Behind the Bastards - Qassem Soleimani and the Bastardful History of U.S. / Iran Relations

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh to discuss Qassem Soleimani, as well as the history of Iran and America's relationship. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the introduction of the podcast Behind the Bastards by Robert Evans. I've forgotten anything that I ever knew about how to introduce podcasts, and over the next couple of weeks, as with the last couple of weeks, I'm going to careen through a variety of different styles, none of which are good ways to start a podcast. And that's where we are right now, at the start of this episode of Behind the Bastards, the show about terrible people with Robert Evans, a terrible person.

My guest today is Anna Hosnia, host, co-host of the ethnically ambiguous podcast, podcast producer here at iHeartRadio, and liquor baron. What? Liquor baron? Like, I imagine if it were the rolling 20s, you would be one of the people who would be like smuggling liquor and bowling balls to speakeasies. I'm sorry, who booked me on this show? I really need to talk to my agents.

Just joking. I don't know what you're talking about. And I will not comment further. I don't know where you got this information, but I made it quite clear. I did not want it out there. Anna, how are you doing this week? I'm good. How are you? I mean, I'm not great, but like I'm alive.

I'm good. Not great. We've had some fun news this week, vis-a-vis the United States and Iran. Not been a high point in these two countries' international relations, I think would be safe to say. No, I don't think we've been doing well at all. And of course, most of that right now, at least, has to do with the fact that on Friday, January 3, 2020,

Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated via missile by the United States as his motorcade rolled out from the Baghdad airport. Stories that came out in the wake of the attack revealed that he had been on his way to an official meeting with the Prime Minister of Iraq. Bit of a shot to call. Not great. Not a great move, necessarily, if you care about Iraq's sovereign rights as a nation. Or Americans.

Yeah, a move with some complications and consequences, most of which we don't know yet, so I'm not going to really speculate on them. We're not going to talk about the assassination itself much or the fallout from it much. Instead, I thought something productive to do would be to really dig in to Mr. Soleimani's life and try to figure out who he was as a person. I kind of think in terms of what I do, that's the one place I could make a difference. One of the things I saw online that was really frustrating to me in the immediate wake of the attack, CNBC published an article declaring the newly dead general,

the world's biggest bad guy, which is quite a take. And then they later revealed that that column was an op-ed, but they hadn't labeled it as such originally, which is great. Just like the Washington Post had a column being like, this actually killing Soleimani opens up some new avenues for diplomacy for the United States, and it then turned out that the guy who wrote it worked for Raytheon, the company that designed the guidance systems for the missiles that killed Soleimani. It's like, hey guys, this is really great for us. We can sell a lot of weapons for this upcoming doom war we're heading towards.

So, hey, stop looking at it in such a negative light. Yeah, if he'd framed it as this is going to be great for selling weapons, I would say totally honest column, the fact that it was framed in terms of diplomacy is where I start to have an issue. But it wasn't just the right wing and centrist media that had unbelievably bad takes about Soleimani. On the left wing, people started spinning yards about Qasem's legacy, and portraying him as an anti-imperialist fighter. On Twitter, people like Rania Khalek and Ben Norton with the gray zone started claiming that the Iranian general had defeated ISIS in Iraq, and tens of thousands of folks on the left retweeted and shared variations of this take.

And one thing I think we can be sure of is that about 95% of the people on the left and the right in the middle who have come out with takes on Qasem Soleimani in the last week or so had not heard his name prior to his assassination, and could not have identified a picture of him. I'm not an expert on the guy. I can say I've known about him for a little over four years. Since I started studying and traveling to Iraq, he's kind of impossible to miss if you go to that part of the world. A lot of people in Iraq joked that he was the prime minister of Iraq, like that was a common joke, particularly in the south.

But the fact that I've known who this guy was for four years puts me in the same basket as the man who ordered his assassination, our president. In 2015, then-candidate Donald J. Trump appeared on the talk show of right-wing radio icon Hugh Hewitt, who asked him, Are you familiar with General Soleimani? Trump replied, Yes, and then made it clear that this was a lie by saying, Go ahead, give me a little, you know, tell me. So Hewitt went on to explain to the future president that Soleimani ran Iran's famous Quds Force,

which is essentially kind of like the CIA mixed in with the Green Berets a little bit. And Trump clearly had no idea what the Quds Force was, because his immediate response was, I think the Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated by us. So he clearly heard Kurds instead of Quds Force. And Hew Hewitt had to correct him on that. So that's where Trump's level of knowledge of this guy was four years before ordering his assassination, which is fun.

Which is like, Yeah, I know. Oh, totes. Love that guy. Great guy. I think he's great. I honestly have never heard anything negative. Wonderful.

It would have been funny if Hugh Hewitt hadn't been a right-wing shill, if he had just kept running and seeing how much he could get Trump to say about General Soleimani in context of thinking he was occurred. You could have gotten 30 minutes of fun radio out of that. I know. Did he correct him? Was he like, oh, no. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And Trump said, oh, I thought you said Kurds. Of course. Well, I guess also not to be that person who defends Trump in any way, but if you don't know Iranian Revolutionary Guard and you don't know that they go by Quds, I guess it's, I mean, if you just have no understanding of Middle Eastern anything, you would never make that connection.

For a normal person, that's a perfectly fine mistake to make. Yeah. I would say I think 100% of the people who run for president, especially who are running for president in 2016, should know who costs him Soleimani. They should know. Like, yes. They should know.

Yeah, he was a big guy and the story we're going to tell today is the story of how he became a very, very big dude. And one of the things that's like, you know, when you're talking about like actors at this level on the national stage who are responsible for horrible things and for good things, you don't often run across some people who are as competent as this guy was. Or at least that's the prevailing theory. There's a couple of different theories that maybe, yeah,

we'll get into that a little bit. But he's an interesting dude. He's like a character from like a Cold War spy novel. He's like that level of like genius at Skulduggery. He's very good at what he did. And so he's an entertaining guy to read about if you can kind of put yourself in the head of like reading it as a story or not reading it as like a tale of history where actual human lives were affected.

But it's interesting as hell. And I really recommend, there's one particularly good article about this guy that we'll get to in a bit, but he's worth reading about and you'll understand more about what's going on if you do. Yeah, he's a real started from the bottom, now we are here type. Yes. Yes. And I won't quote the rest of that song because there's a bad word in it.

Is this a clean show now? No, but not that one. So yeah, one of the things I did when I was doing my research on Sulamani is I made sure to avoid, I tried to avoid as much as possible using sources that were written after the assassination because everybody writing anything after the assassination, at least right now, I assume new shit will come out at some point, but everyone right now is just rewriting the couple of good articles

there were about this guy before he was killed and getting stuff wrong in the translation so I avoided that for the most part and I would caution people to be very hesitant to trust much that you hear about this dude in the next couple of months, maybe years because it's going to take a while for us to get much more good information out on him. He's a very politicized figure. I also recommend reading what Middle Eastern writers are writing during this time.

Yes. Although one of the things, like some of the Middle Eastern writers I found writing on this guy right for places like the American Enterprise Institute which is like a right-wing think tank. It's like a neo-conservative think tank. Interesting. And the article on him there isn't terrible, but like everything you find on this guy is very political.

Which is like, so yeah, do your best to find a variety of sources and avoid anything new if you're going to do your own research on this, is my recommendation. So, Qasem Soleimani was born on March 11, 1957, 7, not 57, in the village of Rabor, Rabor, R-A-B-O-R, in Kerman province, Iran. His father was a farmer and when Qasem was small, his dad took out an agricultural loan from the government of the Shah, Muhammad Reza Palavi.

Now the Shah, born in 1919, had come to power in 1941 after his father, the previous Shah, had refused to support the Allies during World War II. In the early 1950s, before Qasem was born, the Shah fought a brutal power struggle with his prime minister. Palavi was briefly ousted and returned to power only with the express backing of the United States and Great Britain. I'm leaving out a lot of detail because that's a paragraph there, but I think we're hitting the highlights.

Now upon his return, the Shah established what many would consider a brutal and repressive police state with the help of his secret police, the Savak. The Shah treated the entire nation as basically his bank account or an extension of his bank account and by the time Qasem would have been a young boy, the problem was so bad that even British observers were shocked by the level of corruption within the Iranian government. Here's a selection I picked almost at random from a 1976 New York Times article talking about the Shah's government.

Two under-secretaries, the handsome Hussain Al-Azada and the scholarly Dr. Mohamed Ali Serrafi, have been dismissed for alleged sugar purchasing irregularities, which are said to involve the Iranian government and unneeded expenditures of 45 million. To underscore the point, Tehran newspapers, which are indirectly controlled by the regime, have piously pointed out that this money could have been used to build 30,000 country schools or 3,000 hospitals. So that's the kind of shady dealings that are daily news when the Shah is in power. And the United States is involved in quite a lot of this.

Grumman, which at that time was a Long Island aerospace concern and is now Northrop Grumman, which is a major part of our security industry, like security industrial complex, I guess you say. They did a bunch of shady bribes to middlemen in Iran in order to get the Iranian government to buy a bunch of airplane parts and stuff from them that weren't necessarily actually useful. And so Grumman was basically funneling corporate money into the hands of individual members of the Shah's government so that they would spend huge amounts of defense money on shit they didn't need, which would be profits for Grumman.

And all of the money that was spent on this was, of course, money that normal Iranian people like Qasem's dad paid to the Shah's government in taxes. And so Qasem grew up into an adolescent watching his father play crippling taxes and interest on a loan to a central government that basically stole money from its people for their own personal enrichment. Now, when his father's agriculture loan came due... Hey look, as an Iranian, can't comment further. Hey, you do what you gotta do, you know.

Yeah. So when his father's agriculture loan came due, the Shah's government offered no forgiveness or respite. Qasem's father wound up owing the equivalent of about a hundred U.S. dollars, which was enough debt to have rendered his family destitute at that point in time. So at age 13, Qasem and his cousin Ahmad had to leave home without their parents knowing in order to go work in the city of Kermin. He later recalled, At night we couldn't fall asleep with the sadness of thinking that government agents were coming to arrest our fathers.

We were only 13 and our bodies were so tiny, wherever we went they wouldn't hire us, until one day when we were hired as laborers at a school construction site on Kaju Street, which is where the city ended. They paid us two tomen per day, which is the currency at the time, I guess. So it took eight months for the boys to save up enough money to make a meaningful dent in their father's debts. And unfortunately, by the time they had saved up enough money, it was late enough in the year that the mountain passes back home were covered in thick snow. The boys had to find a local man with a car, a guy named Palavan, and he drove them back.

And according to Sulamani's later recollections, this guy really hated the Shah, and he was the first person to express seditious political views to the young Qasim. Palavan was particularly furious that small children would have to work full-time to pay off a relative's debt to the already wealthy Shah. This is the time for them to rest and play, not work as a laborer in a strange city. I spit on the life they have made for us, Qasim recalled this guy saying. So this is clearly an important moment in his young life, and it makes his personal memoirs. And again, it's hard to say how true that all is, because again, he's a very politicized figure. These are the memoirs he came out with, and you get the hint with some of them

that he's trying to inculcate some values that he wants to spread in the populace. But most of what we know about Qasim's early life came from either a book that he wrote, or that might have been Ghost Written, about his life, and then a few interviewers who have kind of talked around folks in that region, some historians and stuff. But there's not a huge amount out there. The experts who have analyzed Qasim's early life outside of his own book do agree that he grew up very poor and he would have been working heavily from a young age. The story about his father's debt, and that he and a cousin had to go to the city to work it off.

That's almost certainly true. We know Qasim got no more than a high school education. He spent about five years in school, maybe. And by the time he was a young adult, he'd managed to get himself a job working for the water department in the city of Kerman. Now, by this point, it was the 1970s, in the twilight of the Shah's period of control. Revolutionary fervor had gripped many sections of Iranian society. Various movements rose up to question the royal grip on power.

Qasim, meanwhile, dedicated himself to getting swole as hell. He became a dedicated weightlifter and began socializing with a group of equally swole and equally frustrated young men. So he's not a revolutionary initially. He's a gem rat. He comes into his late teens, early 20s. Based on my understanding, he wasn't very religious either. I think he grew up not necessarily secular, but it wasn't the most present in his childhood growing up.

No, and you don't get the feeling. You hear different things about this guy. Some will say he was extremely pious. A lot of folks who knew him and talked, you get the feeling kind of openly about it. It wasn't a big deal to him. I do think it would be accurate to say his religion was the Iranian state and the revolution as he saw it. I think he was that kind of dude as opposed to being super pious.

Funny you say he's pious because he was a Pisces, which means he has some intensity, but he's adapted. He adapts to his situation and when you're trying to fight to pay off a loan for your father or just trying to survive when you're poor and you just adapt to your environment and do what you need to do to get by and if that is joining an army, you do what you can. Yeah, he's adaptive. As a young man, he starts getting swole as hell. That's mostly his social group for a little while. He does start attending a series of sermons by a traveling preacher who worked with one of the future Ayatollahs.

This is where Qasem first became seduced by the idea of Iran without its Shah. He's not a part of the revolutionary movement. There's a revolutionary leftist movement in Iran and a revolutionary Islamist movement. Obviously, the Islamist movement is the one that actually succeeds in overthrowing the Shah. But he's not really a part of any of that. He's entranced by some of the speeches of some of these guys who are pro-that, but he never really gets involved. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhola Khomeini overthrows the Shah's government and declares an Islamic Republic in Iran or a bunch of people backing the Ayatollah, I should say.

He didn't do it on his own. One of the new Ayatollah's first orders of business was to secure this new regime from being overthrown, particularly by elements in the military who might still have been loyal to the Shah, or at least who weren't necessarily loyal to the Ayatollah. And to this end, he established the Revolutionary Guard, which was essentially a separate branch of the military that was loyal directly to the clerics who now ran the country. And young Qasem left his gig at the water department to join the Revolutionary Guard. He found himself called to get involved with this new thing.

And this is a smart move. You see this a lot in history when you have revolutions. Most of them will set up a military side structure. If they don't outright just destroy the military, the military stays intact, but nobody really trusts it. You see this with a lot of revolutionary governments. You don't see it in the Soviet Union so much because they did kind of destroy everything that had existed before. But you see it in a lot of revolutionary movements where they'll have to set up a side security structure outside of what had existed before because they can't do away with that entirely, but they don't trust it. And when you have this new kind of thing, like the Revolutionary Guard was,

you have an opportunity for a young man with no history to make a big name for himself. Because the military or the intelligence agencies, those are really ossified strict structures where there's a certain way they do things and they tend to hire from certain groups of the population. And if you don't know anybody, you're probably not going to get much of a shot there. Whereas the Revolutionary Guard, nothing's written. And so this guy, this poor kid from Karaman, can join it and he has a chance to actually build a career for himself. And he immediately distinguishes himself as very intelligent, very ambitious, and he starts to rise within the Revolutionary Guards.

And loyal. And by the time he's 20 years and extremely loyal. Because he's a Pisces. Yes, that's exactly what he credited it to as well. Big, big Zodiac guy. I remember that about him. So by the time Sulamani is 23 years old, he'd earned himself enough trust that he was sent with a group of guardsmen to suppress, pretty brutally,

a Kurdish uprising in West Azerbaijan in a place called Mahabad. Now, in the late 1940s, Mahabad had been the site of a short-lived Kurdish Socialist Republic, which had fought for its independence briefly, but was abandoned by the USSR, its only hope of survival, and then eaten up and destroyed. In the wake of the Shah's overthrow, Mahabad's Kurds had decided to basically give independence another go. If you know anything about Kurdish history, this happens all the time. And it never works out. And it did not work out this time.

We don't know much specifically about Sulamani's individual actions to crush this uprising. It's not part of his backstory that's often emphasized, particularly since he wound up dealing very frequently with Kurds in Iraq and in Syria on a diplomatic basis over the course of his career. So it wasn't a great thing to go into detail about. But this action against the Mahabad uprising by the Revolutionary Guard was really like the first big action taken by the Revolutionary Guard. And participating in the Mahabad Rebellion becomes seen as like,

if you do that, that's kind of what makes you, marks you out as a big name, an OG in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as you were a part of this force that was deployed to Mahabad. And it sets you up for success and for promotion and stuff within the organization. And so because he's there at this time, it puts him in a really good position for what comes next. You know what's going to come next? World domination!

Well, kind of the opposite, actually. A crippling and unbelievably destructive invasion by Iraq. Oh, that little thing? You know what's interesting? My father fought in the Iran-Iraq war and so did my mother. Well, she didn't fight. I think she was more on whatever the women do, not fight. Based on my understanding, she said she played a drum,

which I think she's lying, but that's casual Persian parent thing. They'll never tell you the truth, but anyway. I mean, unless I'm mistaken, there's some stories of people like women who would run with explosives under Iraqi tanks and blow them up and themselves up and stuff. It was a pretty desperate war, especially in the early stages. Yeah, I believe my father rode horses. That was his thing.

He just told me he rode horses. He's not also very forthcoming about his war days. I mean, it's not very much known in the West, but it's one of the worst things that happened in the latter half of the 20th century. There's a lot of bad wars in the latter half of the 20th century, but that one's up there. And it would prove to be a foundational moment, obviously for the modern nation of Iran, but also for Qasem.

So for a little bit of a background on this war, in 1980, Saddam Hussein, you might know him for his romance novels. He also was the dictator of a country called Iraq. Gorgeous writer. Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran. His goal seems to have been to take advantage of political chaos in the country following the revolution to make a quick grab for land and power. Now, there are rumors that you'll hear to this day that Saddam invaded

with a green light from the United States, and there's actually very little hard evidence for this. Most of what we have suggest the Carter administration was too busy dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis, and they were actually really unhappy that Saddam invaded and complicated matters. From internal Iraqi documents, we know Saddam expected the U.S. to impose the invasion. We'll talk about the fucked up shit the United States did here shortly. But what's important is that Saddam Hussein launches this fucking invasion of Iran

thinking it's going to be easy. It's kind of the same reasoning you see with Hitler in Operation Barbarossa when he invades Russia, where there's just been this revolution, everything is unsettled, the old order has been torn down and replaced with a new one, and this neighbor who's belligerent is like, oh, that'll be really easy to kick their asses. And it works out kind of the same. It works out similarly to that one. Yeah, Iran doesn't turn out to be a pushover.

The war would come to be known. I think the sacred defense is the term used. Sacred defense. Do you have a translation for that? I don't have it in Farsi. The two terms I've heard for it is the sacred defense and the imposed war. I'll have to look into that a little. I'm curious what it is in Farsi. What did you grow up being told about it? I wasn't told much. A thing that goes on and sort of, maybe it's just, I don't want to say just blatantly immigrant families,

but something I notice in my Persian family is that certain darker aspects aren't spoken about and you're kind of guarded from those things. So you're not really told about such things. When I was told about the Shah, they were like, he was this lavish king who always wore gold. It was all this beautiful imagery of a man who was covered in gold basically. And later as I grew up and I started reading, he was a deeply corrupt man who had a father who basically ruined him so he was never really able to stand up for himself and be his own. It was all this stuff of layers and layers of layers.

My parents would have never told me any of that. I always had a very base understanding until I went and did my own research and was like, oh, I remember my father gave me the book, All the Shahs Men, and I was like, oh my god, this is not how I expected it to be. Wait a second, what happened here? They like to sugarcoat it because they're trying to protect you from, I guess, internalized genetic trauma, which you're like, what are you going to do? There's an extent to which that kind of sounds like my upbringing.

Just in terms of like, you hear like Thomas Jefferson was this great scholar of liberty and this great thinker in the nature of human freedom. And it's like, oh, and he also raped a slave for decades. Basically, my whole understanding of the Iran-Iraq war was that my parents were in it because of the two-year draft, which is still in place in Iran. They were like, hey, we went and did it, but now we're in America and we are looking forward and that is about all I understood. And I just saw photos of my parents in their gear out doing things,

like my dad on a horse or eating. Well, you know what doesn't have a two-year draft on a, you know what won't draft your parents for two years to fight in a war against Iraq? What? The products and services that support this show. Hell yeah. They have no legal power to do so yet. That's what I would hope for.

There's some bills we're putting up in the house that will hopefully give our supporters the right to draft U.S. citizens. I am a very supportive of that. I said we cut out the middlemen, get rid of that state, just let advertisers directly compel people in the military service. I'm sorry, I have one quick question before we go to break. What was the draft ages when the original draft in the U.S. was on? Oh jeez.

I think it was, I mean, it might have been 17, but I think it started at 18. And then it went to how old? Like when did they cap it? I believe, I think 35. 35? Damn, I'm about to get drafted. You can hold it right. I mean, to be honest, I think it should start at like 30 and go up to 70.

No, 70. Can we just killing our people like that? If the boomers, think about how different the Iraq war would have been if we'd sent the boomers out to fight it first. I mean, we would lose a lot of boomers. I mean, I guess that's, I shouldn't say that. Oh dear. I shouldn't say that.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it seems like, 17 seems too young. I could see 20 to 30 because after 30, that's when you start to be like my back. And then it's like, okay, good luck. I support like, I think 22 would be a good minimum age. You're old enough to where we're like, I don't know, maybe 25. You can't rent a car until you're 25.

That seems like, why should you be able to drive a tank? Yeah, that's true. Word. If fucking. I mean, not that I don't want there to be a draft to be clear. I was just curious because I've been thinking about it because it's been, people have been talking about drafts and draft dodging. I was just curious. I don't want a draft to be clear.

Please don't have me. I don't oppose a draft, but if you're going to have a draft, start with people who are 50 and older. There you go. That's my thinking on the matter. But speaking of the draft, draft these products into your lifestyle. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and this is a fun moment. We don't often have news break while we're recording an episode, but as we went off to break, the news dropped that a series of missiles were fired at Al-Assad airbase, near Air Bill in northern Iraq. And our government is saying they were fired by Tehran. Obviously, I don't think from Tehran, but it looks like it was probably the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who fired the missiles. Now, a number of these missiles were fired most recently a day or two prior to that by members of an Iraqi Shia militia supported by Iran, so it's kind of not clear how different this all is from that, but it seems like this is at least continuing to happen. So I guess we'll see how it goes. That's fun news.

Yeah, great times. Everything's great. I love it when all of the people in charge are level-headed and sane. So yeah, when we were talking in the past about horrible violence between Iraq and Iran, we're talking about the Iraqi invasion of Iran, the Iran-Iraq war that continued for most of the 80s. So at the start of this war, you know, Saddam had hoped it would be an easy victory due to the technical superiority of its forces, but stiff Iranian resistance quickly turned the war into a World War I style meat grinder. Qasem Soleimani was at the front almost from the beginning. Now, there are two different versions of this story, and I found both collected by the American Enterprise Institute, a Neil conservative think tank. And I must note that since Qasem's life is very politicized, you're going to have trouble finding sources on him that don't have some sort of clear bias. The AEI report cites its sources and seems pretty in line with the other stuff I've read. It doesn't seem, I'm not saying anything crazy in here at least. Right.

And it describes two different theories as to how he sort of got his career started at the beginning of the war. Soleimani reveals that he was given the task of administering the Kerman-Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds-Garrison upon his return from Mahabad in the face of the Iraqi invasion of Iran. Soleimani trained and expedited several contingents from Karamon to the southern front against Iraq. Later, the IRGC sent a company under Soleimani's command to Susengard, where it resisted Iraqi advances on the Malikiya front. Malik, who's an Iranian scholar, provides an almost entirely different account of Soleimani's participation in the war against Iraq. According to Malik, Soleimani was sent to the front as merely a participant in a very casual mission transferring water to the front. He was sent to the front for only two weeks, but the enlightened and heavenly atmosphere of the front left such an impression on the heart of the young and pure workman or technician that he, rather than spending only two weeks of his mission at the front, spent almost the entire eight-year long period of war there.

Now, it's not possible to verify either account. Soleimani's own account gives the impression of a young man with a clear purpose in life, while Malik's account is sort of like idealistic, like... Okay, so basically, you've got the two different versions you've got of how this guy starts the Iran-Iraq war. One is kind of like a pretty standard military story. This guy is in charge of a military unit. He is sent up to the front, and he distinguishes himself there, so he stays stationed there and fighting at the head of things for the entirety of the war pretty much. And the other account is that he's sent up there on a non-aggressive mission to deliver water to soldiers, and he just falls in love with being up at the front line. And I don't know which of these is true. I can say that the most trustworthy Western account comes from a 2013 New Yorker article, The Shadow Commander, by Dexter Filkins.

It's the article you'll probably have seen shared on Soleimani after his assassination. It's a pretty balanced and well-written article, and it goes with the water carrier version of events, that he was sent up there to deliver water to the front, and that he fell in love with the culture of front-line sacrifice, and gradually got more and more and more involved. I do think it's worth digging into what the motivations behind both variations on this story might be. I think the Water Boy backstory is kind of the one both the Iranian government and Soleimani himself wanted people to believe. And I think that clearly, obviously, the government has a definite interest in pushing this view of a guy going up to the front and being inspired by the heavenly atmosphere that he feels there, this atmosphere of sacrifice. You kind of see that in any sort of government, compared to the movie American Sniper.

But it also is kind of worth noting that the official version of Kossum's biography doesn't make him out to have been an early radical supporter of the Ayatollah. It admits that he was kind of just working out at the gym when all that was going on. So it is entirely possible that this is an accurate depiction of events, that when he kind of really gets radicalized and inspired and finds his calling in life, is at the front line during this war. And there's a lot of reason to believe that a lot of young men find their first experiences with combat at like a front line like that to be kind of intoxicating. It tends to either break young people or be something they find almost addictive. And it seems like it would be fair to say that Kossum wound up on kind of the addicted side of that in the mid aughts while delivering a speech at the site of one of the Iran-Iraq Wars major battles, he said this to a reporter. The battlefield is mankind's lost paradise, the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest. One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens and lush landscapes.

But there is another kind of paradise, the battlefield. So that's, I mean, it's one of those things, it's definitely the angle he wants to portray about himself. It also might be true because he spent the whole of his life in war zones basically. Well, I mean, I think some people, and it's just based off my understanding of like career military people, like they are, they feel the most, I mean, it's weird to say they feel the most at home at war. Like that's where they thrive, it's what they understand best, like you take them and put them on a dinner table and you're like, so how was your day? And they're like, I mean, they don't even know what to say to you because they're like, look, I fight wars, I come up with strategy, this is the work I do. And they don't really know how to deal with other things outside of that. This is how they are, it's how they're wired.

And I can, I can, I've had a lot less experience at front lines than this guy, but it is addictive, like the atmosphere out there, the additional sense of like meaning everything's imbued with. And I do, you know, I try to be like critical whenever you're trying to figure out like, what do these people want you to believe about them? Like, what are they putting out into the media versus what is true? But I kind of think the version of events that Qasem relates about his early war experiences are more honest than not, just because it tracks with the rest of the guy's life. I think this is a dude who falls in love with battle and sacrifice and makes that his life for the next 30 years or whatever. That's how it seems to me. Yeah. And even the sources that hate Qasem Sulamani are consistent, that he served with distinction at the very front of the Iran-Iraq war for pretty much the entirety of the time that it went on. And I'm going to quote from the New Yorker now.

Sulamani earned a reputation for bravery and alon, especially as a result of reconnaissance missions he undertook behind Iraqi lines. He returned from several missions bearing a goat which his soldiers slaughtered and grilled. On Iraqi radio, Sulamani became known as the goat thief. In recognition of his effectiveness, Alephana said he was put in charge of a brigade from Kerman with men from gyms where he lifted weights. The Iranian army was badly overmatched and its commanders resorted to crude and costly tactics. In human way of assaults, they sent thousands of young men directly into the Iraqi lines, often to clear minefields and soldiers died at a precipitous rate. Sulamani seemed distressed by the loss of life. Before sending his men into battle, he would embrace each one and bid him goodbye. In speeches, he praised martyred soldiers and begged their forgiveness for not being martyred himself. When Sulamani's superiors announced plans to attack the Faw Peninsula, he dismissed them as wasteful and foolhardy. The former Revolutionary Guard officer recalled seeing Sulamani in 1985 after a battle in which his brigade had suffered many dead and wounded. He was sitting alone in a corner of a tent. He was very silent, thinking about the people he'd lost, the officer said. This is a rough time. From the best information available, Sulamani was a dedicated soldier. Rule Mark Gurekht was a young CIA officer in Istanbul during the war. He interfaced with many wounded Iranian soldiers who were sent there on leave to recuperate. He met Sulamani during one of the times when the general was wounded.

Gurekht's job in the CIA was to meet these young Iranians away from home to recover and try to recruit them as CIA informants. He met a lot of these guys. Did they try to recruit him? He definitely talked to him. I don't think it took. He was like, sorry, bro. I'm a Pisces. You know how that be? I'm loyal to my guy. Hell yeah. Gurekht was a Gemini. I'm a Gemini, so slow down. Gurekht said, you'd get a whole variety of guardsmen. You'd get clerics. You'd get people who came to breathe and whore and drink.

There were the broken and the burned out, the hollow-eyed, the guys who had been destroyed, and then there were the bright-eyed guys who just couldn't wait to get back to the front. I'd put Sulamani in the latter category. Death estimates from the Iran-Iraq war range from around half a million to over a million, and over a million honestly seems like the most credible estimate. It was one of the most brutal conflicts of the latter half of the 20th century, and living through the carnage it caused would have been a pretty radicalizing experience for a guy like Sulamani, who saw both war's beauty and its horror. Now, Qasem rose rapidly through the ranks, and by his mid-20s he was to commanding an entire division, and his lofty position in the military would have made him aware of the incredibly shady dealings going on in the background. I am speculating here, but it is my suspicion that American policy during this period would go on to have a major impact on the man Qasem Sulamani became, and the tactics he engaged in for the rest of his life. In 1992, The New York Times published a bombshell report titled, The U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in its War Against Iran. Or it should have been a bombshell report, but since it was about the Middle East, and it wasn't during one of the cumulative 11 weeks that our nation has cared about stuff happening in the Middle East, no one really noticed the article.

But it was damning, and I'm going to read a quote from it now. The Reagan administration secretly decided to provide highly classified intelligence to Iraq in the spring of 1982, more than two years earlier than previously disclosed, while also permitting the sale of American-made arms to Baghdad in a successful effort to help President Saddam Hussein a imminent defeat in the war with Iran, former intelligence and State Department officials say. The American decision to lend crucial help to Baghdad so early in the 1980 to 88 Iran-Iraq War came after American intelligence agencies warned that Iraq was on the verge of being overrun by Iran, whose army was bolstered by the year before by covert shipments of American-made weapons. So in other words, Iraq invades Iran, and as soon as Reagan comes to power, we send Iran a bunch of guns illegally. We actually have Israel sell them the guns in order to bolster. Contra. Oh, this is before that shit.

Oh, this was before? That's a different thing. Wait, we did this twice? Under Reagan? Yeah, we kept doing this. Yeah, you couldn't stop Ronald Reagan from selling arms to Iran while in buying them. Wait, so what did he use the money to do this time? Well, this was not about, this first time, I don't think there was even a profit.

Oh, they were just like whatever. This first time it was like a geopolitical thing. Yeah, he didn't want Iraq to overrun Iran, so we sent weapons to Iran. And then, because the way the Iran-Iraq war goes is Saddam invades Iran, and it's a debacle for him, and he loses a huge number of men. But then Iran, once they push Iraq out, invades Iraq as sort of like, well, let's see how far we can take this shit. And then it's a disaster for Iran. And what happens is Saddam invades, then he gets pushed back in large part due to the fact that the U.S. gave Iran a bunch of weapons. And so the U.S. is like, shit, now Iran is going to overrun Iraq, so we send Iraq a shitload of weapons.

And not just do we send them weapons, we send them high-level intelligence on the positioning of Iranian troops and military divisions with the specific knowledge that Saddam Hussein is going to deploy chemical weapons against those people. So we did not give Saddam his chemical weapons, although his chemical stockpile was made with a lot of help from European scientists. Hell yeah. But we specifically helped Saddam's military target the Iranian military, including Soleimani's units, because his unit lost thousands of men to chemical weapons with chemical weapons. So during this war, Soleimani is at a high enough level that I'm pretty sure if he doesn't know while it's going on, he knows immediately afterwards that the United States is arming both sides of this conflict. And it is a very, this is not, I want to be clear here, this often gets played as like the CIA fucking around. This is not the CIA fucking around. This is just straight up the U.S. state government.

And they're like, why does Soleimani not like us? It's like because he's been watching the U.S. for years, fuck with everybody. That's wild. Now one former, yeah, I think it's interesting here because it's specifically one of the state department officials that the New York Times talked to like specifically laid out that this was not a CIA rogue initiative. But that had been approved at the highest levels of the Reagan administration. The exact quote he gave them was, we wanted to avoid victory by both sides. So basically we wanted there to be a bloody stalemate. We're trying to be like really neutral about this, but at the same time we are going to give everybody weapons.

Yeah, we're going to give everybody weapons. And like the way we did it was really shady. We basically looked, we sold weapons to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and then looked the other way while Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait sent those weapons to Iraq. Yeah. Wow. From the times quote, American officials made no effort to stop these sales known to many in the administration, even though American export law forbids the third party transfer of American made arms without Washington's permission. So if Soleimani wasn't aware of this all at the time, he was aware of it by 1992 when this report came out in the New York Times. I'm going to guess a guy like him would have read it.

It was not a secret New York Times article or anything. I assume Iran's got a couple of subscriptions is what I'm going to say. Yeah. Now, when the war ended in 1988, Soleimani and his division were posted to the chaotic eastern frontier of Iran where gangs of narcotics smugglers laden with Afghan opium had rendered much of the region wild and uncontrollable. For several years, Qasem fought a brutal, bloody, but ultimately successful war on drugs in that part of the country. Among other things, he gained a reputation for being incorruptible. He also spent a lot of time fighting against the Taliban, who were enemies of Iran at that period of time. And he spent a lot of time like backing and moving in agents and like supporting militias in the area that were anti-Taliban, including a militia called the Northern Alliance, who you might have heard about when we invaded Afghanistan because they're the guys we allied with too.

So now in 1998, based on all of this experience, Qasem Soleimani was a natural choice to put it to put it the head of Iran's notorious Quds Force. The Quds Force is an elite division within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and essentially serves as a mix serves in a mix of functions, a bit like the CIA crossed with like joint special operations command. The Iran-Iraq war had ended after a series of disastrous offenses into Iraq, caused hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. And this debacle had convinced the government that their military future lay an asymmetrical warfare. You can't compete with like the big Western nations and like straight up tank battles and it's incredibly wasteful to try. So instead, let's get smarter about this, you know, fund insurgencies, get better at that sort of fighting. And in this way, Iran kind of guesses what the warfare is going to be like in the 21st century. They're definitely ahead of the United States in figuring that part out.

So in the wake of the Gulf War, as US influence expanded across the Middle East, the Quds Force became increasingly important to Iran's geopolitical strategy. It was basically responsible for projecting power outside of the Islamic Republic. So Qasem's appointment to the head of this force was the sign of the deep trust the Ayatollah placed in him. Over the years he held the job, Sulamani would prove to be a dedicated supporter of the conservative clerical elements in the Iranian government. In 1999, a series of student protests racked the country and pushed for reform within the nation's harsh religious laws. President Mohammed Qatami, who had come to power as a reformer, was unwilling to crack down on these students. Qasem Sulamani and several other Revolutionary Guard commanders signed a letter promising they would depose the president if he did not brutally crush the demonstrations, which were brutally crushed in the wake of this. And speaking of brutally crushing student demonstrations for liberty.

Okay. You know who won't do that? An ad. An ad. A sponsor. A sponsor, unless it's one of our Raytheon sponsored ads, in which case that is kind of their business. Yeah. Although Raytheon does also need insurgent movements in order to stay profitable.

So really, you know, if you're an insurgent, Raytheon is your best friend. Yikes. By Raytheon. Oh boy, yeah. I do not stand by that. No. Then it cuts to immediately we get a Raytheon ad because we have horrible luck. I am hoping for the day we get a Raytheon ad.

That's going to be fun. I mean, don't be surprised. We were getting Coke Bro ads and we were getting Fox News ads. We get random ads. It's beautiful. And I'm just excited for it to be Raytheon. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. People have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So we've been talking about the Quds Force a bit, which Kasim Soleimani has just been appointed to head.

The Quds Force is named after the Farsi word for Jerusalem, which gives you some idea as to what is seen as its ultimate purpose. And there's definitely a big angle that's sort of like Iran as the head of this axis against Israel and against the United States. And in fact, the term axis of resistance is used a lot like what they're trying to build in the Middle East in opposition to Israel and the United States. And the Quds Force headquarters is very notably on the former U.S. Embassy campus in Tehran, the embassy that was taken over during the Iranian Revolution and stuff, which is like, that's a move right there. So now that he's in charge of the Quds Force, Kasim Soleimani embarks on a policy of recruiting and training agents all across the Middle East. His biggest success is probably Hezbollah, an Iran-supported militia and political party in Lebanon that spent most of the last couple of decades chucking rockets into Israel and being bombed by Israel in response. Hezbollah started as a resistance to the Israeli occupation because Israel occupied a lot of Lebanon up until about 2000. And constant Hezbollah insurgent attacks were a big part of why Israel eventually like gave up on that occupation. So it's again, I'm not going to be doing justice to all of this history. I'm trying to provide the broad strokes.

And a lot of the ability of Iran to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and particularly to send them the rockets that Hezbollah like intermittently fires into Israel is possible because Iran's ally is Syria. And so Iran is able to move rockets and support and like money and weapons up through Syria. So keep that in mind because that's going to be very important later. So Qasem was also busy in Afghanistan. The Taliban are sworn enemies of Iran's clerical regime. And for years before 9-11, Soleimani was integral in backing and supporting the resistance to the Taliban. And I'm going to quote now from a report in West Point's combating terrorism center. In August 1998, a few months into Soleimani's tenor at the head of the Quds Force, Taliban forces swept into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, home to a substantial community of ethnic Hazaras, Farsi-speaking Shia Muslims. The Taliban initiated a brutal pogrom against members of the minority, trashing homes, raping women and girls, and massacring hundreds of Shia men and boys. Among the dead was a group of nine Iranians, eight diplomats and a journalist. At this naked provocation, factions on both sides turned white-hot for war. The IRGC's overall commander at the time, Yaya Rahim Safawi, requested Supreme Leader Khomeini's permission for the punishment of the Taliban to advance to Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, annihilate, punish, eliminate them.

Iran began massing an invasion force of almost a quarter of a million soldiers along the Afghan border. Reportedly, it was Soleimani who stepped in and diffused the situation without resorting to further violence. Instead of confronting the Taliban directly, Soleimani opted to throw increased Iranian support behind the opposition northern alliance, personally helping to direct the group's operations from a base across Afghanistan's northern border in Tajikistan. It was a model of proxy warfare to which he would return again and again. So this is really important. The Taliban murders a bunch of people, including Iranians, and there's this huge outrage with an Iran calling for an invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1990s. And they have a quarter of a million men massed to do it. And Soleimani says, no, no, no, fuck that. We've seen what mass invasions look like. We've seen what war on that scale looks like, particularly against an enemy like the Taliban that's never going to stand and fight. He's kind of predicting what would happen in the United States later. That's a bad idea. The smart thing to do is send in support and trainers and commandos and bolster one of the militias of Afghans that are already fighting the northern alliance or that are already fighting the Taliban. And that's the way to actually make progress in Afghanistan. There's no benefit to invading Afghanistan, which, looking at the history of invading Afghanistan, not a dumb play.

Now, obviously in 2001, later in 2001, 9-11, 9-11 to all over everybody's asses, and the U.S. committed itself to invading and then never leaving Afghanistan for reasons which are still unclear. Qasem Soleimani was only too happy to lend his forces support to the American military effort in that country. In his Quds Force and their proxies in Afghanistan, worked closely with U.S. special forces in particular. Quds Force soldiers and U.S. special operators fought side by side against the Taliban. And one of those chapters of the war on terror that we do not talk about very much anymore, but this is where things are at the start of the war in Afghanistan, is Iran and the United States very much working together against the Taliban. So, as the Bush administration began to ramp up the propaganda campaign that preceded the totally successful and widely praised invasion of Iraq, there was reason to believe that U.S.-Iran relations had turned a corner. The government of Iran and Qasem Soleimani hated both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. And there are a few better ways to turn a nation from enemy to friend than fighting two back-to-back wars as allies. I mean, it worked for the United States and England. So, the question is, how did things get fucked up from this point? Like, that seems like a pretty great spot to be in. You're fighting alongside each other, you're like fucking up two of their big enemies in a row. What turned things bad? You have any guesses?

I'm gonna say white people because they're never happy. And when you're a person of color or grown up with immigrants, you just take what you can get and you understand and you go, I'm not gonna cause more trouble because I see what the situation is and I know it might not be better for us in any other way. This might be as good as it gets, so I'm gonna fucking shut up and keep my head down and not speak out where I'm not supposed to speak out. Maybe I'm speaking a little too much from how my father would talk to me, but that's what it always felt like. Well, you know who didn't worry at all about speaking out recklessly because he knew that none of it would ever harm him? Who? Was George Bush in one of his speechwriters? In January 2002, President George W. Bush delivered his first post-911 State of the Union address. He named Iran as part of an axis of evil alongside Iraq and North Korea, three nations which, notably, did not collaborate or work together in any meaningful sense of the word.

This declaration took Iran by surprise, considering their soldiers were literally fighting alongside the United States and Afghanistan. Now, Ryan Crocker was deputy chief of the American embassy in Kabul at the time. As a result of this position, he communicated regularly with the representative of the Iranian government, a guy who was basically the direct mouthpiece for Qasem Soleimani. Crocker had not been warned that the United States was about to declare Iran part of an axis of evil in a speech, and he was very unpleasantly surprised when he realized this is what had gone down. And here's how Crocker recalled the hours after the axis of evil speech in Kabul. He saw the negotiator, the Iranian negotiator, the next day at the UN compound in Kabul, and he was furious. You completely damaged me, Crocker recalled him saying. Soleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised. The negotiator told Crocker that at great political risk, Soleimani had been contemplating a complete reevaluation of the United States, saying,

Which makes sense. Why wouldn't he? Maybe it's time to rethink our relationship with the Americans. The axis of evil speech brought these meetings to an end, where formers inside the government who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. We were just that close. One word and one speech changed history. Great. What's new? A Bush. But hey, no, Bushes are cool people. They hang out with Ellen. And we should, I want to note, Bush should get some blame for that speech, but we should throw a lot of blame too on the guy who wrote the axis of evil speech. And the axis of evil speech writer was a fellow you might know from the internet today named David Froome. Now, Froome is currently a staff, yeah, he's currently a staff writer at the Atlantic and a never Trump idiot grifter king.

He wrote a stupid book about how Trump is bad, and despite the fact that all of his previous work as a neocon was laying the ground for Trump. Anyway, fuck David Froome. You can find him on Twitter at at David Froome, but you probably shouldn't because the shit bird has done more than enough damage to the world and should not be listened to by anyone on any subject ever again. I will admit that it's pretty hilarious that his current pinned tweet, which I think he means as a reference to the Trump administration, is the sentence, when this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it. I fucking hate David Froome. Okay, you fucking piece of shit moron. But in fairness, no one will remember this. It is debatable as to whether or not Iran was ever actually seeking rapprochement with the United States. Qasem was, again, I can't emphasize this enough, a spy chief, and every piece of information that he allowed to get out about him carries the risk of being a piece of disinformation because that's what spies do. Now, maybe he wanted to spread the rumor that the axis of evil speech is why relations broke off. It's impossible to prove this to a point of certainty. All that I can prove to a point of certainty is that David Froome is an idiot.

Now, whatever the truth behind all this, by 2004 Saddam Hussein was out of Iraq and Soleimani's Quds Force was committed to ensuring that the U.S. followed him. They began to manufacture and export huge amounts of explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs. These are basically roadside bombs that launch a molten copper slug into armored vehicles. EFPs were miles ahead of the indigenous improvised explosives in Iraq, and they could only have been manufactured in Iran and sent into Iraq. And in short order, roughly 20% of American combat deaths in Iraq were blamed on these weapons. So this is what a lot of U.S. military planners will really point to as to why they hated Soleimani. And it's one of those things. There have been a lot of people in the United States military establishment since Bush was in office who wanted us to assassinate this guy. And both Bush and Obama were intelligent enough to be like, it's just not worth the fallout. There's a part of me that thinks the reason he was assassinated is that eventually enough of those guys got forced out by Trump.

That some of the military people who were just thinking of like their dead friends were like, we've got a chance. He doesn't know what the consequences will be and we can get rid of this guy that we hate. I think that might be what happened. So emotions running to decisions and not true logic? Yes, yes. And it's one of those things. I don't morally blame a military leader who had friends killed by an EFP for wanting that guy to be killed. It's what you do if your friends got killed. But part of the reason why the military doesn't run the show in our government is because you shouldn't have those people making the calls. You should have civilians with a level of separation from all of those sort of calls and a level of emotional separation making decisions.

Which is why we didn't assassinate this guy earlier. Because the powers that be, the civilians who are running our military as it is supposed to be, were like, I know you're pissed, but that's a bad call. Like, it's going to endanger more lives. And I think one of the stories of the Trump administration is, again, those norms that existed for a good fucking reason going away. Now, some of that's my own speculation, but we do know that the EFPs in particular are why so many U.S. military people really hated Soleimani. Now, Qasem Soleimani's war against the United States in Iraq was a textbook case of how to wage a successful insurgent conflict. He and his Quds Force succeeded in briefly bridging the Sunni Shiite divide among insurgent groups, supporting both in their efforts to kill American soldiers. One way he did this was by using his connections to the head of intelligence in Assad's Syria to allow Sunni extremists to move through Syria and across Iraq's porous border.

This provided huge numbers of foreign fighters to battle American soldiers. It also helped establish the networks of Sunni extremists in that region, in Syria and in northern Iraq, that years later would coalesce into what we now know as ISIS. So this is, again, a decision with profoundly mixed consequences, and I'm going to quote again from that New Yorker article. In many cases, Al Qaeda was allowed a degree of freedom in Iran as well. Krocker told me that in May 2003, the Americans received intelligence that Al Qaeda fighters in Iran were preparing an attack on Western targets in Saudi Arabia. Krocker was alarmed. They were there under Iranian protection planning operations, he said. He flew to Geneva and passed a warning to the Iranians, but to no avail, militants bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including nine Americans.

As it turned out, the Iranian strategy of abetting Sunni extremists backfired horrendously. Shortly after the occupation began, the same extremists began attacking Shiite civilians and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. It was a preview of the Civil War to come. Welcome to the Middle East, the Western diplomat and Baghdad told me. Soleimani wanted to bleed the Americans, so he invited in the jihadis, and things got out of control. Now, one of the things that's really frustrating to me right now is that you'll see, and like a lot of the anti-war left people celebrating Soleimani as like an enemy of ISIS and Islamic extremism, and it's true that his forces fought against ISIS and that he helped in the campaign to destroy ISIS. But he was also integral in helping ISIS come about in kind of the same ways that the United States were. And this is one of the things that's I think ironic to me is that if you look at like a lot of the mistakes that the U.S. made that allowed ISIS to get a foothold in Syria and Iraq,

and a lot of the mistakes Iran made that allowed ISIS to gain a foothold in the same region, they're not entirely different. And I think they're both based in this kind of an attempt to use these forces for your own gain that backfired. It's an interesting story, but it's a lot more complicated than a lot of people on Twitter are giving it credit for being. So that's my take on it. Now, in 2011, when the Syrian civil war started up, Soleimani ordered members of the Iraqi Shiite militias that he'd formed to help resist the U.S. into Syria to support Assad's beleaguered and still incompetent military. And this is again like there's quotes that you get from like members of the Iranian government at the time that are like, if we lose Damascus, we lose Tehran. Because like Syria connects Iran to Lebanon and like Hezbollah is a hugely important chunk of like Iran's international policies, particularly like in terms of like what they consider to be the resistance to Israel. So there's very much this understanding that we cannot let Assad in Syria fall or it's the end of us.

And there's also another one of the things that you'll hear, you'll hear quotes along the lines of, unlike the Americans, we stick by our friends. And obviously I hate me some Bashar al-Assad, but there's a point there that I think gets to like why the United States is doomed to always lose whenever it gets involved in conflict in the Middle East is a country like Iran under a guy like Soleimani and whoever's going to come next to him is capable of thinking in terms of decades, in terms of we have been supporting this regime in Syria for years and we will continue to and we will gain certain long term benefits from being solid as a rock in our support of this regime. And they did things like they loaned Assad $7 billion. They sent thousands of soldiers in to fight a significant chunk of whom died fighting for Assad. Whereas in the United States, you never get plans that go much further than four maybe eight years and nobody who we back as we the Kurds in Syria have most recently seen nobody can trust that will stay there for any length of time, because like when you're looking at why we continually fuck up in the Middle East, I think that is as much of a reason as anything is the fact that like nobody can really trust us to hang around. And meanwhile with a country like Iran, if you're Iran's ally, you kind of can know what they're going to do.

And it's not because, you know, it's because of national self interest is because Iran sees Syria as an integral part of its national defense and its foreign policy. But like if you're Syria, you can trust Iran to do certain things to back your ass up. And if you're a U.S. ally in the Middle East, you can never trust the United States further than about four years out. Right. And that's just the way it is. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's like the American way is to always just have your own back and not consider the consequences in a weird way. Yeah, I don't care for this. It's this problem of like, like obviously I'm not in favor of, I think it's good that we get to vote regularly on a new government, but there are aspects of it that are dumb.

And one of the things that's dumb about it is that it means our entire foreign policy changes on a dime every four to eight years. And maybe there's a way to have a government where we still get to vote out leaders regularly, but also we don't whiplash our allies every time someone with a different opinion winds up. I don't know. Maybe there's a way to figure that out. God, you would think. Or like, just keep it. I don't even know. Like it's so, it's so tough to think about because like, I mean, more so when you were talking, I started thinking a lot about my Iranian family and hoping.

I feel like the best outcome would be that the U.S. understands that the attacks were the missiles that were just fired are in retaliation of them killing Soleimani. And they just take it as that to go, okay, that's enough. And that they don't retaliate until you're on. Because I feel like this country can't, I don't even know like what to think, like we can't stand here and then be like, okay, well, let's just all vote. Like it doesn't, nothing makes sense anymore. And I'm really starting to become a little unraveled as we go on. I don't know. I really, it doesn't even feel like just being like, well, we got to get out there and vote them out is enough.

It's like, why is no one taking this person out of the control? Like it seems so, I feel so lost currently. I don't know what I want. I just want it to be done. I want this man to be out and I don't want, I don't want anyone else to die. Is that like just too like, I don't know, naive? I mean, like right now, the most recent news that just came out after the Iran launched missiles into the Al-Assad airbase near Erbil is that one of the advisors to Iran's supreme leader, a guy named Said Jalili, posted to Twitter a picture of the Iranian flag. And if you'll remember when Trump announced, Trump announced the killing of Soleimani basically by just tweeting a picture of the American flag.

And it just, it keeps getting dumber. Like, like, don't, that's not the direction it should be heading where we just post flags and shoot missiles at each other. That's not a, oh boy. I'm not happy with that development. Yeah, and also it just came out that Iranian officials are warning that if the U.S. retaliates to the strikes that Iran just launched, Hezbollah will fire rockets at Israel. So that's, this is all going great. In real time, everybody. Fun one.

Super cool. Oh boy. I mean, I think- Boy howdy. The best we can do is understand that we did something we shouldn't have done without a plan and now we have no plan and now we're here and it's like, what are we supposed to do? You can't go into Iran. You just can't do it. You cannot go start a war with Iran.

You definitely can't go start like a foot war with Iran. You're not, this isn't, this is absurd. No one's going to survive this. You're not going to put these four military, the U.S. military does not deserve this. They do not deserve to have to fly troops out there while they're literally telling troops to get the fuck out of here. This is not good. No, here we are. It's fundamentally like you, one of the things that was really frustrating in the lead up to the fucking election is that there would be all these guys who are ostensibly on the left who would be like, well, Donald Trump at least is like our best bet.

Like this is someone I really respect otherwise, Jeremy Scahill over at the Intercept, something that said something like, Trump is the best, might be our best bet for like not getting America involved into any new wars. And it was like, if you listen to his actual rhetoric, he was never anti war. He was just anti actually like committing like he was never anti war. He was anti the only thing about war that isn't all negative, which is like the ability to build long term relationships and potentially stability in areas at the cost of lives and a significant amount of money. Like what we had helped to achieve in chunks of northeast Syria, like what we helped to achieve in chunks of northern Iraq. And he was against that stuff. He was not against murdering people and sending in troops as long as he got to steal oil from people. Like that was the thing that Trump said is like number one, he's fine with fucking bombing the shit out of people.

And number two, he thinks when we're involved in a country militarily, we should get to take half their oil. Like he was always just a pirate. Just a bunch of idiots trick themselves into thinking he was anti war because they hated Hillary Clinton. It's just so frustrating. How dumb people were. And now we're seeing like, yeah, he's just sending more troops into the Middle East and they're getting shot at by rockets. And he's bombing sovereign nations that are on paper are military allies because it's just so dumb. It's so dumb.

Yeah, there's no logic. But do you think there's an adult in the room? Anywhere in this situation? Not, not anymore. I mean, the problem is that like everybody's convinced they're the adult and they're like these military guys, the guys who I suspect like pushed were part of what was pushing the assassination of Sulamani would say that like, no, we are the hard-nosed adults. We understand the realities of the world.

And this guy was a bad guy and he killed our men and like sometimes you got to take it to the bad guys. And I think Sulamani was a bad guy. I think he did some terrible things. I think his backing of the Assad regime was awful. But the right answer and the smart answer is not always killing everybody who does bad things, especially since for as much ugly shit as Sulamani did, you can find American generals who did a lot of similar things who are alive today. And Qasem Sulamani doesn't have nearly as much blood on his hands as say Henry Kissinger does. Like that's just a reality of the world is that if you go around missile striking everybody who has done bad things,

you will be at war with everybody and a lot more people will die. And it's not satisfying when you've lost a friend as a result of something that guy did, but that guy lost friends as a result of something some of your buddies did. Because like that's the fucking way this game is played. And I hate all of the people who actually consider it a game, which is most of the people that we talk about in stories like this. Like I hate them all. I was thinking the other day how circular history is.

I had a very dark thought where I was like, oh, this will never end. Like maybe relations will get better, maybe they won't, but we will be in this cycle forever. And it feels like it just happens and happens and happens. Whenever I get too trapped in that kind of thinking, one thing I like to think about is France and Germany. And France and England, which are all countries that were trapped in a centuries-long cycle of constant and incredibly bloody warfare. And now all of their teenagers fuck each other every summer and get drunk and take ecstasy and dance to electronic music. And there's never going to be a war between those three countries again.

And a ton of ugly blood between them. So I don't think it's hopeless. That's a good way to look at it. I can see that. Number one, it requires being like, well, okay, you have guys on your side who killed a lot of our guys and the shit they did was fucked up. We have guys on our side who killed a lot of your guys and that shit is fucked up. And at some point we have to stop taking vengeance on each other.

Otherwise, we're just going to keep killing each other and nothing's ever going to get better. And that is eventually France and Germany and England stopped counting who had killed more of the other sons and they just started taking ecstasy together in dance clubs. And that made things better. And yeah, we've had a digression a bit. We should get back to talking about Qasem Soleimani. Right. So in 2011, when the Syrian civil war started up, Soleimani ordered members of the Iraqi Shi'ite militias

he'd formed to resist the U.S. into Syria to support Assad's beleaguered military, which was, as it is now, completely incompetent. I was just watching a video the other day of 30 soldiers of the Syrian Arab army supported by a tank fleeing from nine Jihadi fighters in Idlib. It's just like, you guys still haven't figured out how to be a fucking military. Why were they fleeing? They're conscripts, they're poorly trained, they don't know what they're doing. They're only led by corrupt...

Only competent fighters in Syria on the side of the Syrian government are like Hezbollah and other like Iranian-backed militias. They have a lot of competent fighters. Yeah, I'm going to read a quote from the New Yorker about that. Soleimani also set up additional Shia militia groups. Forces under his command were instrumental in many of the major offensive during the Syrian war, including the recapture of Qasar from the rebels. So, most experts view Iran's support as embodied by Qasim Soleimani, because he is completely in charge of the Iranian effort in Syria,

is absolutely critical to Bashar al-Assad staying in power. And Qasim Soleimani is really the man who runs the Syrian civil war for the regime for a lot of the war. He is one of the top players and maybe the only competent one. Or at least, I mean, there's other competent Iranians involved. Nobody in the Syrian Arab army is very good at what they do. Now, today the SAA is obviously still not great, but the entrance of Iranian-backed militias, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, provided the regime with enough competent fighters to recapture critical cities like Aleppo

and swing the tide of war back in Assad's favor. And it's hard to exaggerate how much human misery this has been responsible for. The siege of Aleppo alone cost thousands of lives, and the fact that Assad's regime survives has allowed them to, among other things, incarcerate and torture to death around 100,000 people. This was all done, or at least the support of the Assad regime by Soleimani, was done for nationalist motivations. He was fighting for Iran more than anything else.

Yeah, so we've gone into why that's critical for them, and why they see it as a matter of sort of national survival to support Syria in this war. So yeah, I think that's important to understand. So while almost every U.S. attempt at projecting power and influence in the Middle East over the last 20 years has ended an object failure, mass death, and unspeakable expense, Qasem Soleimani and his Quds Force have been extremely successful in spreading Iranian power across the region. Thanks to a network of militias and an incredibly successful political influence campaign, Iran now has deep connections to the government of Iraq,

basically owns the government of Syria, and maintains a sizable base of power in Lebanon. In addition to that, they also have a huge base of control and support in Yemen, because the Houthi militias that are currently fighting against the Saudi-led coalition are backed by Iran, and they spend millions per week supporting the Houthis, and the Saudis spend billions per week bombing them. And it's kind of the opposite of the case in Syria. In Syria, Iran is definitely on support of the side that has killed the most innocent people. In Yemen, they are on support of the side that is fighting against the people who are murdering civilians by the thousands.

The Saudi-led coalition has been responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in Yemen. So this is always very fucking complicated when we talk about these different conflicts. And I'm not going to give the Iranian campaign sort of in Yemen as much time as it deserves. But it's important to see like when Qasem comes to power in charge of the Quds Force, like other than like Hezbollah, which is still at that point kind of nascent in Lebanon, they don't have a lot of influence in the rest of the region. And by the time Qasem Soleimani is killed, the Iraqi government is on his side. There are 150,000 Shia militiamen backed by Iran who are like Iraqis.

There are Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been responsible for keeping the government in power, and the government owes Iran billions of dollars. Hezbollah is one of the most dominant forces in Lebanon. And Iran has a huge amount of influence and dominance in Yemen as a result of their support of the Houthis. That's all Soleimani is doing. That's a huge amount of power and influence. And you have to compare how Iran's ability to project power in the Middle East has changed in 20 years to how the United States has, where in a lot of ways it's completely collapsed

as a result of the fact that we're incredibly inconsistent. We don't tend to run our campaigns competently. It's one of those things on a purely intellectual level. He's very good at what he did. He had an incredibly successful career, almost breathtakingly so. Yeah, he did. It's pretty wild. Yeah, he's a very influential fellow. Now, for most of 20 years, Qasem traveled with near impunity from Baghdad to Damascus

to the suddenly frontline outposts and battlefields of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars. In the years since 2011, he went from a silent background figure, which is appropriate for a spy master, to a highly public war hero, constantly photographed standing on trucks surrounded by fighters. His image grew even more prominent after 2013, when ISIS began its bloody march across the Middle East. The Shia militias that Qasem had spent years building were some of the few capable forces in Iraq during the early stages of the civil war, when the soldiers of the Islamic State were at the gates of Baghdad. The role these militias played in stopping ISIS is wildly overstated now online, but in the early days of the civil war, they were quite important.

As the war drug on and the Iraqi army reformed and retrained other units, including the famous Golden Division and the counterterrorism forces, these forces did the vast majority of the actual fighting to retake Iraq from Daesh. When I was there, we ran into the Hashd al-Shabi militias, which are the popular mobilization forces, the Iranian-backed militias, now and again. But it really was most of the fighting, like the recapturing of Fallujah and Mosul. It was like Golden Division and CTS forces more than anything else that did a lot of that fighting. Where the popular mobilization forces were critical was when ISIS was moving on Baghdad and stuff,

as the West struggled to get its act together and providing useful support. You don't want to denigrate and say that they didn't have an impact in stopping the spread of ISIS, because they absolutely did. But the idea that Sulaimani and his militias beat ISIS, it ignores thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Sunni Iraqis who did the bulk of the actual fighting against Daesh. Anyway, I should note that my source on this take is not just due to my own biased recollections from my time in Iraq, it's also due to other sources within the Iranian government.

Because the intercept recently published a leaked archive of secret Iranian spy cables that they got their hands on somehow. These cables came from members of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, which tends to be pretty antagonistic towards the Quds Force. Because again, and this is another frustrating thing, you read about coverage of this and Iran this, Iran that, and to a certain extent it's hard not to when you're talking about multiple different nations. But there are a number of different forces within the Iranian government that want different things. Can you explain to me why the intelligence is not fans of the Quds? Yeah, as I understand it, it kind of goes back to, like we were saying,

you have the revolution and the Shah is out and the new government doesn't really trust the military or the existing security apparatus. You're not going to tear all of that down because it's too much of a pain in the ass to do so, but you also don't trust them. So the revolutionary guard and the Quds Force come out as a way for the clerics to kind of have their own military and intelligence machine. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security is basically the descendant of the older standing security services in Iran. And so they're not the Quds Force and in a lot of ways they view them as kind of an enemy because they're like opposed sort of forces. They're more antagonistic, opposed isn't quite the right word, but I hope I've gotten that across to some extent. I'm not an expert on this. I've never read up on that or even really thought about it.

It never occurred to me, but it really makes sense because there's so many working, like you said, forces in Iran. I tend to forget sometimes that the whole era before the revolution was just a different time. And while they did try and eliminate the majority of that influence, certain things are still kind of working within Iran just because they're needed to be. Yeah, you're not going to fire all of the police and stuff overnight, especially since you need those people to help you assert your power now. But then you don't trust them and you build your own structure and things move on from there. That's the understanding that I have. So anyway, a bunch of these cables from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security about these guys talking about Soleimani and his militias in Iraq leaked out. And these are all from 2013 to 2015.

And I'm going to quote from that intercept article now. Well, the Iranian-led war against ISIS was raging. Iranian spies privately expressed concern that the brutal tactics favored by Soleimani and his Iraqi proxies were laying the groundwork for major blowback against the Iranian presence in Iraq. Soleimani was also criticized for his own alleged self-promotion amid the fighting. Photos of the Iranian commander on battlefields across Iraq had helped build his image as an iconic military leader. But that outsized image was also turning him into a figure of terror for many organized Iraqis or for many ordinary Iraqis. In some documents, intelligence officers criticized Soleimani for alienating Sunni Arab communities and helping to create circumstances that justified a renewed American military presence in Iraq. A 2014 MOIS document limited that partly because Soleimani broadcasted his role as commander of many of the Iraqi-Shia militias fighting ISIS.

Iraqi Sunnis blamed the Iranian government for the persecution that many were suffering at the hands of these same forces. The document discussed a recent assault by Iran-backed forces against ISIS fighters in the Sunni farming community of Jurf al-Sakhar. The attack had included a number of Shia militia groups, including a notorious outfit known as a Saib al-Hak, which is also the guys who fired missiles at those U.S. bases a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days ago. The militias succeeded in routing the Islamic State, but their victory soon gave way to a generalized slaughter of locals, transforming the sweetness of Iran's triumph into bitterness in the words of one case officer. This is that case officer talking. It is mandatory and necessary to put some limits and borders on the violence being inflicted against innocent Sunni people in Iraq and the things that Mr. Soleimani is doing. Otherwise, the violence between Shia and Sunni will continue, the MOIS report continued. At the moment, whatever happens to Sunnis directly or indirectly is seen as having been done by Iran, even when Iran has nothing to do with it.

And this is another part of the complexity here, and we're talking about if you're trying to get a fair assessment of Soleimani's role vis-à-vis ISIS, you have to account the fact that he formed these militias, which were a part of defeating ISIS. You also have to take into account that a big part of why ISIS gained a foothold in Iraq is because these Shia militias, particularly in places like Mosul, brutally suppressed and executed Sunnis, based in a large part on long-standing local different arguments and hatreds between Sunni and Shia, but Iran then supported those guys by giving them weapons, so they were able to carry out these blood debts. And that provided fuel for the Sunni uprising that ISIS really represented in Iraq, so that then some of these Sunnis could get guns and kill Shias. And a lot of what I saw when I was over in Mosul was people complaining about the Iran-backed militias and the violence they were carrying out against Sunnis. Again, in response for a lot of violence that Sunnis who had supported Iraq had carried out, and they're like, this is just going to cause another cycle of violence between Sunni and Shia and Mosul, and it's like, fuck this shit. This is all very messy. Now, in these documents, Iranian officers speculated that much of the propaganda campaign to turn Soleimani from a secretive spy chief into a public hero had to do with his hopes of a future campaign to be president of Iran.

And this is one angle you're going to hear about Soleimani a lot, that he was being groomed, or at least grooming himself, to become the next president of Iran. This is possible, but I think some other theories might also be possible. Maybe he would take on the next supreme leadership. Yeah, I think that's really possible. The two real possibilities is that, A, he was being groomed and sort of like pushing himself to either be the president or the next supreme leader of Iran. Totally possible. He had the kind of reputation where that could have happened. I think the other possibility is that the Iranian government and Soleimani himself were preparing for him to be killed by the United States and wanted him to be a potent symbol when it happened.

Really? They were assuming it was going to happen and that he was trying to provoke that assassinate. I think it's possible. Wow, you just blew my mind. I don't know. I mean, obviously, I don't know. But I think both are possible. So starting in 2013 with that New Yorker article, Qasem Soleimani's most frequent public appearances were at funerals for deceased Quds Force soldiers.

For years Qasem made a point of meeting with the families of martyrs. And here's an excerpt from one part of the article talking about his visit to the funeral of a comrade who died fighting in Syria. Quote, he has a fierce attachment to martyred soldiers and often visits their families in a recent interview with Iranian media. He said, when I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell their scent and I lose myself. I think that's something that probably made more sense in the original Farsi than it does translated into English. As the funeral continued, he and other mourners bent forward to pray, pressing their foreheads onto the carpet. One of the rarest people who brought the revolution and the whole world to you is gone. As a Panahan, the Imam told the mourners, Soleimani cradled his head in his palm and began to weep. So in public appearances, number one, Soleimani is constantly at the funerals of martyrs, constantly honoring these soldiers who have died in his command. And he's very humble about his own history, even mocking his short stature by describing himself as the smallest soldier.

He's infamous for refusing to let audience members kiss his hand at public appearances. But online, he was a lot less humble. You can't be having randos kiss your hand. But there's a lot of random kissing in that part of the world. True, but cheek to cheek, you keep it light. You keep it light. Practice at this. Don't kiss my hands. Now, so he's trying to be humble like in person and at these events, and that's clearly a big part of his image, but he also has a big online presence. And before it was shut down in 2019, his official Instagram had more than 800,000 followers. Pretty good gram.

Now, for its part, the government of Iran, pretty good gram. For its part, the government of Iran devoted significant resources to burnishing a cult of personality around Soleimani. The supreme leader of Iran referred to Qasem Soleimani pre-assassination as a living martyr of the revolution. Now, martyrdom became an increasing theme in later public appearances of Soleimani. In 2014, Defopressed at IR, which is a website popular among internal Iranian security insiders, published the text of a speech Soleimani had made back in 2007. They republished it in 2014, praising the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. I'm going to read it from a write-up in the Middle East Media Research Institute here. Well, and that he will not deny me this mighty blessing granted to outstanding individuals.

So, I think there's an argument that maybe, and that because like one of the things that, you know, the U.S. will argue provoked our assassination of Soleimani, is the fact that a few days before that Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, like the same one that committed one of the massacres during the fighting against ISIS, fired missiles at a U.S. Iraqi joint base and killed an American contractor. And that was like, that's sort of like part of what the U.S. used to justify this, like killing Soleimani. And I, part of me wonders, like, it seems clear he's being set up for something. It was either politics or because they wanted this guy to be famous and beloved and well-known, and they wanted to provoke the U.S. doing something dumb. To take him out, because then he's a martyr, and then you can use him to galvanize resistance to the United States,

which is a big part of Iran's foreign policies, to galvanize resistance to the United States. And right now, Qasem Soleimani has become a symbol of resistance to the United States, two millions of Shiites across the Middle East. His picture hangs over streets on banners from Beirut to Baghdad right now. So, I don't know, I don't know what the actual case is. It's also, he's like, his funeral has been used by the government to kind of try to unify people in the wake of, there were just a bunch of massive protests in Iran. And the Quds Force, you know, under the command of Soleimani, had like something like 1,500 anti-government protesters killed during like this uprising. And now, I think they're kind of using his assassination and like this aggression by the United States.

The attempt at least is to kind of pull the country back together. It's fucking hard to say what the actual plan was, or if there was a plan, or if I'm reading too much into this. He's a spy commander, chief guy, so part of me is like, you know, maybe there was a deep plan here. Maybe he just wanted to be supreme leader or president, and he'd ever thought that we would do something this dumb. Either way, I'm just seeing now that the president is going to address the country later tonight, so that's probably not going to be good. I hope it's him saying he is tapping out, because god damn. I don't think that is what's happening. Oh god.

Well, here's hoping for the best. Pray for the people of Iran, pray for the people of Iraq. Pray for the people in the Middle East who will suffer because of what is to come, thanks to the lack of adults in the room. Pray for, yeah, the lack of adults in the room. Well. I would say more, but I have a bit of, I think I'm in a bit shock over everything that's kind of slowly pouring out in the news. And I need to go talk to my Iranian family members and make sure everyone's good to go, because that's all I have is a telegram app to make sure they're okay. Because that's the way it goes sometimes when your entire family lives in Iran and you have no sense of communication, and this is the darkest fucking times.

And we can only pray for this to end soon and for no more people to die. Yeah, well, the U.S. just banned all civilian flights over the Gulf region, so that's not a great sign. Oh yeah, Jesus, interesting. Yep. Yeah. I mean, everyone needs to tone it down. That's just my, that is my final thought is tone it down. Take a chill pill bro.

Yeah. Yep. Which is, that's, I feel like now a lot of people are going to get stuck in Iran, like American nationalists, because you have to go over the Gulf, right? Yeah, and there's a bunch of journalists there who were there from the United States to like report on the funerals and stuff, which I mean, on one end, assuming they don't get taken into custody by the security forces, is kind of a sweet position to be in as a journalist if you're the only people on the ground when something like this happens. But I don't think it's, I think it's going to be pretty horrific all around. Yeah. Well, if you're listening and if you're in any of those places, you're in our thoughts and just stay safe.

Yeah. That's all you can do. Yep. I wish this could be more uplifting, but I don't know. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the big question is, is this going to be a series of terrible airstrikes and missile strikes on Iran? Or is Donald Trump going to actually send in ground troops? Either way, probably a bad idea.

Yes. Yep. Yes, this is not, this is not good. This is not good. And those are my final thoughts. This is not good. Back to you, Robert. What if I was just the worst journalist?

This is not good. Well, that's the episode. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pod. You can find us on the internet behind the bastards.com. Keep the people of Iraq and Iran and Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, all in your hearts and hope that the fewest possible number of people die. And what's about to happen? There's really nothing else to say. Yeah. We also fucked David Froome.

Yeah. Fuck that guy. He's tweeting about all of this shit right now and he should not be. No. Shut the fuck up about the Middle East, David. Truly. Okay. Well, the episode's over.

Oh, thank God. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.