because it's so hard to oppose from within there are presumably a lot of opposition people in prison there are a lot of opposition people who've been wiped out and it's very very hard to organize any kind of opposition so until you know from our perspective until you know well where might this go if the regime does collapse and who are the people that you imagine being in charge it's very hard to see where it goes i remember feeling so i walked across iran i guess in 2000.

14:45And my strong sense then, so that's about sort of halfway between the revolution and now, is that you had this massive class split. So you had many people saying to me, oh, if you go to Isfahan or Tehran, it's very liberal and everybody's drinking alcohol and nobody's wearing headscarves and these amazing parties and everybody's very decadent. But in the rural villages where I was staying, people were very, very conservative. It was a sort of village working class environment. They were all the kind of people who would eventually vote for Ahmadinejad. I was being stopped by the Basij militia all the time.

15:19There were huge images of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. Big, big focus on Shia martyrdom, on the regime. And the regime had delivered, they felt, for these villages. These people who'd felt marginalized under the Shah, who felt under the Shah, it had all been about money and oil and glamour in the cities. Electrification had come, roads had come. There'd been a big push on rural development. And so I guess if you were trying to explain why these revolutions didn't work, say, in 99 or even three years ago with Masa Amini, you probably would have said, look, this is still a society where people are divided, where either you have a rebellion of the working class or you have a rebellion of more progressive women about headscarves, but the two things don't come together.

16:05And you also would have said that Iranians are very proud nationalists, so that it was noticeable when Israel and the US bombed Iran and the Shah's son and Netanyahu called for everybody to rise up, they didn't rise up. So you would have said, actually, you know, Iranians, when push comes to Java, are quite nationalistic. What's changing here, Chris de Blague, who has written really well about this and unheard, he was saying to me that he thinks it's young people. It's a completely new generation, which in a very sort of way that would shock older Iranians, don't really have a beef with Trump, can't remember what the Shah was like, perfectly happy to endorse Pahlavi without necessarily the Crown Prince, not knowing so much about him, and much more violent, much more prepared to, it seems as though police officers have been killed, places have been stormed.

16:54And some of that driven by social media. That's another strange thing about Iran. I mean, despite the fact it's autocratic, everybody's got VPNs, everybody's watching videos from Elon Musk, everybody's enjoying memes about Trump. So there is a sort of young men mobilizing who are completely rebelling against all the assumptions of both their progressive and conservative parents. Somebody else I spoke to who's Iranian, but not in Iran, said that what they were picking up was that this relates to the point you just made about who goes to these protests. So that, you know, Mas Al-Mini was seen very much as an issue to do with women and women's rights and the hijab and all that.

17:32Whereas what's happening now, you've got the kind of liberal intellectuals, you've got young people, you've got working class people, and quite a lot of the older generation as well, who maybe care less about being sort of put upon. so it does feel that there is a there is a broader demographic on this one but when you were sort of asking yourself there why none of these revolutions previous revolutions have worked i think in the end i'm afraid it is about the means that they have to oppress them when you see some of the pictures i've been looking at this morning of what's people looking for bodies people when you hear the words of the the politicians and the leadership and that they're putting out you know You're going to think twice.

18:14You're going to think twice. And the other thing may be worth just reflecting on, Roy, that you said when you came on, has anything happened today? And the only thing I saw that was kind of, you know, really, I felt quite surprisingly newsworthy or newsworthy and surprising was this incident that's happened in Los Angeles, where there was a protest of Iranians and Iranian supporters for the overthrow of the regime. and somebody who turned out to be from the from you know the kind of mudahedine supporter hired a lorry and drove it through the crowd now a bit like at the liverpool remember the liverpool football club celebrations and the guy's just been sentenced for a very long time for that but this thing it's amazing nobody was killed because he was this guy was really just charging through and i wonder whether that will because of course the one thing that we know about trump is he follows American television very, very, very closely.

19:06And this is all over the American TV news now this thing has happened. I guess the question now that we're all waiting for is whether the Americans will have some kind of fresh military intervention. Trump is, you know, he's pumped up about Venezuela. He keeps saying that he's managed to sort of, you know, obliterate the Iranian nuclear program, which he hasn't. Everybody else says he hasn't. And whether he fancies another one or whether Israel likewise thinks, you know, Israel's entire security doctrine is based on the idea that they cannot be challenged within the region. They will be, whilst they want a regime they can work with, but they'll be sort of looking at this as well.

19:46So I think that's the next big moment we have to wait for to see what one of those two does. And what, if Trump were to intervene, what would be his vision for the future of Iran? Because in Venezuela, it seems as though after an initial suggestion that he was going to embrace democracy and liberty and freedom. It turned out all he really wanted to do was get rid of Maduro and basically leave the whole regime in place. So would the idea be here that he'd try to take out Hamini and then try to just negotiate with what remains of the regime, or maybe bring in a slightly more liberal cleric? I mean, it'd be interesting to see.

20:19I certainly, if I was the crown prince, I wouldn't be betting on the fact that a Trump who still hasn't met the crown prince is going to get behind him. Although, boy, you want to talk about the age of social media. The social media PR campaign that has transformed the crown prince in the last three years from somebody who most of us thought as a pretty marginal, slightly joke figure who hadn't been back to Iran for 46 years, who was an unwelcome reminder of this slightly strange moment in the 1970s of all the extravagance and autocracy of the last Shah, has now somehow, despite allying with Trump or Israel, perhaps because he's allied with Trump and Israel has been rebranded now.

20:58And, you know, even me as a, you know, in our duo, Alastair, the great monarchist, even I find it quite difficult to believe that the candidate that they're running is this rather elderly crown prince of a discredited regime. And yet, boy, does social media make that possible? Well, I think he took a big risk because, as you say, if you're fighting from outside or making a case from outside, even in a country as difficult as Iran, it's you put yourself at a disadvantage. OK, but what he did, where he took the risk was with this call that he made for people to, it was a bit like during COVID and we were all sort of, you know, clapping.

21:32He basically had to get out at eight o 'clock, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, get out there and protest. OK, and in their hundreds of thousands, people did. And so that, I think, is what's then lent itself to this credibility. of the eyes. He's put out a new message today where he's standing in front of the old monarchical flag. The one thing he's being careful to say, I think, though, is that he does not see himself as a future leader of the country. He sees himself as this, quote, bridge to democracy rather than as the leader. You're looking a bit sceptical about that, Roy. You look like he might just be playing a game.

22:09I wonder whether he'd quite spend the massive fortune he's spent and put quite so much energy into this incredible PR and social media campaign if he didn't actually want to take power in Iran. Might he just love his country? I think it's pretty clear that he doesn't see himself as the future ruler. I think I'm right in saying that we've been approached actually a number of times over the last few months to interview him. And again, this is in the many marks against Rory Stewart's judgment. I'm afraid I probably was in the camp of thinking, hmm, I'm not quite sure I'm taking this guy this seriously.

22:40You were, Rory. We had a bit of an argument about it. And would you now accept my judgment that maybe he'd be quite an interesting interviewee for the podcast? We should certainly, certainly get him on. Thank you for bringing a run up. And boy, is it something to watch. And boy, is it something that could literally collapse in the next hour before we put out the podcast. In an hour? Or they could still be in place in a year's time. Oh, OK. Right. It's the thing about these regimes. Exactly. Exactly. The thing about regimes. I mean, literally, all that happens is, and that's why it can happen so quickly.

23:09They can last apparently forever or suddenly at a key moment, as you were describing from that moment with Yeltsin, the soldiers refuse to pull the triggers and everything collapses. Yeah, yeah. Who knows? But at the moment, I'm not betting on the hour. No, no. The other thing I think, which is interesting from his sort of messaging, and it has been very effective, is I don't think they're going to go down the debathification route either. I think that part of this defection strategy is to say, look, if you make the right choice now, wherever you may be at this moment working with the regime, then you have a future within Iran.

23:46Also, just to warn listeners that because of the media blackout, it is unbelievably difficult to know what's actually going on on the ground. There is a real danger that there is an echo chamber, particularly of people outside the country, particularly people who are on the anti-regime side, spinning stories. It's very difficult to verify. We know for sure a lot of people are being killed. We know for sure the regime is evil. But when it comes to the questions like these defections, I'm very doubtful that we have any real information on that at all that's reliable. I agree with that. And I think we should be very wary.

24:21But the other thing to say is they, as I said earlier, they have kept the internet insofar as it is useful to the regime. But the other thing, they are, for obvious reasons, given how very, very, very well penetrated by Mossad they have been, and they now know that from what happened in the recent attacks, is that there is media manipulation and disinformation going on from every which way. So it is very, very hard to work out what's going on. But what is absolutely clear is these protests are real. They are right across the country. That's maybe another difference with some of the ones that we've had before.

24:56And they are finding it very, very hard to shut them down until the last 24 hours, where I think it's gone in a pretty grim direction. Right, shall we take a break and then come back and talk about Yemen? Very good. The Insolvenzantrag is set. And suddenly everything is in all-tempo. For our protagonist, the hardest phase begins. In episode 4 of our series, the end of the insolvency, we show you why Openness is the important part of the Währung. Why a Insolvenz-Way is not a Gegner. And how a business is stabilised or coordinated.

25:42Welcome back to The Rest of Politics. I'm with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. The other thing going on in the Middle East is Yemen. And that's an unbelievable story. So let me just summarize that for listeners. In fact, we got rather a nice email from a TripPlus member who'd been stranded on a small Yemeni island. asking for an explanation of what's going on. So Yemen, people remember, it's a big chunk of territory below Saudi Arabia on the edge of the Red Sea. And it was two countries through to 1991. There was a southern country, which was traditionally a British colony around Aden.

26:18Older listeners will remember Aden, a place that people used to stop on their way to India. Did you ever learn the barren rocks of Aden when you learned the bad bugs? Oh, the barren rocks of Aden. I definitely, I did learn the barren rocks of Aden.

26:32remember that one yeah it's very very it's a lovely tune it's a really lovely tune and actually it took me a long time to work out what Aden was it was only when I finally got to Yemen I could put the pipe tune together with a place yeah um anyway these two countries came together that and in the north a very different type of place up in the northern highlands which was connected to a branch of Islam Zaydi Islam which is a complete exception maybe a little bit more Shia than Sunil has become a little bit more Shia than Sunni under Iranian influence recently, but really quite an exception with its own charismatic religious leadership.

27:04Anyway, two things come together in 1991. On we go. And then in the Arab Spring 2011, the Houthis who are up in the north, who are these Zadi Houthis who are Iranian connected, begin to advance south. And I remember visiting the British ambassador in Yemen. We were just north of Sana 'a. And suddenly the body, you know, the way that your security team comes running to you. And the story was the Houthis that come in. So we all had a jump in our car and head south. The Houthis then took Sanar in 2014. And then people remember Saudi Arabia and UAE together, so Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Syed, intervened in a very, very brutal campaign where Saudi Arabia and UAE combined tried to drive the Houthis back, tried to seize the port of Hodeidah.