TRASHFUTURE - At the Zagros Mountains of Madness feat. Séamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

This week, we’re talking Iran escalation and Donald Trump’s genius strategy of galvanizing a nation, but there’s a little more nuance than normal. So, Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum join special guest Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek), who’s a writer and analyst working in Beirut. This one will stimulate the logic center of your brain more than a thousand Ben Shapiro podcasts. Hope you enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *COME SEE MILO* If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour

So I was going to the mall, the ABC mall near Verdun, which is near to the south of the city. And I was listening to the latest episode of this, this lovely podcast about the, the OYO hotel scam that doesn't make sense. And I was walking past an army checkpoint. There are a lot of them in the city. They're not uncommon, but I didn't hear them. I was walking into an army checkpoint. There are a lot of them in the city. They're not uncommon, but I didn't hear them. I was walking into a restricted area. I was just kind of laughing along,

you know, talking about the upholstery and no, wow. What a, what a system. And then I heard one of them whistle at me, not in the sexual way, but, but in a way to signal me.

And he had, he had his hands on his his his kalishnikov as ak-47 and he directed me to get the hell out of the area because you were doing the virgin walk with like the headphones oh you should have been doing you should have been doing the Chad walk listening to the Romaniacs. That's true. How many people has our podcast killed or almost killed? Oh, well, there is one fan of ours

did get run over by a car while jogging and listening to us. Was he wearing a shirt that said, ouch? That is the question. He's fine, but we did give him a free shirt no do not get yourself a free shirt by getting yourself run over by a car that is not the way we endorse

or did we say we were going to and then be too no we did do it okay we did do it all right so if so i think that's that puts the um people put in direct mortal danger by our podcast to two that we know about also means that we have been militarily defeated by the lebanese army Hello and welcome back to Trash Future, the podcast that has nearly claimed a couple of lives by accident. I am Riley and I'm here in studio with Hussein, who's on the boards. On the boards, probably fucking this up. Like, I feel, I look at these kind of, I'm looking at these bars right now and I'm just feeling so anxious. But like Nate's just going to disown me and I'm going to end up having to go to TriggerPod to get a job.

So any complaints with the audio? At Alex Keeley. At Alex Keeley. A blast from the past there. Yes. We also have Nate who got distracted by doing some DIY and is calling in. I'm calling in from home in the house that podcasting built because I was building a dresser with Milo Edwards and I forgot what time it was and realized it was so late.

I couldn't get in in time and I didn't want to just be a no-show on my own program. So here I am podcasting from my house, from my office. See, this is the problem with Big Wife because once you like site once you like get in the pocket of big wife like you can no longer just like sleep on a mattress on the floor and you can no longer like just keep like bowls in a box you have to build shelves you have to you have to get out of the wife deal is the thing yeah the the poly bonds of the jcpoa uh we also have alice calling in from neutral Glasgow. Yes, we do. I think it's very optimistic, by the way, that we think we've only killed people on accident.

And we also have from sunny Beirut, Seamus Malikavzili. Seamus, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. I'm enjoying the lovely neighborhood and all that Lebanon has to offer. So if you don't know, Seamus is an analyst, a journalist covering Iran. He actually is fluent in Farsi, and he's one of the most sort of knowledgeable people that you can talk to about this situation going on. I imagine that's why you're in Beirut now. You're not just there on holiday like Pete Buttigieg went to Somaliland.

No, no. I am currently going to the American University of Beirut to study media and communication. And additionally also do journalism here that I can't do in Eugene, Oregon. You're on a long hiking trip like Shane Bauer Jesus Christ I'm gonna cry ah yes the three people on Skype really get that one look you have to leave it in

because people will like it but i know shane this is why like i'm a little bit like um okay so uh we are we have uh another iran episode today where we're going to talk about um what the what the u.s iran relationship means what it means for the u.s to be an imperial power in in the 21st century how that's different from how it used to be and how it's the same but first of all we have to revisit some old friends we must we must revisit some old friends because sometimes sometimes there is a letter that is sent. Sometimes these are significant letters of history. And one has been sent most recently. Dear Zoom team members.

That was a weird way for the Iraqi parliament to open that withdrawal letter. I always get confused with like Zoom and Zune. Oh, yes. Zune user, send us a message if you're out there. If there's the one person who's still listening to our podcast on a Zune, please do tell us. No. So there has been a letter sent by the CEO of Zoom, a SoftBank-backed, quote-unquote, Amazon of food by the CEO, basically informing them of the following since zoom was founded nearly

five years ago we have been blessed with an opportunity to invent brave and innovative solutions intended to improve our global food system uh by the way just just for everyone counting at home and as a reminder their innovation was a truck that makes pizza while it drives to you that is brave it was brave in the face of food critics who all said it sucked um they say clamoring for this it gets so much better so fast i can't even begin to describe it um so without recapitulating too much old ground just so we know what we need to know for this zoom was a startup that was a couple of pizza delivery vans in san francisco that made the pizza robotically on its way to you but actually what it

did is just it finished and reheated it and then sliced it robotically on its way to you it was still mostly made by people in a warehouse. It was horrible. It almost failed. Was rescued by SoftBank with a $4 billion valuation. Then they did 30 different projects at once, one of which was spending two weeks Googling pizza boxes to try to invent a new one. And what they invented was a round one.

But the revolution was that it was made from plant fibers. Unlike cardboard, which isn't made of plant fibers, it's like a moon material that doesn't grow on earth naturally of course it's made of tree fibers which trees are different from plants yeah they're um they're they're animal vegetable mineral tree um

that's the the zoom food pyramid anyway the letter goes on our because when the ceo sends you a letter that says since zoom was nearly founded five years ago, you know it's good. Ours is a broad agenda, including new methods to produce food, deliver it, and package it in increasingly sustainable ways. Today, our mission is the same and requires the same bold thinking, but with increased focus.

I'm going to pause here. What do we think the theme of this letter is? You're all losing your jobs. What are they announcing? Yeah, everybody fired. Clean out your shit. Security will be escorting you. Seamus, what do you think the theme of this letter is?

I'm going to have to agree with Alice here. This is the perfect grandiose intro to be told that everyone is going to starve to death we have been blessed with this opportunity to yeah no everybody's so fired we've been blessed with this opportunity to right size our organization

this was the company because I think I was away when you recorded this but this was the company that like made the kind of round box right and like there was no point building this box um so my my thinking is is that someone has been like well why don't we put it in a box that's shaped like an octagon oh it tessellates you can stack more it's the perfect it's the perfect perfect midway point between a circle and a square. And there's a co-branding opportunity with the UFC.

Just step inside the pizza to go. No, it will still taste like dog shit because they're committed to making it with as many robots as possible. So the next paragraph of the letter goes, As we move forward with this new strategy, this is points for Alice and Seamus, many of the current roles at Zoom will no longer exist. They no snap them.

You're not doing anything to them. They just no longer exist. It's like the Twilight Zone episode with the little boy. Yeah, what happens is that they've um they've um what happens is that they've been caught in a time travel paradox and now many of the roles at zoom have been terminated before they actually begun you're just looking at the big photo wall of all the employees and seeing in horror yourself fading out of it yeah just everyone everyone in almost every division like sales marketing pizza operations, just photos all fading.

But they just go on. And we regret we must say goodbye to a number of our valued friends and fellow, get ready for this one, Zoomers. Oh, no. Next thing you know, they're all going to become trad. They're all going to fucking throw their beers and wear sundresses and be very decent. gonna become trad they're all gonna fucking throw their beers and wear sundresses and be very decent yeah what is zoom pizza but trad wife food gore at an industrial scale but that never escaped san francisco yes that's horrifying you know it's basically it's trad wife food gore but it's the jetsons it's all the politics of the jetsons with all the automation of the jetsons

and all of the corporate like commercial feasibility of the companies of the Jetsons with all the automation of the Jetsons and all of the corporate commercial feasibility of the companies in the Jetsons. The letter goes on. These decisions were incredibly difficult as we could not have reached our current success without the talents of these same people. What success? What success?

You're firing everybody from your box company. Also, it's like, it's like, okay, so you couldn't have reached your current success without the talents of these same people, fuck off though, bye, bye forever. Yeah. I- also, like, I- just, I know in my heart that the talents that they're talking about, and the employees that they're talking about, is one person who knows how to make a 3D model of a box and 50 social media people. And just, yeah. No, I feel bad for them.

But in terms of the talents, the talent that's being deployed is mostly making people on podcasts aware of you. I mean, success. Yeah, absolutely. If your measure of success is being mentioned on Trash Future three separate times, congratulations, you did it.

Three-time champion. So what they've actually done is they have closed down every single element of their business except the one that ever made an actual sale which is their box division so that's it then after 20 years of service goodbye and good luck i don't recall saying good luck no of course the correct simpsons reference here is, I don't know what kind of world-changing startup you're thinking of. We just make boxes here. Oh.

Yeah. They literally just make boxes here now. So basically they've decided that because they invented making cardboard out of plants, a thing that's never been done before, they now have the future in their own hands, which is to make round pizza boxes. And they don't need to make pizza, but they're still a tech company somehow.

They're still very much a tech company. Now they're not handcuffed to their failing pizza division. They can just make boxes in all kinds of new varieties and dimensions. The world's their oyster. They can make a box that's like a Dyson sphere.

They can make a box that's like a Dyson sphere. They could make a box that's a hypercube. Yeah, I love to, like, open my special containment vessel to, like, get at my fucking, like, I don't know, my parcel of sex dildos or whatever. So, like, also, here's the other thing, and this is Seamus, like, I can't help but thinking, someone listening to this right now is so mad that these morons were given just billions and billions of dollars in Saudi oil

or given a billion dollars valuation in Saudi oil wealth that they're just like on purpose going to walk through a checkpoint they're just gonna stop holding on to any railing that they're holding on to like don't do that stay safe do not let do not let the content of this show blackpill you yeah just just wearing my stilettos out in an icy morning uh yeah wonderful um okay i'm gonna say one more thing about this and then we're gonna move on to to some Iran stuff. This is from a previous interview in June. This is about the packaging. This is why it's such a unique product. Alex Garden says, we take the sugar cane

and turn it into something wonderfully compostable. Essentially... Okay, okay. I know you can't compost pizza boxes, though. Well, these are going to get on you. You can't recycle it. What?

No, this will repel the grease because it's made of leaves. Yeah. Don't worry, they're going to invent next the greaseless pizza. Oh, okay. It's all around about way. Okay.

What if they had an idea where if you could fold the pizza in half, that way the grease stays inside? Yeah. When you start up, it's cow zone, but it just has all of the vowels removed, so it's just like... I'm going to do a start called cow no-go zone.

Essentially, he continues, as we scale more, it helps save the world. Yeah, fucking why not? Why not? You know, sure. It is written in multiple pieces of scripture. Whoever makes a better pizza box saves

the life of the world entire. Is that a Hadith? I mean, I didn't know that the Tal talmud was about pizza but i wouldn't be surprised all things considered we just have like an hour-long halakhic discussion about whether or not you can apply that to the creation of pizza boxes should man create pizza boxes in the image that god created the man i love the idea but also that it would be like the Talmud, that someone would be arguing that and then another person like 100 years later be like, you're a fucking idiot and you are an Afro to God. In a way, the first podcasters. Oh my goodness, you're right.

So yeah, that's our update with Zoom. They pivoted away from whatever it was they were doing and have pivoted towards some new shit and i'm excited to see what they pivot to next um maybe financial services you know perhaps they could just take all the money that they've been given by softbank and just put it all on red wouldn't it like make sense that they would pivot to like a dna company oh yeah using this like spit samples from like pizza crusts? Oh yeah you can pay- I bet there won't be any spit because it's greaseless pizza so it just sucks all

the moisture out of your mouth. You're just like dying of dehydration eating this slice of pizza as it just like- like a lemon like it just fucking sucks all of the like water out of your body. No you pay for it by spitting into a vial and then they own your dna that's how it's gonna work okay so as anyway uh alex garden says as we scale more it helps save the world and as of the recording of this episode we seem to have narrowly avoided a global conflagration not actually because of the restraint shown by the iranian government in response to sort of multiple

US provocations increasing in intensity, but instead because Alex Garden, CEO of Zoom Pizza, now Zoom Box Factory, has saved the world by doing some shit with sugar cane. So I guess we can cancel the Iran section. Yeah.

Yeah, we just do more box apologetics instead. Yeah. So, Seamus, now that we no longer need to talk about Iran, are you cool talking about boxes for the next 45 minutes? What's your perfect Sunday? Oh, God. Take out the cardboard box, just sitting in all day. This is just soaking in the air.

Okay, so, unfortunately, we live in the real world where Alex Garten has not been able, yet, to save the world from some unspecified threat. Not with that attitude, Riley. Well, not yet. A couple days, man.

Stop being so defeatist about this. Look, Alex Garten just needs to find the right pivot, and then he can save the world from whatever threat we're saving it from with a round box. His pitch can basically be like every country where Zoom operates, there will be no wars, right? Same with, like, didn't McDonald's? Right. Yeah, the Democratic Zoom peace theory. That was proven wrong, though.

Oh, right. Yeah, that was proven wrong though oh right yeah that was a proven wrong in georgia right yeah yeah yeah it's not even real anymore man nothing's real i mean technically that was a franchise of mcdonald's so actually um yeah yeah everyone's everyone's like sinecure job at the atlantic writing about how like you know two like two countries in which the x factor has been broadcast have never put economic sanctions on one another or whatever, they can all keep their jobs because they were technically right. So we don't live in that world.

We live in a world of messy imperialist shit and we're going to talk a little bit about it. So I'm going to do a little bit of a table setting right now and then Seamus I'm going to ask you if I've missed anything from my summary of the situation. A beautiful tables, I'm going to ask you if I've missed anything from my summary of the situation. A beautiful tablescape you're going to craft for us. So a group of Iranian-backed

protesters in Iraq basically owned the U.S. embassy really hard some days ago. The U.S. responded to this with the international version of, hey, you get off my lawn, which to them is, of course, assassinating one of the most powerful, important and beloved figures in Iran. Iran responded to this with an outpouring of national grief, clarifying to the world that their cheers of death to America is a political statement about America's leadership and general role as a global menace. It then conducted a hyper-competent missile attack that basically involved a circus level trick shooting. So they only leveled the porta potties of several U.S. occupied bases.

They didn't quite stick the landing and also accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. And all the people who supported the U.S. shooting down an Iranian passenger airliner in 1988 are not taking the shut the fuck up forever wagging your finger at Iran challenge. Trump then said all is well and Rouhani has made it clear that direct hostilities won't increase further. Seamus, have I more or less summarized the situation, and what have I missed? Okay. I'm just going to need to clarify a few things. Just... It's fine. Please get my ass.

Okay, so the group of protesters in Iraq, just for some clarification, they were a different set of protesters than the ones that were protesting the Iraqi government previously. And also there was a lot of militia members who were running back in that crowd and they attempted to break in. After that, the

phrase circus level trick shooting, at least there was, I think, a a map uh satellite photo that was released that showed uh that they had hit the air control tower uh as well as some barracks so i wouldn't wouldn't say it was just porta potties i don't know i don't know if there are port-a-potties in those, uh, in the buildings that were hit. Uh, and, uh, also,

yeah, the Ukrainian jetliner was after making, after making, I mean, the, the, that, that wound is still very,

very fresh in that Iran tried. It's utmost to avoid basically all American casualties or Iraqi casualties by alerting people and maneuvering around it. And only an hour after attempting to be that diligent, they immediately accidentally blow up an airplane full of 176 people. That is absolutely the timeline. full of 176 people. That is absolutely the timeline. That is the perfect timeline that we live in, is to play this beautiful

aria on a Stradivarius for an hour and a half and have everybody rapt and silent and then on the final note just taking the violin and turning it upside down in your hands, winding up and aiming it directly at your own

dick just incredible it's it's just it's it's just an incredible fuck up of just insane proportions like oh and i'll go into the ramifications of it later on, but it's truly incredible how badly, I mean, not to put it in, I guess, light terms, but how badly they blew this layup where they had the propaganda victory of retaliating against the United States in a way that also did not result in further retaliation from the United States, but then killed hundreds of their own citizens and then immediately destroyed all the national unity that they have cultivated because of Soleimani's death. And now as we're recording this, there are protesters

out in the streets of Tehran calling for the resignation of Khamenei. So, good job, guys. Resign job guys resign you did it like just just incredible has soft has soft bank been an investment had made an investment in the in the like iraqi air defense forces like how the fuck did this happen no it's okay so i i can explain because um the head of the uh irgC Aerospace Division gave a press conference today. And the level of structural insanity that led up to this point, this is a rare admission of guilt from the attack on Al-Assad Air Base happened, there was a heightened state of alert, obviously, and there was a call out to put him in no-fly zone over Iran because of the threat of possibly cruise missiles from American retaliation.

from American Air Trial Alliance, that was not honored. Because there were a lot of airplanes already in the air, and there were departures that were already coming out from Tehran airport at the time that the missiles were flying. So eight flights have departed from Tehran airport with no issue, no issue at all. But then this Ukraine international airplane is flying and it shows up as a blip on the radar in this uh in this anti-aircraft battalion operator only one guy he sends a message back to his commander because he's worried that this could be a cruise missile and the tweet by uh trump threatening cultural sites in in Iran had put him on a heightened state of alert.

He doesn't receive a response back for 10 seconds. And he doesn't wait more than 10 seconds. But he thinks that the threat of the cruise missile is so great in potentially that he see fires the missile at the jet liner and uh in about a couple seconds it's it's it's in flames and it takes about two minutes uh for it to hit the ground uh if if you just wait a couple seconds longer and the the commander on the other line had been able to figure out the communication issue uh then this could have been avoided um and after that there was just this absolute fiasco uh that that occurred with this cover-up that there was so on wednesday apparently the elements of the irgc knew that this

had been an accidental shoot down and they wanted to to explain it. And this is the official government story. It's the sanitized version. I don't know if it's it's accurate or not, but even in this version, it's quite damning. So they went to higher ups in the IRGC to like, we need we need to we need to talk about this. we need to like talk about this um but instead the people who knew about the missile shoot down were quarantined and were prevented from speaking to the higher-ups and this means that uh the supreme leader uh the president um all uh the higher-ups in the irgc aviation officials who had to give out a press conference that uh there was no missile shoot down the concern of it they didn't know uh so they were deliberately prevented from explaining the truth about this matter and for three days uh they were just uh iranian aviation officials

were saying this was a mechanical error this was mechanical error um we're gonna do an investigation two years long uh we're gonna invite all the other countries into this we're gonna figure this out uh but then uh the united states said that they had intelligence uh saying that this was a missile shoot down yeah it was a cell phone video right like there were after after that very shortly after there was a cell phone video that came out and uh it very quickly was geolocated and it wasn't just a random cell phone video it was in the area that it happened and there were there were concerns from people uh like at the gray zone that it was it was potentially faked it was unverifiable but then there was a second

cell phone video that came out uh that showed the similar angle similar location uh showing the exact same scenario occurring and it became pretty clear at that point that um you don't have to trust the u.s like the u.s intelligence on this you don't have to you don't have to only go on that like there there's videos of it there's eyewitness accounts of it um there's videoewitness accounts of it um there's video there's images of the debris there's even an image potentially showing like the missile itself on the ground uh and then uh the irani aviation uh official gave a press conference uh yesterday saying that we're going to do investigation but we are certain with with

complete charity that there was no missile involved in this attack there was no missile fired and then later that night there was there was a message went out to the iranian press saying that they were going to reveal the real reason behind the uh ukrainian jetliner going down uh which surprised a lot of people since they just had a press conference explaining that uh and then of course today they admitted to it the irgc commander came out and said that he wished he was dead and that he didn't want to see this uh people are calling for uh irgc officials to resign um just politicians and uh from all stripes are apologizing and uh just

just a very very very large outpouring of grief and admission of guilt that is very very rare for the iran government i mean they did kill a lot of iranians right like that's got to be part of the majority the majority of uh the people on the ukrainian jet were uh iranians more specifically a lot of them were canadian iranians um there were lots of people there were images that were spread around the uh uh newspapers and persian outlets um a lot of people were coming back from like weddings uh birth like birthday parties, study abroad trips. Everybody, a lot of Iranian journalists that I spoke to, they either knew someone who was on that plane or they knew someone who knew someone who was on that plane. And diaspora communities, you know, they talk with their family back in Iran.

It's a very, very personal tragedy to a lot of people. Iran, it's a very, very personal tragedy to a lot of people. So, and additionally into that, you're all familiar with Iran Air Flight 655, right? Yes. You mentioned that. We'll get into this in the best, I suspect, but yeah. Yeah. That national trauma of having a flight shut down by the United States, it's still a very,

very fresh in the minds of a lot of iranians so to have that happen again by your own government it it it's not something that you just kind of easily whisk away and you say oh sorry it's all good it's an accident no no hard feelings no things things are going to get very difficult. It is the hell timeline because of all of the things that could have gone wrong. Like if they had killed a hundred something people literally any other way than just shooting down a commercial airliner with a surface to air missile, it wouldn't have been as acute a fuck up, I think. a fuck up I think So Seamus, I want to ask you then because I was listening to you on the Popular Front

podcast which is an independent conflict studies military affairs podcast and it's very good and I urgently recommend anyone who wants to listen to the story of who Soleimani was and what his significance was to Iran, I suggest you listen to that show that you were on. We'll link it in the

description. But you were talking about how Soleimani, when he was killed, it was this sort of national rallying moment for Iran because he was seen as sort of beyond the domestic politics of the country, even though he had political beliefs himself that were quite to the right, sort of anti-communist and so on. He was seen as this, as a national, sort of like a national, a figure of national respect. And when he was killed, there was this moment of unity among a relatively, you know, disunited and somewhat fractious polity. And now, after the downing of the airliner, Iran has kind of lost that moment of unity.

That would be an accurate assessment of that, yeah. There was, in between the strike on Al-Assad and now, when they admitted that they accidentally shot it down, and there was a bit of time where there was discussion about whether or not Ukraine international had been shot down if it was a mechanical error. There was kind of this limbo that many Iranians were in because they had been clamoring for, a lot of them had been clamoring for revenge. They'd been clamoring for a lot of them have been clamoring for revenge they've been clamoring for uh hard severe retaliation um and the iranian media despite the fact that it's it's kind of clear that they were trying to avoid american and iraqi casualties uh in the

media they had been claiming uh that 80 american soldiers had been killed, hundreds more injured, that this was a massive, catastrophic loss for the United States Army. I don't think really many people bought that, at least from my impression. But there was this limbo where, you know, what's going to come next? If Trump isn't really escalating the situation, and Iran has made it clear that they are not going really escalating the situation and iran has made it clear that they are not going to escalate situation it's it's if it's still a slap in the face to trump as uh their propaganda as iranian propaganda likes to uh state about it but it's not it's not it's not

this uh the thing that i would there's a there's a there's a movie that I would reference for the fantasy that many Iranians would hope would happen. It's a CGI animated movie called Battle of the Persian Gulf 2. It's a movie envisioning a world where Bassem Soleimani, he hears news that America is going to invade through the street of Hormuz and he's tasked with fighting off the invasion. And it ends with a massive kinetic strike from space that destroys the entire American Navy in this massive, like, like thing,

like it's this huge explosion to kill thousands of people. And that's kind of the nationalistic fervor that i think a lot of people whipped up into and after this no americans dead um still slap but it's not it's not much but after that there was that limbo period and then as we're kind of waiting for the american governments and the iranian governments to make their next move uh the admittance of the jetliner being shut down happens and all of that that kind of nationalistic unity all of that putting aside our differences to unite against the american enemy uh that all kind of wilts away very very very quickly uh When you put it like that, I'm kind of surprised that they did admit to it. Like, by that point, why not just kind of brazen it out, deny everything, and just sort

of let people live with the ambiguity? That's the thing. That's the thing that I think surprised a lot of people. And it also seemed to surprise people who were active within the Iranian government, because just before we started recording this, I saw a clip from Iranian state TV. There was a reporter asking someone on the street, should we have not admitted that we shut down this plane because this has given credence to our enemies? It's given them ammo.

That's certainly what the grey zone people I think that was their thing going in was like even if it is obvious that this was an Iranian shoot down why give the US the credit that attaches to that why not just deny everything

I think after there were a lot of factors into this but after the Iranian protests that just happened a couple months ago, where at the very lowest estimate, hundreds were killed, but the Iranian government has not released any casualty figures, dead or injured, to assuage any of these people's concerns about how many people were killed. how many people were killed so it's not like the iran government is necessarily uh it's not a commonplace thing to admit these things but i think considering the scale of the tragedy that's one thing but also as i said before iran air flight 655 that in the in the wake of that kind of tragedy when you have that kind of historical reference point, do you really want to go down? There are certain points that even the Iranian government will not cross. Do you really want to go down as the administration that lied to the Iranian people about a tragedy that befell the country 30 years ago, that same kind of tragedy?

Yeah, it's too stark a contra point. And I think, in fact, the other sort of point we can take from this as well is that this really gives the lie to the American view of what Iran is like. Because the fact that in the american foreign policy imagination iran has no account the iranian government has zero accountability to any of its citizens and can lie and steal and oppress freely and in the american government imagine american foreign policy imagination as far as the blob is concerned around dc um they they wouldn't care about shooting down a liner of their own people. And the

fallout from this entire incident has shown that that is what we all knew all along, which is that is such a childish, pointlessly Manichean worldview applied to foreign policy. It's also like a necessary Can I?

Come on in. It's also like a necessary can I come on in it's also like a necessary thing for them to entertain because and I said this from the outset which is that this isn't kind of like the killing of Qasem Soleimani this wasn't kind of the trigger that

would lead to a potential war. People have wanted war in America. They've wanted war with Iran for a long time. And the reason why is that they have this view of what Iran needs to be, because Iran needs to be set up in a particular way in order to, quote unquote, legitimately wage a war against it. And I think that what you've just said now is like a prime example of like the kind of vision that columnists are still portraying about iran as being this like unaccountable um top-down authoritarian uh do you know what i mean

yeah in the british imagination this is always framed in terms of the mullahs. Yeah, we have mullahs. What if we went back to miniskirts? Exactly. I was speaking with someone who was sort of very active in foreign policy in the 80s. I was speaking to him about this episode specifically. And he was saying that when you're thinking about Iran as it exists in the American imagination, and I'm sort of serving this up to the group here so you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, he says that you cannot overstate the extent to which the U.S. and U.K. are disappointed

when their ambition to create Iran is a Middle Eastern version of Japan, ultra-Western friendly did this sort of booming, some kind of booming tech economy that they would largely have sort of like some like control. Big guns and statues everywhere. Yeah. Just no one knows why. No one knows why.

Those plans were frustrated by coming into contact with the reality of the country. Yeah. You said it was like the loss of a lover. Yeah. Well, I mean, just like,

yeah, sorry, go ahead. And Seamus, I'm interested to hear what you have to say about that sort of theory that there is this psychological wound that it cannot be. I would agree pretty much wholeheartedly with that. Just to address a point that you made earlier about Iran being accountable to its citizens. Just to sort of go on a brief tangent here, if I may.

just to sort of go to brief tangent here, if I may. There's the real head-scratching problem about Iran is that it's both accountable to its citizens in some respects and also completely not. It's frustratingly, I don't really know how to describe this. There's a system in place that allows just enough dissent where you can criticize some policies, you can criticize some actions that are objectionable, even by these non-republic standards. But when you try to criticize the system itself, these non-repreb system itself, there's a massive crackdown on that kind of thinking. You have to think about everything in terms of

you can't question the Republic in that sense. You can't question the system in that sense. It's sort of like how people like to characterize the deep state in its original form in Turkey, right? You can have however many changes of government you want,

but you have to have the republic or else. I think that's- I don't know too much about the Turkish deep state, but that sounds fairly accurate, it sounds fairly comparable. Well, I mean, that's kind of like- I've been banging this drum for a while about, whenever sort of Western liberals want to do this thing of, oh, look at how backwards such and such a place is, because look at the laws that say you can't do this. I always want to point out that the way that governments work, the way that laws work, is a lot more flexible in practice than people understand.

And there's always going to be some amount of dissent or illegality or anything like that that's quietly tolerated at some times and not at others um and it is really difficult to get people uh to understand that even about well even about their own countries but yeah but i think like so much of like the ire towards iran from uh like neo like neo-conservatives and uh like just like liberal columnists and stuff tend to like they touch on the kind of structure of the islamic republic and i think for a lot of them like what when it comes what it comes down to deep down is the fact that the islamic republic has like survived and shiism in the region has not only survived but it's kind of gained a lot of power to the point where like iran is a power broker in the middle east um which is why we're seeing lots of weird things where like all these

kind of actual theocratic nations like saudi arabia and like these countries in the gulf all of a sudden like um western countries the united states are really keen on working with them really keen on working with guys and like right the problem problem with Shia Islam to all of this columnist set or whatever is that we bet against it, and we're not supposed to lose that bet. We went wholeheartedly in on the absolute worst people we could find just to set the stack that sectarian divide in favour of Sunnis. And like, yeah, no, you're not, you're not supposed to do that.

You're supposed to die quietly. But it also means that when we kind of talk about supporting dissenting Iranians, like often these, the people who are kind of saying that we support like, like dissent in Iran, we support kind of left-wing kind of union movements in Iran. And like the union movement in iran is like really

big it's like considerably big i don't know if it's really big but it's like considerably like larger than in most other countries in the region and when you hear like leftists in the west like talk about like when you hear liberals in the west rather talking about like the problems of iran it's very rarely about that it's very rarely about like of course actual kind of policies or laws it's always about like the aesthetics and fundamentally it's about why has the Islamic Republic survived? They never, I think, understand the revolution and the way that that panned out, and the involvement of socialists and communists and unionists and much more moderate clerics than Harmony who eventually succeeded. like uh yeah no you're

never going to get that that kind of understanding and instead you're going to get oh we support the iranian dissenters like uh the mujahideen akh oh my favorite my favorite group yes i was gonna i was gonna mention those guys yeah mujahideen akh as well but also i think the combination, too, from the neoconservative and the sort of rank-and-file American pro-war, pro-military person, a lot of it, in my opinion, comes from there's certainly a generational thing with people older than me. I'm 35, older than me who have some living memory of the hostage crisis. memory of the hostage crisis. And then also people who served in the U.S. military in Iraq are convinced that everyone who killed an American soldier was actually operating under the orders of the Iranian government. Or that, for example, things like explosively formed penetrators were all built in Iran and people who deployed them were Iranian and the Iranian militias were killing American soldiers. And to some extent, there were Shia militias in Iraq that had allies and training and advising from people in Iran. But the idea that the Iranian government was puppet mastering in my opinion the general pro-war american subconscious

absolutely believe it that's why it's so wild that uh killing solomani actually kind of came closest to making this real like to i think that's the only thing you could have done that could have made uh iraqi shia nationalists make common cause that quickly and that readily with iran would be to kill one of their guys next to one of iran's guys in iraq and make it an absolute joke that you ever even once considered iraq an actual sovereign state absolutely just just the absolute dumbest thing the United States has done in a very, very long time. It continues to astound me when I keep having to talk about it. We talked about this on What a Hell of a Way to Die, but basically we said there's the joke that when you get trained in this stuff in the military that you never give your commander

a joke or a bad or anally fake course of action to choose. But you certainly don't hand Donald Trump the option to fuck the moon. And sure enough, Donald Trump got on the fucking Apollo spacecraft and went up and stuck his dick in the moon rocks. And now we're living with the consequences of that. So absolutely. I'd like also I'd like to take us on a little bit, right? Absolutely. there. But I like the U.S. right as an imperial power, the U.S. needs Iran as an enemy, just as they needed Iran as a friend before the Islamic Revolution. So they could say, look, we're making

Japan in the Middle East. It's going to be great. We're going to have this sort of westernized country. Check out the miniskirts. Everyone's a fucking solid 10. And one of my questions is, right, is what purpose will Iran serve the U u.s what's what purpose does iran serve the u.s neoconservative imagination now that they're in a continued a continued stalemate with what nowhere left to go but to escalate i imagine and vice versa and what is the current threat posed to the entire fucking world by the u.sose I discussed this on my popular front interview which you should listen to listen to at home

the response to the killing of Soleimani by a lot of pundits for example at the Federalist there was that theater critic I think who was talking about is it John Podoritz? No not John Podoritz I wish it was John Podoritz.

He would have had something funny to say. Something saccharine. But he was a theater critic for the Federalists. He was talking about if you run, if you attack New York City, if you attack my home,

I'm going to level you, buddy. Oh yeah, I saw this yeah because because somebody from i think chopper or somewhere else dug up a tweet of his from like six months before that was like me zero uh 200 pound ceramic bathtub i was trying to move up some stairs one and also like he was talking about like like how he thinks divorce should be illegal just just a very just a very normal guy normal guy yeah i mean we we talked about uh our last episode we talked about the nypd and their weird mania for you you better not do nothing to stat oh yeah no bill de blasio came out and i was i was talking about

this with a bunch of my friends like bill de blasio comes out and says not only in a tweet but also as a press conference talking about you know you know we don't think that uh you know iran is gonna attack new york city but we got to be prepared it's like what you just contradicted your own statement why would you why would you do that there was also the lapd that made that response uh the whole tweet about like oh we're monitoring we're monitoring all potential threats and it's like oh oh guys listen to our previous list our previous bonus episode if you would like to hear the full the full rundown of the nypd and lapd's trying attempt to what i mean i don't do police brutality on the rgc with the l LAPD kind of makes sense because like Iran

How like us Iran has a lot of loss like former Los Angelinos that no Iran La has like a massive community of Community of displaced people from silver lake They know exactly how to take down Los angeles which is go there and all flush every toilet in the city will be leveled what i was what i was going to say is like i don't understand how you how like the ny like how you could kind of combat the threat of iran in like new york city when the subway is like don't even well i don't understand what they would do they're gonna sabotage the subway by like having somebody take a dump in a car but just yeah if you all the old jump turnstile at the same time you want to hear

the answers to that check you're trying to get us to stop doing the same episode twice i fucking hate it when kasim solomani's agents pull the emergency alarm every frame in your city but one of the things so I'm yanking this back on track here because I do think one of the risks here is that after this exchange of missiles right where we have the US assassinating Qasem Soleimani

Iran attempting to sort of do a very measured and rational response, but fucking up, basically. Yeah, my concern is that because the US needs

Iran as an enemy, any kind of meaningful long-term detente has been made even more impossible by this, obviously. I just realized something. This is what would be what would be a fair comparison for americans i don't know about british people i guess for british people it would be like if you know if iran or some other you know much maligned

blown up matt hancock accidentally accidentally did the blitz while defending they're like oh we we defended you know we defended london but we accidentally blew up the subway and did another seven seven but for america it would literally be like oh if they would launch an intercontinental ballistic missile we shot them all down but we accidentally crashed a plane into the new world trade center it would basically be like that but but what i what i want to think about right is that they this has happened um iran iran is like Iran does have its sort of ways of retaliating against the U.S. through its proxies. And my concern is that as this keeps going, we're now in a more unstable version of this dyad, where one another's actions are less predictable and where they have nowhere to go but up, really, unless both sides make the choice to disengage.

Again, I am not trying to both sides this year. Obviously, it's on the US to disengage, but because of the mistake around the airliner, Iran has sort of lost its moral authority in this situation. So my concern is that it's more unstable. I have an optimistic answer to reassure you with this, right? Which is that if we say, say like assassination is sort of a known game right and like iran and the u.s often through israel you know we kill one of their guys

they kill one of our guys something like that uh like fucking uh in um in dubai or those iranian nuclear physicists who got killed in Iran. I have. I had Imad Mounier as well was someone I've written down as an example. Yeah, for sure. If that's sort of understood as how you do assassination, the Soleimani thing is so singular and so stupid and so unlike those that it's sort of, it's a once in a lifetime type thing and if uh the people around trump can get a handle on him as seemed to be somewhat indicated by him waiting a day and then coming out giving a statement on fucking quaaludes uh then maybe something a bit more like normalcy uh will sort of return to this. But that's the optimistic...

I agree with that optimistic view. The issue is that we're not unfamiliar with this concept. Trump's brain is basically soup at this point. So if... But Trump has, even if his brain

is literally pulling out of his ears as we speak he he has somewhat of a consistent worldview uh when you when you have when you have him like in a room and you haven't attacked like if you're arguing with him about war he'll initially say that he doesn't want war he wants a deal that kind of thing it requires other people to speak with him for more than five minutes to immediately get him to switch that position. Yeah, he needs a hot general. He needs a hot general.

So the hot generals... He was flanked by two extremely hot generals during that statement, which is... Look, we've had the generals who are about equal to tom cruise in body but better in face yeah we need the zach efron generals like my take on that whole address was that there was recruit the magic mike there was a hot general coup i i don't know if trump is well enough to know it but i think he is now being piloted by some sexy generals in in any case there was uh i i think

the generals after the millennium challenge of 2002 and the absolute disaster that that was uh i i think american generals i mean this is this is. Obviously, I could be very, very, very wrong. I think American generals know that the dangers of going directly into war with Iran and escalating and escalating and escalating it to that point would lead to. And that's why they gave Trump other options to not do that. I don't know about generals, but I do think it's very funny and entirely plausible based on the hell world that we live in where everyone has the worst and most petty motivations. The reason why the US Navy in particular does not want to fight a war with Iran

is because it's dominated by this black shoe mafia of surface warfare officers who absolutely don't want to see their entire branch rendered obsolete by uh getting sunk in the straits yeah in the during the iran war just something yeah during the iran war there was um the u.s took a preemptive strike and sunk i think about half of iran's operational navy uh but since then ir Iran has obviously invested into other things, particularly speedboats.

Full boats. Yeah. And as we saw displayed in the Millennium Challenge 2002, Colonel Van Riper, amazing name. Yeah, incredible. He deployed those speedboats, those suicide speedboats, and he killed 2,000 naval cadets in that war game. And the U.S. Navy, I don't think, has invested in speedboat warfare either. We're going to get that laser sooner or later, once we can fucking uh pulling around a gigantic battery for it

well i was thinking i was thinking about this a little bit as well right how sort of this the endemic culture of graft and and corruption in the entire u.s imperial war machine uh means that i know we mentioned this before but that any any kind like any kind of war in iran would be a complete suicide mission in as much as like how are you going to achieve air superiority when it's raining and your main fighter plane is the F-35? How are you going to fight a naval battle when all of your confident admirals have been

indicted for fat Leonard related crimes? Just never let a flag officer anywhere near a hotel or an expense account and i mean look yeah they do have overwhelming superiority in almost every respect except like basic competence and anything i mean if if you want me to go into at least some detail about how Invasion of Iran would play out, I can, if your listeners would like. Oh, please.

Please walk in getting stuck in the Zagros Mountains for two years for us. I'd rather hear that than make fun of David Brooks. Okay. That's our new third segment. Ditch a third of the notes and we're doing what happens if president trump's moon man brain leads him to uh invade iran i want to see stars and

stripes and tell her okay so okay let's let's just let's just say that the worst happens and uh everything is escalated to a certain point. Pompeo has gotten to Trump and decides that President Tom Trump's in 2020. Don't do that. The lies. Don't worry. I've already

summoned Andrew Doyle as DCMS Secretary. If Tom Cotton is President, he might just honestly nuke Iran, honestly. But let's stay for the moment If Tom Cotton is president, he might just nuke Iran, honestly. But let's say for the moment that Tom Cotton has decided that he's going to take his chances invading the country of Iran. So let's say they decide to go through the

street of Hormuz to make maybe a naval landing on the south of the country. Immediately they are faced with the fact that the Iranian Navy is very, very experienced in asymmetric warfare particularly with uh naval forces and they will likely do something similar to how the millennium challenge doesn't do played out blow up a bunch of u.s navy boats and that part of that mission is uh pretty pretty pretty fucked up i guess is a way to be putting it um

now they could make a small landing on the south of the country but the issue is there's flat land on that part of the country but after that if you want to pull up a topographic map of iran to follow along here uh There's a massive mountain range that pretty much covers the whole country up until Tehran. That's fine, you just drive the armored column straight through

that at speed. Guys, elephants, come on! Hannibal did it. Hannibal did do this. We're gonna get a 12 strong movie but it's just special forces guys wearing peccoles on elephants

so after that point okay so obviously doing a land invasion from the south or potentially let's say we keep doing that we do Iraq occupation 2.0 because it appears to be the direction that we're going now by rejecting the Iraqi parliament's

request for the United States to leave the country. Let's say that we use Iraq to bolster, to house U.S. forces that are going to eventually invade Iran. So maybe they managed to take Afghans again, small areas

near Lodistan and Iran and Kurdistan. But again, you run into the same problem. You've got massive mountain ranges that are extremely difficult to traverse, and Iran can just as easily bomb those

necessary highways. And then, well, what's your third option? You could potentially airdrop right to Tehran but there are obvious issues. That market garden feeling.

You are running the risk, if you want to airdrop into that general area around Tehran you run into the massive risk of having anti-aircraft guns basically taking out a large percentage of your force, especially now that I believe Iran has ordered Russian anti-aircraft launches. And after the arms embargo is set to expire, I believe one and a half years from now, they're allowed to buy many more modern weapons,

one and a half years from now they're allowed to buy many more modern weapons which would be more much more effective in that sense but let's say even based on all of these horrible horrible factors that would make the invasion of iraq uh seem like a cakewalk because of all the flat land that exists considering that iraq is flat up until like mosul, basically. Like, yeah, it's a very different environment. But also, surely, Iraq is not only flat, but Iraq was sort of considerably more fractious with like a weaker state. A weaker military, weaker state. And you also had a massive military port in Kuwait where you could bring everything safely before yes yeah you basically and also on the on the note of the port if you want to get support uh for your military operation from maybe local forces um you could not have picked the worst two that you could have called on saudi arabia and the uae um

yeah 50 guys carrying an f-16 with some Emirati print in it. Just incredible. Yeah, there is... It's like, it's great. I didn't know that actually you could take a fighter jet off with rims. Which white Dior belt will I wear to the invasion?

Okay, I can see it? I can see it. I can see it clearly. There was an article in the National Interest I think about a year or so ago that postulated that the United Arab Emirates it's proven it's worth in Yemen.

So obviously in a war with Iran it would steamroll them. Sure. And as we know, the war in Yemen ended two years ago. So, you know, sure. Everything went fine. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have a lot of faith in any military force, most of whose budget is sunglasses.

I mean, that's the thing, though. Like, most of the American military force's budget as well is like... Oh, I was including, like, naval aviators in that. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Well, no, it's the special sunglasses you need to see the heads-up display in the F-35 cost $4 million. But also I would say too, I mean, the US just simply doesn't have enough forces that it can call upon to do this competently. And that's the thing that always makes me wonder when

they start doing saber rattling, because even under the assumption that you could call up a similar coalition to Iraq, when you think about the US, the UK, the Australians, then a bunch of like really small strap hanger countries that came along too. You forgot Poland. I was going to mention Poland and places like Honduras and El Salvador, Uganda, places like that that also sent troops.

Assuming you could even do that, you're still nowhere near enough to be successful. The US, when you look at reserve component and active duty military, isn't going to really be able to manage more than like I mean it doesn't really have more than like a million people to call upon

and even then that would be literally pulling everyone out from everywhere so this is not feasible. There is one upside which is Captain Buttigieg sir we need your service again we need you to drop a powerpoint although like honestly we just need like if you want to defeat

iran it seems like the only way to do it is to like get mckinsey to give them cost-cutting advice for their army and then it just won't work i mean i guess that's the way that i've always seen it though when i think about about a war with iran is that like even if you buy by some miracle masterstroke you are able to achieve to achieve force on force superiority and actually beat back the Iranian military and occupy the country. The occupation is going to be, first of all, that conflict will produce casualties on the order that people in America just have not dealt with since Vietnam, at best. At worst, fucking Korea. And beyond that, at worst fucking korea and beyond that an occupation is going to be so unbelievably deadly and just such so much worse than iraq was that i just i don't think that you're even

going to be able to kind of like slap a band-aid on it the way that they did in the iraq war you know and basically allow anybody who didn't have like a massively violent felony to join the military and stop loss everyone they possibly can and, you know, hold guard and reserve units in country for like 15 to 18 months. That's not going to be enough. And I don't know, Seamus, if that was what you were leading to when we talk about the sort of like how that the on the ground scenario would go out. But like to me, it's a disaster to try and invade. And even if by a miracle chance you're successful, you will never successfully occupy that country. There's kind of three points that I want to elaborate on there.

We say we need more occupation troops than we could possibly imagine. It's probably even worse than that. There was a report by the RAND Corporation during the Iraq War that stated, I believe that you need one soldier for every four people in a country to effectively occupy it. So when we're talking, or I think I believe one at one for every six. So the calculations that I did for that with Iran would require 1.6 million

us troops stationed around the country, which I believe is currently more than active duty soldiers exist with the United States Army itself. Oh, no, far more than that. The United States Army is about 500-ish thousand people. I mean, it was getting up to about as much as 600,000, but then after sequestration, they started to reduce it. But then you look at the marine corps

is like 280 000 people i think active duty um and they're yeah you i think there's there's close to about a million ish if you count active duty military and national guard and reserves but it's just obscene obscene numbers it's it's an absurd number that i mean it would legitimately require you to pull every body from everywhere from like germany to korea to like diego garcia and put them on a fucking boat to the strait of hermuz and like i just don't expect they could i'm kind of in favor of this now it's this is acceleration? Like, you're probably doing less imperialism if you go and get everybody invading Iran and getting owned than if you have them spread out across, like, 500 different bases. It's like Bombay is, like, a communist. Oh, God.

The worse the better. He's, yeah, deep cover Leninist. Deep cover Leninist. So, in fact, all of this has actually come round to the point where I actually I want to read a couple of lines from this David Brooks article. Oh, please do. Because this discussion now underlines how just completely vapid the American pundit class that dragged the world into war in Iraq the first time is. Now, before you start reading, I just want to ask you a question, because I don't care for David Brooks. I do not

read his content. Was he active in the early 2000s? Was he for the Iraq War? Was he on record as supporting the Iraq War? He was absolutely one of those within six months. Just want to give my context.

Alright, I'm ready. Interestingly, when David Brooks wrote The Second Mountain about the road to character, he was referring to the Zagros Mountains. Was that the one about leaving his wife? Yes, that's the one where he

climbed Mount Research Assistant and that was going to be his listing. He owing like a fucking horse. That's the one where he climbed Mount Research Assistant. And that was going to be his listing. Oh, like a fucking horse. The article is from the New York Times. And it's called Trump Has Made Us All Stupid. I mean, it's not wrong. I mean, it's not wrong.

But it's about Iran. I'm excited. Okay. All right. The decline of discourse in the anti-Trump echo chamber. Okay. All right. The decline of discourse in the anti-Trump echo chamber. Okay. All right. I love what this is doing to all of you.

Donald Trump, he writes, is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic, and intellectually dishonest, said David Brooks into a mirror. So you'd think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we're not like him, that we are judicious, informed, mature, and reasonable. But the events of the past week have shown that the anti-Trump echo chambers become a mirror image of Trump himself. Of course, David Brooks, as always, is just writing about his own anxieties that he is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic, and intellectually dishonest.

But I digress. For example, there's a complex policy problem at the heart of this week's Iran episode. It's not fucking Game of Thrones. I know he means episode, but still. It may as well be a box set. Yeah, David Brooks, he's not affected by this, so it's an episode to him. No.

No. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. Iran is not thrown. Interestingly, Seamus, this might be interesting. This was news to you, I bet, but did you know that quote, Iran is not powerful because it has a strong economy or military?

I mean... What's up? Yeah, Iran isn't doing great right now economically. What's his point? What? It's powerful because it sponsors militias across the Middle East, destabilizing regimes and spreading genocide and sectarian cleansing. Oh, it's like a franchise.

I don't, I mean, I personally, I'm not a fan of the Zanark Republic. I'm not a fan of its foreign policy. However, I don't... Cut his mic, cut his mic. Is he asserting that Iran's military itself isn't, like, powerful? What? What is? Yeah, like, um, the reading we had on our last Iran episode, which you should

go listen to, where Charles Moore from the Telegraph just says, some people say Iran has the, like, strongest military in the world that the US is gonna fight since Korea. I don't think so. Okay, okay. If I may, just a tiny one minute tangent, if I may okay, so the whole, around the Middle East, particularly through the Syrian

Civil War and the war in Yemen we've basically seen that the Syrian military the Saudi military, the UAE military are completely dysfunctional and don't know what they're doing. It's nepotism

all the way down. Sunglass budget. Sunglass budget rule. The Iranian military is successful and the reason why its expertise was wanted by Bashar al-Assad, that's what turned the tide against the rebels, was because Iran

knew what military strategy was was experienced in it trained as fighters in the war of attrition for decades and decades and decades through both war experience training schools oh my god it's not it's not the iraqi military where it's just you've got 400 000 people just throw throw them at people. There's strategy to it. That's why they're formidable. Are you suggesting that Bashar al-Assad, what turned his fortunes around was Iranian advisors and not

like 50 Russians squatting? I don't want to go into the logistics of the Russian squatters, the squad kings. That's for another time. Let me just throw something in there too because i i've spoken to people you know who at least have some if not necessarily expertise in the region like have dealt with some of like the u.s i don't know what you've described

as sort of enablers who are monitoring things in syria and somebody that i knew who i mean i definitely disagree with politically because he's definitely still like pretty pretty neo-connish after having been in the military basically said that in his he said that that Hezbollah and people like the Iranian military were basically deploying what you might describe as like brigade-sized elements operating in Syria and so they had they just been getting experience yeah yeah and I don't know if that jives with your with your uh with your observations Seamus but like to me it just strikes me that you know there's been this war going on for almost a decade they've been fighting in it at not just like a send 10 guys to fucking so that we get them off our hands level but legitimately at like above a tactical level like what you would say like operational or strategic

and that they're going to you know transfer that experience into defending their home country yeah the irgc has been very heavily involved in the Syrian civil war since the beginning. And that level of experience that they're taking with them in not only fighting the rebels, but fighting ISIS, the force that was about to conquer vast swathes of both Iraq and Syria, that's going to come in pretty obviously in handy when you're fighting the United States, even if it's, the United States is obviously far more of a formidable power than the Islamic State. It's war experience that they would not have gotten-

Preston Pyshko similar ideology in places. David Schawel Ever since the Iran-Iraq war, there are still those commanders in place who have the extensive experience of entrenched warfare and attrition warfare, but the newer, younger recruits, that experience in Syria is going to assist them greatly if there is a war with the United States, which I hope doesn't happen,

but it obviously is going to be somewhat transferable. Indeed. However, I would like to pull it back to David momentarily, because all of that that we just said you know like a discussion of the material conditions underlining sort of why iran actually is a formidable military uh david brooks disagrees he said no uh it's not it's not powerful it's actually mean and its strength is its meanness so i mean That does seem like a key part of military success is being mean.

Close with and be mean to the enemy. So he says, we're not going to go in and destroy the militias. So how can we keep them in check so they don't destabilize the region? Again, said David Brooks into a fucking mirror. That's the hard problem, one that stymied past administrations. What if we did more airstrikes? The decision to undertake this operation is a matter of weighing risk and reward, as opposed to, you know, just fucking around and finding out.

And after the Soleimani killing you saw American security professionals and here's where David Brooks is David Brooks talking the language of balancing risk and reward Stanley McChrystal a retired general and Michael Mullen a retired admiral Susan Rice thought it wasn't Stanley McChrystal

Stanley McChrystal but he made a whole movie about how he was stupid. I'm sorry. We've killed Seamus just by mentioning Stanley McChrystal's name, and quite rightly so. Yeah, he was the hunter killer. But you hear his name, you just die laughing in embarrassment. His name is a killing word.

But in the anti-Trump echo chamber, that's not how most people were thinking led by bernie sanders they avoided the hard complex problem of how to set boundaries instead they pontificated on the easy question not actually on the table should we have a massive invasion that's always been on the table the problem with militias is they don't respect consent and they're not good giving all game. I want to yell when I'm in a hotel. I can't express myself. Oh god.

Don't go full Christmas on it. Should we have a massive invasion of Iran? So it's like, yeah, David, would you rather we had the professional measured language with which you and Stanley fucking McChrystal restlessly advocated and persecuted the invasion of Iraq

which went so well in terms of stabilizing the region. We just have to do the McChrystal Obama strategy of targeted strikes opportunistic use of special forces. Nothing will go wrong with this. Also cover up friendly fire on Pat Tillman. Let's do that again.

Absolutely. So he's saying, most of this week's argument about the Middle East wasn't really about the Middle East. It was just about ourselves. Democrats defend terrorists. Republicans are warmongers. Actual Iranians are just bit players

in our imperialistic soap opera. The passive recipients of our greatness are perfidy. Dude, this is the picture of Garfield looking at the sign with no Garfield and being like, God, I wonder who that is. Yeah. Fucking hell. It's just the pure

blithe ignorance of what it means to be critically engaged in foreign policy is actually infuriating to me as it permeates the sort of great and good of the press of both the US and the UK. Like the fact that in the UK, there are pundits and also politicians who are saying, no, the problem is Iran didn't stick to the 2015 JCPOA.

You have to respect the deal. And we're worried that you're not respecting the deal it's like it's the incredible failure of thought or at least at best it's not a failure of thought it's just massive sort of cynicism about the intelligence of the populations of the countries which they're either commenting to or ruling over yeah and i mean this is good one thing i know we're going so long but i wanted to add one more thing. One tiny thing. Oh, we didn't even do my fucking conspiracy theory. Ah, well, next episode.

Sorry, next time. We will do it. We're like, when you, something we've been talking about today, right? And I kind of want to bring this together on like how people on the left can think of foreign policy criticism. Because it's true if you go like elizabeth warren and you say look solobani was a bad guy he did a lot of bad things around the region so it was right it but we killed him in the wrong way we didn't fill out the paperwork yeah then you're a sucker and you're playing into the hands of um of the neocons i i

hate to say it i hate to say it but the gray zone cranks are actually right with their first instinct being uh fuck you that's not a missile uh you you're an american dog and the problem yeah but the problem is the problem is right and this is something uh shameless that you talked about on on popular front right like like if you are like like like custom solomoni was also like a virulent anti-communist like the guy did not like the trade union movement he was spent a lot of his early career suppressing socialists like we still have to find a way to understand that these aren't good people but at the same time without ever giving any credence to the neoconservative movement because then that that is going to then weaponize us admitting that like

yeah it's this is not a this is still like not a good guy and i don't understand how we can square that circle and people like david brooks do it by putting on the helmet that makes you stupid and i mean and and then you know you know the answer is it's what something that had been previously monopolized by the like late 2000s liberal blogosphere where they just did the truly truly Insufferable thing of being like oh you want good policies from your candidate for president Well, why don't you put on your big boy pants because we live in the real world instead of doing magic And we should just do that. That's all realpolitik is.

It's just be like, yeah, okay, find me a good guy in, like, fucking any government ever. Who is the guy in that role for, like, who runs a military or paramilitary force and who goes around

advancing their nation-state's interests through this complex mix of militias and money and everything like that who is the good guy who does that name them yeah i mean i shamus i'm interested to sort of hear your reactions on this as well because like i've been i've been following your commentary on this i found it to be quite balanced in terms of being very anti-imperialistic with while still being yeah it's it's it's and i know if any of my iranian friends are listening to this i know you're probably gonna hate what i'm gonna say here um it's a very very very difficult line to cross because when you when

you preface all of your statements by saying that solomani was a bad guy. I don't want it to be the case, but neocons always then come in and say, well, if Soleimani was such a bad guy, then why are you against killing him? Why aren't you in support of him being killed? I think this is where I can jump in really fast just to say, because I think for UK listeners, which is a lot of our audience would get this, think about the extent to which we all knew there were problems with Corbyn in the leader's office and just like with some of the things in the Labour Party. But you could not say it because if you did, the worst people on the planet would be like, oh, see, well, that's why you deserve to fail and we need Blairism

again. Like there was no way to say it without basically opening yourself up to the worst, dumbest criticism. It's an in-group conversation we should not be like caping for Soleimani we shouldn't be saying that he was you know an amazing military hero that he was um he was just a great man I don't think that we should be doing that but at the same time when we talk about if if we are if if you are pressed on the issue of if Qasem Soleimani, if you admit that Qasem Soleimani is such a bad guy, then why don't you support killing him? One, you have to address the fact that killing a foreign official in a foreign country sets an incredibly horrible precedent that could easily be exploited by America's adversaries.

If you're going from that angle and at the same time if you're talking with leftists and you say the Qasem Soleimani is a bad guy and they say well do you support the neocons you support his murder then well no uh American the the American military that took him out, the people that authorized that operation, the people that got us to this point are similarly way bad, if not way worse people. You cannot be a fan of both of these people, but you recognize the fact that killing Klaus M. Soleimani is such an unbelievably reckless action. It's such an unbelievably reckless action. You should just focus, if you can, just focus on that. The fact that it's incredibly reckless, that it could lead to a war that would kill millions of people, almost inevitably.

That it destabilizes the international order by establishing a precedent of killing foreign officials in governments without war being declared and all those other things involving international law. And calling them terrorists too, which is. The IRGC terrorist designation is one of the dumbest things that I can think of. Cause even if the IRGC is involved in incredibly horrible actions around the world, the IRGC is a state arm people can be

drafted into it um they run malls you can work at an irgc operated mall like all these people construction company yeah like are you are these people all these people who are drafted in the irgc are these people all who like work withGC-related construction companies, or storefronts, are these all people accessories to terrorism? Also, where they are sponsors of, if you want to say terrorist groups, I'm not gonna dispute that Hezbollah is a terrorist group, say, it's not just to fuck around. There is a coherent foreign policy vision at work there, and a vision of Iranian and

to a lesser extent Shia interests that's... You can't compare it to, say, Islamic State. No, there's a coherent foreign policy to it. I think a lot of people perceive Qasem Soleimultan as that kind of

osama bin laden kind of guy who is a rogue who just wants to blow things up but that's really not the case and that's why killing him was so reckless is because it it it doesn't fuck that up in a way that would be beneficial to the u.s it fucks it up in that it makes them more aggressive and it makes it everything much more difficult to counter if you're from the United States. I mean, I was thinking about this from the perspective of like, say you had if you had a situation in which Iran and the United States were operating in a similar area, like, for example, the fight against ISIS in Syria. And if like somebody on the order of Jim Mattis or Dave Petraeus before he disgraced himself by sex. Clutch, Clutch, Mount Research, Resistance. Yeah, we're doing a battlefield rotation and the Iranian military decided to fucking kill them with a drone strike.

People would lose their minds. And that's what we did. And it's like, was he a combatant? Yes. But the idea, I strongly agree with what you said, that the idea that somebody who's a representative of a state body is now being designated a terrorist because we think they're mean, that doesn't really bode well if you want to treat every American or Commonwealth or NATO soldier as a terrorist because you think they're mean when they're being mean, if you want to use that definition. if you want to use that definition. Yeah, there was a decision by the Iranian parliament just a couple of days ago,

though they've done this a couple of times before, where they designated the entire Department of Defense as a terrorist organization. So it's already happening to a certain extent. So before we go any further, I would just like to note we've been recording for an enormous amount of time. And I think that does leave us on what i might say

a chilling premonition of things to come i have one very quick under a minute thing uh if you yes if if you want to do the leftist thing of being like oh so you don't accept that iran is is is good i agree the one thing you should read about is uh theutions of Iranian communists in 1988, which play a large part in how the MEK got the way that it is. Read about that. It fucking is extremely haunting, and it will

put the critical in your critical support. I would suggest that as well. Reading up on that is an extremely harrowing experience. If you're wondering why we aren't banging the drum for... If you wonder why we're not

banging the drum that you might expect a leftist podcast to be banging in the way that we're not banging it, that's a big part of why. Read about the precise questioning procedures they went through to decide who they were going to execute. Indeed.

But on all of that, I mean, all realpolitik always leaves everybody sort of... What was it? It's like... It's like a pig in shit. All the warmongers are sort of happy as clams to be warmongering.

Everyone's dirtier for having gotten involved. And you don't really know what to do next. But this is it. This is the world. This is what we live with. We have to make the best of it that we can. It's complicated. It's messy. There are no clean

storylines. There are no clean endings. No episodes. Yeah, there are no episodes, David Brooks, you fucking vacuous moron. So we are, but we are going to have to leave this episode at that. So Seamus, I want to thank you

so, so much for coming on and talking to us today. This has been incredibly interesting to hear you. This was so insightful. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. So where else can people find you online? And to our listeners, I insist that you do. Well, on Twitter, you can find me

at shamus-malek M-A-L-E-K If you want to find my portfolio stuff, it's at my website at shamus-malekafzali.com. And I'm going to spell it out here. Warning.

S-E-A-M-U-S-hyphen-M-A-L-E-K-A-F-Z-A-L-I.com. Apologies. Everyone note that he used a Z. So mark that down on your bingo cards. I'm only apologizing for the Seamus part because Irish names. So otherwise, don't forget our beloved co-host Milo Edwards is doing a show in Liverpool. You should grab some tickets to that. Also, you should remember that we've got the Patreon.

It's five bucks a month. You can subscribe to that as well. Check out our previous Iran coverage, which was much more boisterous, I would say. Yes. Yeah, it was definitely a experience. Yes. It's a good accompaniment, I think.

Yeah. So this is part one and part two of the Iran saga. First is fast, then is tragedy. And otherwise, yeah, our theme song is Ginseng. the Iran saga. First as fast, then as tragedy. And otherwise, yeah, our theme song is Ginseng. Here we go by Ginseng. Find it on Spotify. And yeah, just once again,

Seamus, thank you so much for coming on. This was a real pleasure. No problem. Alright. See you, everybody. Bye. you