Angry Planet - Iran’s Red State Revolt

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Iran is at war beyond its borders in Syria, Afghanistan, and other places, too. It’s a bit weird to hear it, but our guest, Amir Handjani, explains that one reason they’re fighting is a very similar principle to what drives the United States: Fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here. But that’s not easy with an economy in shambles and protests cropping up where you’d least expect them.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. It would be, I compare it to, it would be like a red state revolt of Donald Trump in the United States. If all of a sudden states like Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas and Georgia started protesting, took to the streets against Donald Trump's policies. You're listening to War.

College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Oh, and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. Co-host, Matthew Galt, is on a diplomatic mission to Alderman. We are very aware that we've been spending a lot of time in the Middle East lately. But I don't think you can blame us. It's a uniquely tense place. The armed forces of Syria, Russia, Turkey, the United States,

Israel, Iraq, and Iran are all taking part in the fighting. And that's not to mention non-state actors, like the Kurds, and Syrian rebels of every possible stripe at this point, from secular to religious extremist. Today, we're focusing on Iran. Amir Hanjani is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center and an expert on Iran. He also wrote some fantastic op-eds for me when I was an editor at Reuters. Thanks for joining us. A pleasure to be with you, and I hope I'm still writing fantastic op-eds for Writers since you've left. You still are. I just don't have the pleasure of editing them anymore. So it's my loss,

but no, Reuters is still doing fine. Out of the deal. So can we just start off with sort of a bit of a Primer. Who side is Iran on in the Syrian conflict? Well, first of all, it's great to be with you. That's a really important topic, and I think it's very timely. I think you can be very confusing to people who aren't, like you and I, for the Middle East watchers, to disentangle, you know, a lot of the fact from fiction and see the, you know, hear the to get rid of all the noise background noise I don't think that they're

they're ostensibly Iran says they're on the side of the Syrian government and that government is the Assad regime they were technically asked by the Assad regime to come in and support them in their fight against the rebels but as you know you and I know and as your listeners know

states don't act benevolently they have they act because of their self-interest. And Iran has very real interests in Syria. And it would not be there just because Assad asked them to if they did not feel those interests were threatened by his downfall. Now, you say that. And another justification that's been cited for the alliance is, and I think, and please help me with this, I think it seems like it's widely misunderstood.

There's been talk that Assad's regime and Iran, are co-religionists, but they're not exactly the same, right? I mean, no, they're not all. They're not at all. That's kind of a bullshit answer, isn't it? Or maybe you can explain it. It is. It is.

I mean, you know, there's the Iranian, the majority, Iran follows the 12th or sect of Shia Islam, which really means that they go by 12 of alms, and then the last one is an occultation. He sort of comes back in a time, the way. Christ does and it's an Islamic Republic you know those who have traveled Tehran of in Tehran you know while it's open in many ways you know there's so it's closed in a lot of other ways too you know there's alcohol is not freely available you know there's no such thing as nightclubs and and so forth Syria is a secular regime and the minority regime which actually rules

Syria the regime the minority religion of the Assad regime is the al-white sect which the sect of shia Islam but it's not as it just follows different precepts than the than the 12 or sect of shiaism that iran follows so are they loosely in the same family yes but are is there does their religion permeate their government and and their domestic policies the way it does in iran absolutely not Syria you know was a was very open society had scars are not mandatory there was alcohol flowing at all hotels. It's just, it's a very different, different country, very different flavor of religion than that of Iran. These states are bound together by common interests. They're not bound together by ethnicity. Iranians or Persian, Syrians or Arab. They're not really

bound together by religion either. Can you talk a little bit about what those common interests are? Certainly. I mean, you have to go back to the time of the Iran-Iraq War. Most all regimes in the region supported Saddam Hussein. The Gulf states did. Jordan did. Syria was the outlier. It did not. Actually supported Iran. And the Iranian Islamic Republic, the political elite, the establishment, never forgot that. When Israel invaded Lebanon and went through the south of Lebanon, it was, and Iran helped the Shia in Lebanon organize and founded Hezbollah. it was through Syria where the arms and the training and the the the sort of the flow of people would go through to get to to southern syria sorry it's a southern southern Lebanon so for for iran um Syria was always a gateway to hasbollah but also was a place where it had a forward position vis-a-vis israel and it was a way for them to deter an Israeli strike by you know being in southern Lebanon by having a presence or a

footprint in in Syria although the footprint was very light now it's quite heavy that that's really the tie that binds Syria and Iran it's it's this from the Iranian side it's you know we have to we have to be there because we have to deter Israel from coming and striking us we have to be there because we have to support Hasbola the way we can only support Hezbollah is by having that corridor to get manpower and weapons into southern Lebanon from Syria. From the Syrian perspective, it's they don't really have friends in the region. And the only friends that they have, the Assad regime have, has been Iran. And they saw that when the Arab Spring happened and people took this route to Damascus. One by one, the Arab countries in the region

started supporting the rebels. The only country in the region that supported the Assad regime was Iran. So it is a mutually strategic relationship, if you will. It's one that is in place because of what each side views is essential from the other. And that's what's caused this relationship to grow over the last 40 years. Do you have any idea what the... people ruling Iran actually think of Bashar al-Assad. Is there any talk that people might have heard?

They're not, they're certainly not happy with how he's prosecuted this war. And, you know, that they, I think that they wish he had some different policies in place at the beginning. That being said, you know, they support him, as I said, not because out of love and affection for him or his family or his tribe or his religion. or his ethnicity, they support him because they know if Assad falls, then a major chesspiece of Iran and the region has fallen. And Syria goes into the Saudi Jordanian U.S. camp, and Iran loses a very powerful and strategic country. It doesn't have many friends in the region.

So their ties to Assad are ties because of their interest to Assad. They're not ties because they think, you know, unlike, let's say, Iraq and southern Iraq, where there's a lot of ties that bind the Iranians and the southern Iraq use. Their religion, their border, cultural ties with the Kurds in the north of Iraq, linguistic ties, ethnic ties. With Syria, it's a, it's purely a relationship of interest, of mutual interest. In order to understand this a little bit better, I was thinking you might be able to help explain a little bit of, about what the situation, what life right now is like in Iran itself. So it's enmeshed in a war beyond its borders. So can we talk a little bit about what's going on inside and how that might be affecting it?

Can we start off purely with the economics? What kind of shape is Iran's economy in? It's in very bad shape. Years of mismanagement, corruption, sanctions have really mainly. Iran into a economic basket case. Its economy is predominantly state run. It's ossified, if you will. It's not able to meet the needs of its people. And you saw that in the protests of last month, took place in cities that I hadn't even heard of. I'd look for on the map. But these cities are cities, you know, that have the profile of cities and villages that the regime draws upon for the

support. It would be, I compare it to, it would be like a red state revolt of Donald Trump in the United States. If all of a sudden states like Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas and Georgia started protesting, took to the streets against Donald Trump's policies. That's what it was like in these cities where the regime draws on support from these sort of rural, not as economically prosperous cities that have very religious communities. Those were bastions in the regime that they draw. But yet, it was those cities that actually took the streets and those villagers and those townsmen that took to the streets. Because the economy is just not meaning the needs of its people.

It's quite sad because Iran's a very rich country. It's a large country. It has quite a dynamic population. But they've really mismanaged that economy since the revolution and the church. are coming home to Roos now. When you say a rich country, part of it, would that include the money that was supposedly unfrozen in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, or at least that's how the U.S. thinks of it, the Iran nuclear deal.

I'm sure the Iranians call it something else. But not just, I don't just mean the cash that they might have gotten access to, but it's also supposed to be that they can now sell more oil in more places. So nothing's improved? I think that, you know, the nuclear deal, we keep saying, you know, in the election campaign here, they say, you know, we gave them $150 billion. Well, it's important to know. That was their money to begin with. It was because of the sanctions, it was really blocked and frozen.

It wasn't $150 million. It was closer to $100 billion. No, since the sanctions have been lifted, the nuclear-related sanctions Iran has been slowly and surely being able to access that money, been able to sell its oil and gas and petrol. chemicals back into the international market and it's it's it's fully recouping it's it's it's uh market share in those international markets but that's not enough it's not enough it's 80 million people of the iran is not you know it doesn't it has production about four million barrels a day and it uses about 1.8 million domestically so it really you know it sells about 2.2 million barrels of a day um Saudi Arabia you know it's it's rival to the south

has a population of about 30, 35 million people and sells 14 million barrels. Now, produced 14 million barrels of oil a day, I think consumes about 3 to 4 million and then sells about 10 million. So, you know, just to give you some idea of scale, it needs much more. Just having the sanctions lifted to sell its oil and gas and unblocking $100 billion is not enough. The sanctions that are still there, the secondary sanctions. and this perception that the U.S. could pull out of the nuclear deal and the old sanctions

would come back on has not really allowed for foreign investments and for trade to pick up with Iran. In many ways, it's still in the penalty box economically. So where does that leave it with in terms of, you know, when the leadership is looking out into the world. What sort of lens does their economic straits put on them? Does it have a big impact on why they're in Syria? Does it have? No, I think we have to disentangle those two things. And I'm not sure, you know, yes, many of the people that were protesting were unhappy with Iran's foreign policy. But there's no, you know, there's no poll that I could look to that says the majority of the Iranian and people are not supportive of Iran's foreign policy.

Because at point of fact, they are supportive of Iran fighting ISIS. They are supportive of Iran being fighting wars against Sunni extremism outside of Iran's borders. Because they know that if they're not fighting those wars outside of Iran's borders, the chance of fighting those wars inside Iran's borders increase. So I think it's, you know,

there's these snapshots, these protesters saying, you know, we want to make sure. that, you know, the money shouldn't be spent in Syria. Yes, I'm sure there are many people that feel that way. I'm just not sure that's how the majority that people feel. You know, we don't know. We don't have an independent poll to assess that. At least I haven't seen one done.

But what we do know is that these two things are separate in terms of what Iran spends in foreign affairs and these wars is a pittance to what it has and it has mismanaged over the last 40 years. So, you know, this economy has been state run. It's 40% of it is now controlled by the, or maybe some people say 60%. I've seen some experts 60% is controlled by the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards. There's a lot of nepotism. There's a lot of corruption.

Its banking sector is, for all intensive purposes, bankrupt. Most of its banks are holding a lot of. a bad debt. Their currency has been devalued. Yet, a currency is devalued, but inflation is quite strong and prices have risen. So people's purchasing power, over the last 10 years, have gotten less and less. And add to that sanctions that have been really, really onerous. It's really a panoply of things that have come together to a perfect storm, you know, through a perfect storm that have put them where they are. But they only have, their leadership only has itself to blame for that. And I think the nuclear deal, having the nuclear deal and having those sanctions removed,

actually brought more of these things to the surface. You mean because they weren't able to directly just blame sanctions for the economic problem? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. You brought up the Revolutionary Guard as an economic entity. Yes. So we hear about them all. the time as a military force. I mean, there are parts of it at least are called elite military force. Maybe you could explain a little bit more about what they mean, who they are inside the country then. Yeah, the Revolutionary Guard, you know, are the number between 250 and 400,000. They are, since the revolution happened, because when the revolution happened, the clerical regime was quite distrustful of the traditional army.

and the traditional navy of Iran. They viewed those entities as being very nationalistic and very pro the previous regime, the Shah's regime. So they set up the Revolutionary Guard as a, and there are protectors of the Islamic Republic. And they have expeditionary forces, such as the Quds Force, that go outside the country and conduct operations. Inside the country, though, they over the last, since really, really the last 15, 16 years, but accelerated during the Ahmadinejad presidency, they have started to be.

gave a lot of economic influence. They have corporations. They have front companies. They're in oil and gas. They're in construction. They're in telecoms. They're in insurance. They're in banking. They're in everything. And they operate ports. They operate the airports in Iran. So they are, they are, they're in everything. And they have real economic interests. And because they were, it was seen at the time, they were the ones during the Iran-Iraq War that were fighting the war and took heavy casualties, heavy losses. When those people came back, they wanted jobs and they wanted their share of the cake. And that has only increased over time. And the sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have placed on Iran really target them and have really sort of hampered their interests.

that being said within the country, they're being now challenged by President Rouhani to divest themselves and of corporate interests. And clearly they don't want to because they make a lot of money doing what they're doing. And no one likes to, once you have money, you don't want to give it up, right? What do they do with their money? I mean, is it that they're buying weapons? Is it just that there are some very, very rich revolutionary guards? It's a whole infrastructure. You know, they, it's a, it's an infrastructure.

They make money, you know, guards, when you're in the guards and you retire, you join one of these companies and, and or if you are a family of a guardsman who's been martyred during the era of Iraq war, you know, these companies are essentially that your family are pensioners, these companies, that they give a slice of the, of some proceeds to you. They are, if you will, Iran's version of the military industrial complex. Are they buying missiles and weapons? No, that's the state. The state does that.

The government does that. They are conducting economic, you know, they have banks. They have construction companies that get contracts from the government or from private parties, but mostly from the government, from the Supreme Leader's office or from the elected government to build things and do things. What percentage of this vast beast is still a military force at all? I mean, what percentage of them are, you know, actively take up arms to defend the regime or to fight outside its borders?

Well, and I can sense that you're struggling with it because it's kind of kind of foreign concept versus American. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, the Marine Corps and the Air Force don't have a business empire. In Iran, it's quite perverse that way, I guess. I've heard it's the same in Egypt also, that the Egyptian army makes refrigerators. I remember reading that. Yeah, and in China, too, now you see Xi Jinping wants to sort of reign in the People's Republic

Army because they have business interests. No, they have anywhere between, as I said, 250 to 400,000 active guards. Those are active. Those are active. The ones who are, they have an equal number who have been retired. And generally, when you retire from being an active duty, you go into the guards business empire. And you fit somewhere in there, whether it's in oil and gas or construction or banking or insurance, there's a job for you. So actually, it is, and many of these companies employ Iranians who are not. in the guards, right? They employ, you know, they control anywhere between 40 to 60 percent of the

economy. So a lot of people work in these companies, the guards run. To say that they're an integral part of the state doesn't even begin to describe it, right? No, it's so it's very hard. I mean, here in the U.S., we target the guards a lot. But in Iran, there are many people that they may not be happy with what the guards are doing or their policies, but are actually working for the guards in some of these companies. And it's very hard. And Rohani is trying to do this. He's trying to have them get out of the economy and stick to being a military force.

It's very hard to do, though, when they control so much of it. And you're going to see in Iran, you're going to see the guards pushing back and saying, no, we're not. We don't want to stop our business interests because, you know, this business interest sustains those people who have served us. and families of those who have, who are, their sons have been, you know, have been killed during the war. I was wondering if you could also talk about, very briefly, where else Iran is fighting. I was really caught by what you said about, you know, the sense that if we don't fight them there, they will fight us here,

which, of course, is a military doctrine that's very familiar to people in the United States. We're not talking about the same us, them, necessarily. Yes. But the whole idea of having expeditionary forces so that you don't have to defend your borders from the inside. So where else is Iran fighting? Well, they were very active in Iraq. Yeah, I think Iran has great influence in Iraq. And they help train and mobilize these popular fronts, you know, these Shia, different Shia militia there.

They're very active in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon, as you know, with Hasbollah. They're active in parts of Afghanistan recruiting Shia militia. And I think that Iran does this because it feels very insecure in this region. We look at Iran a lot and they can be such a maligned force in the region, a malevolent force. But the way they see it is that they're surrounded by countries that don't like them and that have a very powerful ally in the United States that has far greater capabilities than Iran does. So how they try and match that force structure that's against them is by tying themselves up with these militias and getting into countries and fomenting unrest and their minds level the playing field a bit.

Just one last question. Far as Syria goes, what would winning look like for Iran? Well, I think there are no winners in Syria. I mean, it's like in the old days of the Roman Empire when they would go and if they, if they couldn't really, the war wasn't going their way and they wanted to conquer people, they would just burn the city down, the town down. And they would say, you know, they'd call it peace and they call it victory. Who is going to rebuild Syria?

Iran doesn't have the capabilities or the money to rebuild Syria. Syria is now a divided country with all different, different parts of the country occupied by by different forces claiming sovereignty over it. I think for them, for Iran, for them, victory looks like being there and having a military footprint there that enables them to deter an Israeli strike. Also gives them connectivity to Hezbollah, being able to arm and resupply Hezbollah. As long as they can do that, they would call it victory. I don't think they have any intention of rebuilding Syria and making it a, making it a,

making you a prosperous country, although they wouldn't mind it be that. But they don't have those capabilities to do that. Amir, thank you so much for joining me to talk about this. It was great to be with you, and I enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, run forth into the streets and proclaim it to all in Sundry. Or, failing that, leave us a review on iTunes, just like Unleash the Fury did recently. Very worth your time. Five stars. Probably my favorite military national security pie. Good deepish dives that are still accessible. Plenty of variety from history to current events. Thank you. Unleash the Fury. War College is Matthew Galk and me, Jason Fields.

See you next week.