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You've seen Dune, haven't you, Eamon? Loved it so much. You know what, as I've been preparing for this episode, I've been listening to the Dune soundtrack on repeat just constantly, you know, that amazing, weird soundtrack. Do you think that makes sense? I mean, it has a kind of Islamic style, a kind of Middle Eastern style soundscape, and the whole story is pretty Muslim, isn't it? Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, talking about the Mahdi and Lisan al-Ghaib and Aina Muadib and all of that. But the secret to a good adaptation, just do not cram the whole damn novel into just one movie. Just split them.
I was thinking that Dune is basically projecting thousands of years into the future, into this kind of Islamic universe, this sort of Islamic galactic empire or something. And of course, in Conflicted, we're trying to go back thousands of years to explain the present. It's like looking in the mirror. With Dune, it's the opposite of what we're doing. DUNE
In episode three, we showed how America's first foothold in the Middle East was in Saudi Arabia, with its largest oil reserves in the world, managed by an American company, Aramco. And last time, we explained how geostrategic realities have informed Russian geopolitics for centuries. In this episode, we
we shift our focus to your favorite country, Ayman, Iran. - Oh, it is my favorite. - Nobody could have known this at the time, but with hindsight, we can see that at the beginning of the Cold War, Iran had somehow become a whirlpool, swirling with all of the 20th century's clashing ideological and political forces. All the players are there, an autocratic monarch in the old style, a newly formed communist party conspiring revolution,
aristocratic liberals demanding economic and constitutional reform, Islamist terrorists, big oil, a declining European empire, the Soviet Union reviving Tsarist geopolitics, and of course, America, the new superpower.
It's a big episode. We've got a lot to cover, but I keep meaning to ask you, Eamon, it's been two years since the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force. We did a bonus episode on his assassination at the time. Two years later, what's your estimation of the impact that his assassination has had on the region?
Well, of course, it's very clear that since his assassination and removal from the picture, the fortunes of the groups that Qasem Soleimani used to be the godfather of... Groups like Hezbollah and even the Houthis? If you see that the Houthis are now...
having trouble maintaining their grip on power in the territories where they control, and they failed in their offensive to take the historic city of Ma'rib, where the oil fields are located and the hydroelectric dam is located.
On top of this, it seems that Qasem Soleimani's favorite groups in Iraq, the BMUs, lost a considerable amount of power in the last elections. They went down from 48 MPs in the parliament to only 17. They lost 31 MPs. It shows his absence really clearly.
present itself very clearly in the politics of the countries where Qasem Soleimani was active in. Amazing how the Americans, by taking just one man off of the field, could have effected such a big change. If you remember, we described Qasem Soleimani as the hard worker
disc that contains the secrets of Iran's external strategic operations in the region, take him out, and he is offline completely. That hard disk is completely offline. And it is very visible how his absence has created this gap between
that cannot be filled by anyone else in the Iranian regime circles. - Ah, Iran. Ayman, you know, I studied Arabic and Islamic studies, which is why I know a thing or two about that wacky religion of yours.
More than one and two. And I could never say I regret studying Arabic because Arabic has opened up tremendous cultural and historical and indeed theological vistas to me. That said, if I do have a regret, it's that I didn't study the language that has been described as the language of poetry par excellence. And of course, I'm talking about Persian or Farsi language.
Someone once wrote, "What Persian poetry expressed was not an enigma to be solved, but an enigma that was unsolvable." And at the risk of sounding like an unreconstructed orientalist, this really resonates with me as a kind of westerner. Because for us in the West, Persia has always been like the great enemy, the essential other. It's always been there, but we struggle to imagine it. It's like a mirage.
The ancient Persians are almost the mirror image of the ancient Greeks. They're both Indo-European peoples, originally from the Eurasian steppes.
They were both newcomers to an already very old Bronze Age civilization in Mesopotamia and the Levant. They were both destined in ways to inherit that older civilization. Persia first, then Greece, when Alexander the Great sacked the monumental Persian capital of Persepolis and set up court in Babylon, not as a Greek emperor really, but as the last
Persian emperor. And the Persians had a tremendous impact on the Bible. The three magi, the three kings from the Orient who visited Jesus and gave him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I mean, they were Persians. They were Zoroastrians.
Ideas like creation in six days or at least six categories. Ideas like paradise, which is just the Persian word for a walled garden. A strict distinction between good and evil. Characters or realities like angels. The fact that moral behavior is the criterion for some kind of post-mortem blessedness or punishment. All of these things actually were in Zoroastrianism and were carried out into the worlds that they conquered by the Persians.
So I want to ask you, I mean, that's my perspective as a Christian thinking about Persia, as a Westerner thinking about Persia, but you, Eamon, as a Sunni, and given everything you've said about the Iranian regime on Conflicted, I mean, I imagine you basically hate Iran. Isn't that right? Yeah.
No, I don't hate Iran at all. I love the people. I love the culture. I love the music. I love the food. You know, there is so much to love and so much to admire about Iran and about the Persian people. And remember that, you know, even though I have, you know...
no qualms whatsoever with my fellow Muslims who follow the Shia faith. The reality is that we cannot even associate Shia faith with the Persians because their conversion to Shia Islam happened only 450-500 years ago. That's it. And that doesn't even make them less Muslims.
The reality is for me, and I always say this to all my friends from Iran and of Persian descent, I say, I tell them two things. First, I am
dislike the regime, but everything else, you know, I adore and admire. That's the first thing. The second thing is that DNA doesn't lie. I am 33% Persian, and I'm very proud. Is this from your Durrani heritage? Because, you know, Greater Persia and all the Persian peoples of Central Asia, they're all sort of basically the same stock, aren't they?
Exactly. So I have no qualms. I can almost say I am half Persian and half Arab with some Turkic blood mixed in here and there. And for me...
to hate Iran or to hate the Persian race or culture or traditions is to hate half of me. - Especially as a Muslim, you were right to raise the topic of the way in which Islam developed in Iran. Because in fact, the Iranian influence over Islam in general has been immense. It's been said that the conquered conquered their conquerors. So much did the Persians end up
having an impact on Islam? Tremendously. In fact, the Abbasids, they were able to topple the Umayyad dynasty thanks to the support of the Persian armies. It was then the Persianization of the government, of the systems, of the departments of governance, the diwans, as we used to call them. And the golden age of Islam started when the Persians, led by the Abbasids,
were able to merge and incorporate what the Umayyads built in terms of civilization and in terms of foundation of the state.
and merged with it the science and technology and learning that the Persians brought with them. And then the age of discovery and the age of translation started. And the contribution of Persian scholars to this is immense and cannot be eclipsed at all. That period of history is known as the Iranian Intermezzo or the Persian Renaissance.
It began in sort of the early 9th century and it continued until the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the early 11th. We discuss the Seljuks in episode 2 because the Azeris consider themselves to be descendants of those Turkic conquerors.
It was during the Iranian intermezzo that Iranian poetry really came into its own. You have Rudaki, Ferdowsi, whose epic poem, The Shahnameh, or The Book of Kings, recounting the Persian past, perhaps more than anything revived in Iranian national consciousness. Indeed, not to mention that
Ironically, the Arabic language were preserved and codified, I would say, thanks to the efforts of Persian linguistic scholars such as Siba Way. I suppose if you're converted to Islam, the religion of Arabic, you have to know Arabic in order to worship. So the Persians were very invested in getting to know Arabic very well.
Indeed, Siba Weih wrote the most comprehensive dictionary in Arabic. Once Islam had sort of grabbed the heart of Iran, there was a sudden explosion of mysticism and visionary theology from Muslim Iran. Al-Halaj, Suhrawardi, Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Jami, Mullah Sadra. These names are immense in the history of Islam. Iranians contributed so much to the development of that religion. Talking about Rumi,
He is my favorite, really my favorite Islamic philosopher and poet. However, one of the funny memes I've seen online, I see his picture and he is saying, "My poetry is not about your ex-boyfriend." So I thought it was so funny.
For the listeners who don't understand that meme, Rumi is famous for his extremely romantic, love-infused mystical poetry. Of course, it's all sort of about the love of God, but I think a lot of people today, especially in the West, think that it's sort of like Valentine's Day card stuff. Anyway, I could wax lyrical about what the idea of Persia means to me and all that stuff forever, but I think we need to get back on track. You know, last
In the last episode, we talked about Russia and Russian geopolitics. Well, Russia and Persia have a very long relationship.
As a result of wars between Russia and what was then officially called the sublime state of Iran in the early 19th century, Azerbaijan was divided in two. We mentioned this in episode two. The northern part was occupied by Russia and the southern part remained part of Iran, which is the reason why there are millions of Azerbaijanis in Iran today. Now after capitulating to Russia, the Shah and the
and the ruling dynasty then were the Qajars, who were in fact Azeri Turk in origin. The Qajar Shah turned eastward. He focused on retaking territories in present-day Afghanistan, which he'd lost to local rivals, i.e. your ancestors, Amon the Durrani. This pissed off the British, who were firmly in control of India and needed to protect their northwestern frontier, prompting the Anglo-Persian War of 1856.
Eventually, the British compelled the Qajar Shah to agree to a number of demands, including never to invade Afghanistan again, and then later to two notorious economic concessions, as they are called, the Reuter concession in 1872 and the Darcy concession in 1901, giving foreigners near total control over the Iranian macro economy.
Now, because it found itself stuck between two imperial rivals, Britain and Russia, Iran particularly struggled to withstand the onslaught of modernity, more so even than their Ottoman rivals to the west.
This resulted in an almost cartoonish smack in the face when in 1907, the British and the Russians signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, unilaterally decreeing northern Iran part of Russia's sphere of influence and southern Iran part of Britain's.
They hadn't even bothered to inform the Shah about this. Typical. Two years later, in 1909, oil was discovered in Iran. But because of the Darcy concession, this fell into British hands by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. As you can imagine, this foreign interference was deeply resented.
by the religious clerics for obvious reasons, westernization, secularization, evil heathens coming to conquer us, but also by those known as bazaaris, the merchant middle class, who watched as profits, usually reserved for themselves, flowed to outsiders instead. In a remarkable precursor to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in 1906 an alliance of clerics and
and Bazaaris, supported by the British as it happens, resulted in what's called the Constitutional Revolution. But Qajar Shah was forced to agree to the formation of a national parliament called the Majlis, which then drew up a constitution modeled, strangely enough, on the Belgian constitution. Voting took place and representatives from around the country were elected, including one Mohammad Mossadegh, about whom we've got more to say later.
The constitutional revolution wasn't a great success. The clerics quickly began to fear the liberals who aimed at the secularization of society. So they threw their support back towards the Shah, who was supported by the Russians, who shelled the Majlis in 1908.
The next decade was politically chaotic. The central state lost control of its provinces. The local economy continued to crater, not least because trade with Russia had been undermined by the catastrophic Bolshevik revolution there, but also because famine broke out during the First World War, which shredded what remained of Iranian sovereignty as Britain basically took full control.
It was not good. Now, given this history, Amen, putting yourself in Iran's shoes, it's not hard to see why Iran's attitude towards Western powers is so mistrustful. In fact, I see a lot of
similarities between the Iranians and the Chinese here. I mean, basically, the resentment after the opium wars between China and the Western powers and the imposition of trade sanctions and unfavorable trading terms on the Chinese by the Western powers is almost mirrored exactly. That is in Eastern Asia. Now, in Western Asia, you see that exactly being imposed on the Iranians. Yes, and like Iran, China is also a great and ancient civilization who
felt totally offended by being treated like that. They thought, well, we deserve better. We are a great people. Absolutely. I think it is the
unfortunate position that Iran found itself in, especially after the First World War. It was never a participating power in the First World War, but nonetheless, they lost between 12 to 15 percent of the entire population thanks to famine, drought, as well as the Spanish influenza. So the economy was in tatters, and at the same time, the oil wealth, which became so
immensely important to the rest of the world, and especially when it comes to military strategy. And yet they can't benefit from it because the terms of the Anglo-Persian oil company were so unfair that they were receiving nothing but peanuts. Peanuts. Definitely, Ayman. Iranian oil would prove a curse as much as a blessing. Jumping forward a bit to the Second World War,
In 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in history, a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Now, this is interesting. This relates to what we talked about in the last episode about Russian geography and its geopolitics. A major prong of the Nazi advance was toward the Volgograd Gap and the Caucasus, i.e., in the direction of Iran.
To protect its oil interests there and to maintain a line of supply to its ally Stalin, Britain occupied Iran. Landing troops in the south who marched northward, while Russian troops invaded from the north and marched southward. The two sides met in Tehran.
30,000 US troops would arrive later after America joined the war. It was particularly humiliating for Iran. The Shah at the time was not a Qajar, but rather the man who had, with Britain's help, overthrown the Qajar dynasty in 1925.
Reza Shah Pahlavi. Dun, dun, dun. Hey, man, it's so funny. When I say the name, I just get this sort of shock of fear through me. He was such a powerful personality known as the Iron Shah. However, he...
He was still a failure. Oh, poor man. But he was powerful. You see pictures of him in his eyes. His eyes, they're sort of hypnotic. You look at them and you'll do whatever he says. Reza Shah, a commoner, a mere soldier, and yet immensely formidable. He founded the Pahlavi dynasty. Now, this is the dynasty that would itself be overthrown in 1979. Wow.
He had done much to limit British control and get back Iranian sovereignty. He was a modernizer like his hero Ataturk in Turkey, and he was a Persian nationalist, something new in Iranian history, which had always been a traditional multicultural imperial state. He pursued a policy of Persianization and helped to deeply embed the idea of Persian nationhood in the people of Iran.
that sense of Iranian ethno-nationalism, it really remains to this day. Would you say that, Ayman? Yeah. I mean, it gave them a sense of imperial nationalism to an extent. I mean, because they are always looking back at the history and the extent of the Persian Empire. I mean,
Sometimes I see IRGC-linked accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms putting what is the ideal map of Iran today. And to my surprise, I see the map encompassing parts of Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, Azerbaijan, parts of Turkey. But then I see all of Iraq, all of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar and
the entire Gulf Coast on that side, which is oil-rich, funny enough, Syria and Lebanon. And to my horror, I see the Israel-Palestine plains extending all the way to Egypt. And then I see out of nowhere Yemen being part of that region.
in your map. — Yemen. — Yes, Yemen, because not many listeners will know this, but actually Yemen for a brief time, maybe seven, eight decades, you know, between the late 500s and mid-600s, were in fact a Persian province. — This is during the Sassanian Empire, the Sassanian period of Persian history. — Indeed, when the Prophet Muhammad sent his messages to the kings of the earth at that time in order to accept Islam,
One of the messages went to the Sasanian Persian governor of Yemen. By then, Yemen was already a Persian province for roughly 70 years. Yet, even though it was only 70 years over the past two and a half thousand years of the long life of the Persian Empire or the Persian people, yet they still believe, or at least the IRGC-linked people still believe in this
ethno-nationalistic imperial fantasy of incorporating Yemen into it and incorporating all of these lands I described. That's fascinating. It really shows how ancient history is still informing the present, for sure. Now, back to Reza Shah. One thing that I found interesting about Reza Shah is his modernization program involved
him doing something very similar to what King Abdulaziz was doing in Saudi Arabia at the time. And this is forcibly settling the nomads. We talked about this in the last episode.
iran like saudi arabia like all of the middle east in the early 20th century still had a very stark distinction between the urban settled and the agricultural peoples and nomads who lived a nomadic life and reza shah put an end to it just like king abdulaziz was doing across the gulf oh yes because the end of the day um
These nomads are a source of instability. They could be the fifth column that could be hired by any invading power, whether the Soviets or the British or any other invading power. Yes. And if you're involved in the process of updating your state to modern norms, you know, where borders are fixed and the state rules absolutely within those borders, nomads don't fit in very well because they don't really believe in borders. Right.
Or settlement or laws or regulations or anything. And of course, if they remain nomads, they will not be paying taxation. As we said, Reza Shah was a modernizer and he had focused especially on modernizing and strengthening the Iranian army. This is why the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 was so humiliating. His army had folded very quickly.
and Reza himself was sent into exile. His son, aged only 22, was installed as Shah by the allies, though he was not really allowed to rule and remain confined to the palace for the duration of the war. This young man, Muhammad Reza Shah, would in time become an iconic figure.
He is the Shah whom the Ayatollah Khomeini would overthrow 38 years later, Mohammad Reza Shah. He truly was iconic, wasn't he, Amen? - He was iconic, yes, but for all the wrong reasons. Extremely extravagant in a nation that was generally
languishing in poverty. He was extremely pro-Western in a society that was still plagued by religious dogma, and he was cruel in his application of the state security force in order to crack down on opposition using the infamous SAVAK
trained by none other than the Israelis in order to crush dissent in his domain. And yet he was a weak-willed individual.
Nonetheless, his extravagance drove everyone to the edge of despair in Iran, which led, of course, later to his eventual demise. It's really hard to see in the image of that iconic Shah from the 1970s, that 22-year-old who ascended the peacock throne in 1941, installed by the Allies. He's so young, he's so nervous and gentle.
in his experience of the war could not have been easy. While Iran was occupied by the allied powers, a historic meeting took place in Tehran between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. This was the first time that all three had been around the same table.
It was during this meeting that Operation Overlord was agreed. That's the 1944 invasion of Normandy, including the D-Day landings. But more importantly, for our purposes, the Allies signed a treaty agreeing that they would all withdraw their troops from Iran within six months of the end of the war.
Well, we all know how that terrible war ended, with two nuclear bombs ushering in a new nuclear age. Everyone has heard of the Manhattan Project, the American program to develop the bomb during the Second World War, and we all know what the consequences that had, not least on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amen.
Give us an overview of how the nuclear age has impacted geopolitics in the Middle East. Which countries now in the Middle East have the bomb? Well, at the moment, there is only one country that is known to possess the bomb.
at least as an open secret, which is the state of Israel. But what about Pakistan? Can we include Pakistan in the Middle East? This is a vexed question. I think for the purposes of this podcast, we include Pakistan in the Middle East. If we include Pakistan in the Middle East, and the fact that Pakistan is a staunch ally of Saudi Arabia, militarily speaking, then yes, we can say that Saudi Arabia is, in theory, covered by the Pakistani nuclear defense umbrella.
So Israel has the bomb, Pakistan has the bomb, and through Pakistan, Saudi has the bomb. In fact, I've read that Saudi has a couple of warheads in Pakistan really with its name written on them. It's theirs.
Just a couple. Actually, it's 12. 12 nuclear warheads that the Saudis have access to. And at any given moment, if Iran tests a workable nuclear device and it becomes a solid member of the nuclear club, then Saudi Arabia next day will have
12 nuclear bombs ready at his disposal should anything happen like this. We did a whole bonus episode on Iran's nuclear ambitions when we discussed another assassination, this time by the Israelis, of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Go back, dear listener, and give that episode a re-listen for a refresher course.
In that episode, we discussed the Iranian nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which President Trump withdrew from in 2018. Now, Eamon, President Trump's gone, Biden's in, and his administration is now trying to get America back on board the deal. How is that going? How are those negotiations going in your view?
The reality is that the Iranians stretched as much as possible the length of talks between them and the Biden administration almost to 13 months now. And the reason is because they wanted to buy as much time as possible in order to enrich as much
weapon-grade uranium as possible in order to blackmail the West and the rest of the world into believing that they are about to produce a workable nuclear device. As a way of getting better terms. Yes. The whole idea is to get as better terms as possible, but
But also at the same time, the fact that once you reach that critical mass, that critical threshold, I would say, you have come so close that at some point in the future, if you want to restart
then instead of waiting for years, you only have a few months and you will achieve your goal. So in reality, the Iranians were achieving two aims here. One, they...
are in a position to blackmail the world powers into saying, look, we are only weeks away or a few months away from having enough weapon-grade fuel to build nuclear devices. So the West starts to panic and agree to some of their outrageous demands.
And on top of that, the ability in the future that even if they sign right now and stop all enrichment, that in the future, once they resume enrichment, they will be much closer to achieving their goal because they will be starting from a more advanced position than they did in 2018 when President Trump withdrew from the presidency.
You know the nuclear deal given the negotiations that are ongoing It was surprising that a few weeks ago to read that America had actually lifted all of the sanctions on Iran related to non-military Nuclear usage their non-military nuclear program. Why would they have done that? I mean that seems to be a very dangerous thing to do right in the middle of these negotiations They had nothing to do with the negotiations
I have it on good authority. And you know, I always have access to good authority anyway. So that's why I'm talking to you, Eamon. Yeah.
I have it in good authority that actually it's nothing to do whatsoever with the current negotiations that are taking place in Vienna. The reality is that the Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which is just on the Gulf waters and surrounded by the Zagros Mountains. This nuclear reactor was actually built by the Shah with German and French help.
Is that that's right? Yes, but they were never finished. And so in the mid 90s, the Russians came and they finished it. So we have a somewhat a bastardized nuclear reactor there with German and French parts with a reactor made in Russia on top of them. Oh, my goodness. That does not sound very stable.
Forget stability, man. Forget the technical and the engineering stability. We're talking about the fact that the reactor is sitting on a seismically active fault line with frequent earthquakes reaching sometimes the levels of 6 and 7 degrees on Richter scale. Why the hell was a nuclear reactor built there in the first place? Because the Shah looked at the map and he thought, okay, this is the most remote area away from the
Persian-Iranian settlements and cities surrounded by mountains, if there is a nuclear fallout, then the mountains and the prevailing wind direction will make sure that it's the Arabs across the Gulf. The Kuwaitis, the Saudis, the Bahrainis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, they are the ones who are going to be screwed up. I mean, so charming, very charming of the Shah. So what does this nuclear reactor have to do with the recent lifting of sanctions on non-military nuclear usage in Iran?
Because that nuclear reactor, as I said to you, sits on a seismically active fault line, lots of earthquakes. Between now and then, it needs repairs and it needs spare parts. And there are some...
I know pun intended, but there are some intelligence leaks about some radioactive leaks from that reactor in recent weeks, which suggests that there is the urgent need for repairs and spare parts to come from certain European countries. So the need for a waiver to these sanctions exists.
was necessary. Otherwise, we could have a Chernobyl on the Gulf and that could spill disaster for the Gulf states. Why? Because Kuwait, as well as the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, as well as Bahrain, Qatar, and to a greater extent also the UAE, rely on desalinated water, water produced from
They suck the water from the sea, they remove the salt, it becomes a drinking water for the people who live in the desert where there are no lakes or rivers or even a significant amount of rainy days. So if the waters of the Gulf are to be contaminated with radioactive materials from that nuclear reactor on the Iranian side, say goodbye to the fisheries there.
You can't eat, you know, the famous Gulf Hamur fish or the shrimp there, unless if you want to become Aquaman, a radioactive Aquaman. And the reality also is that you can't desalinate the water because the water, while you can remove the salt from it, you can't remove, you know, radioactivity from it. I mean, so yeah, it's a disaster waiting to happen. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little...
or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.
All this talk about radiation, nuclear reactors melting down, nuclear bombs being developed, it really does put us right back into the beginning of the Cold War. And let's go back to our story of the Middle East and the Cold War. America dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as we said.
Stalin was already actually developing a bomb of his own, which is a fascinating spy story in its own right because infiltrators within the Manhattan Project had been passing secret info to the Soviets. The first successful Soviet bomb test was carried out in 1949, and from that point on, the nuclear arms race began. However,
For those four years in between the atomic attacks on Japan and Stalin's first bomb, America's monopoly on nuclear weapons gave it tremendous leverage at the outset of the Cold War. And this was first demonstrated in Iran. As I said, the allies who were then occupying Iran had signed a treaty agreeing that they would all withdraw their troops within six months of the end of the war, i.e. the 3rd of March 1946.
In January of '46, the US and Britain followed through, but it soon became clear that the Soviets weren't going anywhere. Thus began the Cold War. It began in Iran, specifically in Iranian Azerbaijan. Really, Eamon, all roads seem to lead to Azerbaijan this season. Why is that?
Well, because of all the complexities, it has all the ingredients. It has an ethnic minority, it has an active communist subversive elements and separatists, it has oil, and it's sitting on a crossroad between civilizations, the Persians, the Turks, the Russians, the Arabs, the English, the Americans.
Yes, goodness. I mean, what more do you want? So let me try to sort of set the scene. We're in Iran 1946.
The first player here that we want to talk about is the Tudeh party. So the Tudeh party is the Communist Party of Iran. It was founded in 1941. It had offices all around the country, but it was most strongly represented in Iranian Azerbaijan. Let's call it South Azerbaijan from now on. It's clearer that way. So South Azerbaijan's capital of Tabriz is an absolute icon of Islamic splendor,
and power and Persian culture. Tabriz had featured heavily in the Persian-Russian wars that we discussed before, and thus the province as a whole had fallen within Russia's sphere of influence in Iran. And so it was, let's say, the most modernized part of Iran. Anyway, the Soviets took advantage of the Tudeh Party's organization in South Azerbaijan to encourage two secessionist movements there, one Kurdish and the other Azeri.
In addition to communist partisans, local Azeris and Kurds were angry at the Persianification policy which the exiled Reza Shah had imposed on them. So these two secessionist movements resulted in the foundation, with Soviet help, of the Republic of Mahabad, a Kurdish republic, and the Azerbaijan people's government. Now, the Republic of Mahabad was defended by none other than the Peshmerga, which
Those valiant Marxist Kurdish warriors who to this day are defending Kurdistan from ISIS, from Turkey, from all the players in the region. It's still there today. Well, yeah.
you know, it just shows you basically not only is a small world but a small history also. The Peshmerga, which means, you know, the men of death or the people who are willing to die for their cause, yes, their roots are Marxist and that remained so for a very long time. And I think because of the fact that they were always opposing at one time or another, you know, either a pro-Western
or a pro-Western power like Iran or a pro-Western power like Turkey because Turkey was a NATO member and the Shah was always perceived as a pro-Western and therefore their adoption of Marxism was, you know,
inevitable at some point. To this day, they are still loyal to some extent, to some extent at least, to their, you know, Marxist, you know, communist roots. Well, because the northern half of greater Azerbaijan was already Soviet and was comparatively richer and more developed than the southern half, it's no surprise that communist ideas were circulating in the south.
As far as Stalin himself, ideological motives played a role, but I'm afraid it was also, and mainly, about oil. He had been seeking a concession to Iranian oil in the north of Iran, and the UK and the US were actively seeking to prevent this.
The situation was very tense, so the United Nations Security Council met. Interestingly, the United Nations Security Council's first resolution was to set up the Security Council, and its second resolution, passed only a week later, was to demand that the Soviet Union withdraw from Iran. So it really is part of the history books here. The Security Council's first move was to demand the Soviets to withdraw from Iran.
And because at that time America had the bomb and had a monopoly of nuclear force, the Soviets were compelled to do so. And they did so in May. Yeah. But it wasn't just pure muscle by the Americans. Also, they were trading with Stalin. Okay, get out of Iran. And in return, we will reduce the amount of military aid we give to the Chinese nationalists who are fighting your allies, uh,
you know, Mao and his forces. It's amazing. You know, it just goes to show that in the Cold War, no event happens in a vacuum. Something in Iran is actually linked to something that's in China, that's something in Moscow, that's something in God knows where. In the Cold War, everything is connected.
So that's the Tudeh party and the Azerbaijan crisis of 1946. As the 40s unfolded in Iran, other players arose onto the scene, one of whom, very interestingly, is a group called Fedayiyan Islam. This group, which actually still exists in Iran, is a precursor to the sort of Islamic terrorist movements that we know today. They were nationalists, so they weren't a globalist Islamic movement, but they were nationalists.
and they assassinated several Iranian politicians in the late 40s and the early 50s. And though the Shah would blame it on communists, in 1949, Fadayyan Islam actually tried to assassinate him.
So, Ayman, this raises the question, what has Iran's impact been on the development of Islamic radicalism in general? I'm thinking in particular of the name Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, a 19th century political thinker who has been called the father of Islamic modernism. He advocated pan-Islamic unity against Western domination. And in fact, in 1869, one of his followers assassinated a Qajar Shah.
Indeed, he is one of the most influential figures who, of course, resided in Egypt at some point and taught in Lazhar University. And there he taught the principles of pan-Islamism to oppose what he sees as the British-French colonial domination of the Muslim world, all the way from the British Raj and its influence on Afghanistan and Persia, all the way to Iraq and Egypt and the French
involvement in North Africa, he was seeking to build that pan-Islamism. And he saw in Cairo an important center for this because it sits right in the middle between the influence of the British and the French in the colonial era.
Among his students was Muhammad Rashid Ridha, who had a great influence on Hassan al-Banna, who would later establish the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen in Egypt in 1928. And the funny thing is that, the ironic is that Fida'i Islam will have as one of its members a man called Nawab al-Safawi.
Nawab al-Safawi went to Egypt and was actually trained by the Muslim Brotherhood there and brought with him a group of the Fida'i Islam. So some of them were trained in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and then went back to Iran to carry out their assassinations and acts of sabotage. What
What is more interesting about Nawab al-Safawi is that his nephew is none other than Musa al-Sadr, the founder of the Amal movement in Lebanon in the 1970s, which would later then give birth to the infamous Hezbollah in Lebanon. And also one of the greatest influences on Nawab al-Safawi is the fact that he met Sayyid Qutb in the early 50s in Egypt and was influenced by him.
Of course, later Nawab al-Safawi would be executed by the Shah in 1955, but 24 years later, Imam Khomeini would describe Nawab al-Safawi as the first martyr of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
It's a reminder of how the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, of Islamist globalist jihadism is much older than we think, much older than 9/11, much older than the Iranian revolution. I mean, 100 years before Khomeini, you have characters like al-Afghani already fomenting similar ideas that would ultimately, as we learned, result in the world that we have today.
So that's it. We have the Tudor party, the communist party of Iran. We have Fadaiyan Islam, an Islamist party of terrorists, of assassins in Iran. And of course, we also have the Shah himself. There's a lot we could say about him. We've already talked about how iconic he would become. At this point in history, though, he was basically a refined young man. He wasn't yet the aloof, autocratic target of Khomeini's invective.
When he came to power in 1941, he agreed to rule in accordance with the constitution from 1906 that his father had largely ignored. He reopened the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, on genuinely representative lines. And in the 1940s, for the first time, Iran experienced a genuinely pluralistic democracy with different parties pursuing different ideologies, all vying equally for power.
The Shah would end up favoring American power over the Soviets for sure. In fact, he was genuinely spooked by Stalin, convinced that he had designs on Iran. The events of 1946 did not convince him otherwise. This is why he blamed the communists when he was almost assassinated and he banned the communist Tudor party, which then went
underground. It's all very Cold War, isn't it, Eamon? I mean, what must spycraft have been like in Iran at the time? We were talking the CIA was there, MI6 must have been there, the KGB or the MVB as it then was.
Oh yeah, and the KVND. And you know, so there were so many different intelligence agencies and spies operating there. And behind them you have the machinations and the intrigue of the oil industry. Absolutely. Before too long, all of these players would be implicated in a Cold War event so notorious that it still informs Iranian attitudes to Western powers.
I'm referring, of course, to the infamous coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Eamon, what resonance does the name Mohammad Mossadegh have in the Middle East today?
For Iranians and other people in the Middle East, he represents the symbol of defiance against greedy Western power seeking to rob a nation of its natural resources and the profits of that natural resources. He wanted to negotiate a fair settlement and the
powers that be, I'm talking about the British here, you know, rebuffed him. So for many Iranians, he is a symbol of defiance. He is also the ultimate symbol of grievance against the West and against the Americans and the British for what happened next.
Mohammad Mossadegh was born in 1882. Can you imagine that? When he came to power in 1951, he was almost 70 years old and he had lived through all of the history that we've been talking about. The Russian, British, Soviet, and now American interference in the country.
He was related to the Qajars, and in fact, he married the granddaughter of the Qajar Shah who'd been assassinated by the follower of al-Afghani. It's really everyone's connected. He was indeed well-connected. He was educated in Switzerland and had always opposed Reza Shah because the Shah ignored the constitution. At heart, Muhammad Masadiq was a nationalist.
Now, in 1949, after the failed assassination attempt against the Shah, the Shah began a move toward greater authoritarianism. He managed to push through reforms to the Constitution, diluting the power of Parliament and increasing his own power.
Followed by new elections that summer which were compromised by claims of fraud and corruption Newsflash all of the elections that take place over the course of this story are compromised by fraud and corruption. It was endemic Here's something really interesting Masada responded to that rigged election in the summer of 1949 by organizing a mass protest movement a
In a sign of the revolution, really, later in the 70s, students were mobilized and a sit-in was organized. The whole panoply of modern peaceful mass protest. The Shah capitulated. He promised fairer elections in the future, and the protest movement coalesced into a new coalition of political parties called the National Front with Mossadegh as its leader.
They sought liberal reforms, and at the top of their policy platform was a demand that would cause a political earthquake really globally, and that was oil nationalization.
Eamon, paint a picture of how the oil concession in Iran was being managed at that time and why that would have made Mossadegh and the Nationalists so angry. As you mentioned, Thomas, before the Darcy Agreement, the treaties that were signed regarding the concessions of trade and natural resources meant that the vast majority of the profits would go to the company that is actually doing the excavation, the extraction, and the transportation.
So in modern times, a company like Shell or BP or any other company or ExxonMobil would come to a country, would sign a deal in which they will say, okay, we explore the oil, we dig up the oil, we refine it, and we split the profits 33, 67, 35, 65, 40, 60. But the majority goes to the country where the resources are.
you know, are located. However, in the Iranian question, in something like more than 90% of the profits, in fact, more than that, were going to the Anglo-Persian oil company. And 51% of that company was owned by the British state. So really, the profits were going to the British government and not to the Iranian government.
Not at all. Whatever that was going to the Iranian government were just mere basic royalties. I mean, we're not talking about 5 or 6%, you know, and which was absolute peanuts, minimal. Especially when Mohammad Mossadegh would have looked around and seen the other sorts of deals that oil companies had struck with other governments. Venezuela first.
successfully negotiated a 50-50 deal. And then in 1950, your friend, King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia managed to negotiate the same deal with Aramco, a 50-50 split. Mossadegh was actually seeking precisely that. And yet the British said no.
Yes, this is one of the darkest, darkest episodes of the history of the British Empire in post-World War II, in which they squandered an opportunity and caused a massive rift and agreements that lasted all the way until now. If they accepted, just accepted, just like the Americans in Saudi Arabia accepted, that we split the oil profits 50-50,
The question is that Mossadegh would have succeeded, that the cause of the communists and the religious fanatics would have been contained, and a more modern, democratic, pluralistic Iran would have persisted. But guess what? As usual, we are now living the consequences of the mistakes of the past.
That's true. I think we owe it to the British to put ourselves in their shoes for a second. And after the Second World War, the British state was effectively bankrupt, hemorrhaging money. They really, really relied on the monies from selling Iranian oil to keep their own country going. And this doesn't defend their decision, but it
It explains why they were so unwilling to grant a 50-50 deal to the Iranians. Mossadegh's chief policy was the nationalization of Iran's oil. And this presented him with a political problem, which in fact, you know, Ayman, to be honest, has been presenting me with a political problem, i.e. wrapping my mind around Iranian politics in the early 1950s.
The all of the events, the political events, the elections, the backstabbings, the coalitions, the fallings out, all of these things that happened during the rise and fall of Mohammed Massad. They really are a brain buster. I swear to God. Absolutely. That's why the you know, the ruling class in Iran right now, the mullahs, they have turbans wrapped up around their heads in order to wrap their in politics around their heads.
Right, so Masadik is leading this new party, the National Front, but it has nothing like a majority in parliament and so only has minority influence. Nonetheless, Masadik is a capable political operator, a good manipulator of the modern media, and becomes the chair of the parliamentary committee overseeing the oil question. His emphasis on nationalism and oil nationalization resonated with the masses, and his personal popularity was growing.
However, he had a problem. Mossadegh was a liberal, but the vast majority of Iranians were conservatives. I mean, they generally favored nationalism. They wanted Iranian sovereignty to be secured, but they were conservative. They were generally loyal to the monarchy, and they were certainly religious.
There was a man in parliament, Abul Ghassim Khashoggi, who sort of represented the religious interests of the country. He was, in fact, allied to Fidayan Islam. Masadiq hoped he could manipulate Khashoggi into getting his oil nationalization policy passed. So Khashoggi was a nationalist, right? Masadiq said, okay, I'm going to appeal to his nationalism to get my oil nationalization bill passed.
Kashani was an Islamist and he wanted Sharia law to be the law of the land, so he hoped he could manipulate Mossadegh into imposing Sharia law. Then, in March 1951, a Fidayani Islam fanatic assassinated Prime Minister Ali Razmara, angered by Razmara's pro-British stance. One week later, with Kashani's help, Mossadegh was able to get a bill passed nationalizing the oil industry.
And then, a month after that, Parliament told the Shah that Masadiq was their nominee for Prime Minister. To his credit, the Shah agreed and even signed the Nationalization Bill. He supported nationalization now, mainly because he hoped it would increase his popularity with the people. He was afraid he was losing popularity as Masadiq gained popularity.
As we said, Mossadegh was seeking a 50/50 deal. Well, Britain went nuts. They withdrew their personnel from the oil fields of Iran, which meant that oil production stopped. They imposed sanctions on the country, preventing imports of staples like sugar,
Iran didn't have a tanker fleet of its own, so without British help, they couldn't produce or even export oil. It was a total shitshow. Negotiations with the British were going badly. The economy was in a free fall. There was political violence on the street as nationalists clashed with communists, clashed with religious enthusiasts. It was chaos.
Conservatives began to waver in their support for Masadiq and nationalization, especially after Masadiq, in a series of brilliant tactical moves, was granted emergency powers by Parliament, effectively sidelining the Shah. Masadiq was making his liberal, anti-monarchical position plain.
The Shah began to turn against him, as did Khashoggi, who realized that Mossadegh was a secularist with no intention of imposing Sharia law. This, Ayman, is where your friends the spies come in. As soon as the oil nationalization bill had passed, Britain had been doing what it could to remove Mossadegh from power.
MI6 were bribing parliamentarians, religious clerics, and other conservative groups. Masadegh had hoped the U.S. might support him, but Cold War politics got in the way, especially after President Eisenhower came to power. The Soviet Union's reach had recently expanded in Central Europe, China, and Korea, and because the Tudeh party had supported Masadegh, Eisenhower feared losing Iran to the Soviets too.
So, the CIA began working with MI6 to undermine Masada's grip on the government.
So in the midst of all this, Masadik felt that the only way he could get his political program through was if he basically could rule by executive fiat. So he called a referendum to dissolve parliament and give himself dictatorial powers. This referendum resulted in a 99% yes vote. Now we all know what a 99% yes vote means. Fraud.
Masadek had rigged it for sure. It wasn't a secret ballot. It was definitely transparent. I mean, you know, you had to vote in the open and there were thugs standing next to you to make sure you voted the right way. So it wasn't a fair referendum at all. But it gave Masadek the result he was looking for, permission as he saw it to rule as a dictator.
This was bound to freak his opponents out. The conservatives, top generals in the army, MI6 in the CIA, and the Shah, none of them could accept Mossadegh as a dictator. So they pressed go on a plan that they had been cooking up for a while, a plan known as Operation Ajax.
The plan was quite simple. The Shah was going to use his powers to dismiss Mossadegh unilaterally, without there being elections, and replace him with a man of their choosing, a general called Zahedi. This was the plan. On the 15th of August, 1953, they pressed go. The Shah signs the firman dismissing Mossadegh and installing General Zahedi as prime minister, knowing that the CIA had given him assurance that the Americans would support this move.
But the Tudor party, the Communist Party of Iran, which had been made illegal, which had gone underground, and which had been an on-again, off-again ally of Mossadegh and the National Front, and over the last few years had infiltrated the Iranian army, the Tudor party found out about the plot in advance and warned Mossadegh about it.
So as the Shah's men were going to Masadeq's palace with the firman dismissing him, suddenly Masadeq's supporters burst into the streets and there was a sort of riot preventing this from happening.
This freaked out the Shah even more. Spooked, he fled the country. I mean, it's actually quite a remarkable and cowardly thing. He just up and fled the country. Some coup. He flees the country and ends up in Rome. The CIA meet him there. Probably, I don't know, they give him a hug. What do you do when the strong man you thought you were going to support to take power just runs away to Rome? So, Mohammad Massadik thinks...
I've survived. The coup has failed. So he sends his supporters back home. However, the generals, the clerics, the conservative forces inside Iran that had conspired against him with the CIA, they were not finished.
They paid a mob to dress up like Tude party members, come out into the streets, and declare a communist revolution. This attracted actual Tude party members to join them. A riot broke out, along with street violence, all of this giving the conservative generals the excuse they had engineered to remove Masadiq from power, which they did on the 19th of August. They arrested him and, in his place, installed General Zahedi as prime minister.
The Shah flies back with the CIA director in tow, determined to rule in a much more authoritarian way. He's had enough with pluralism. He's had enough with party politics. As far as he's concerned, it resulted in economic collapse, chaos, geopolitical turmoil, the offending of important allies, etc., etc. This is where the Shah becomes the strongman that we know, the iconic Shah that Khomeini overthrew in 1979.
So, Ayman, after listening to me narrate Operation Ajax and everything else that happened during that pivotal point in Iran's history, what do you think? Was it as people usually think? Certainly Iranians think this. Were MI6 and the CIA, the puppet masters, secretly controlling everything from behind the scenes? Look, Thomas, I think I want the listener to indulge me a little bit here when I say that all this talk about the CIA organizing
military coups here and there, whether it is in Iran, the Congo, in Latin America, wherever it is. The reality is that MI6 and the CIA and the French intelligence or any other powerful agency, they cannot do any of this without a fertile ground already being present in the country they want to interfere in. In other words, that the circumstances in the country were ready for a coup. It's just a question of having the direction.
So, in essence, nothing happens in a vacuum. The CIA does not take one stable country completely happy with itself and then turn it upside down. No, there are always other set of factors which would contribute to the greater powers of the world at that time, which include not just only the British, the French, and the Americans, but also the Soviets.
when they want to do something in their interest, they would basically come and say, "Okay, this country, I can change. I can exact change because there is a fertile ground for change." In Iran at that time, there were too many forces at play, too many interests, too many political parties constantly changing sides, too many class-based issues. It was too complicated.
And you know, ultimately, Muhammad Masadiq, for all of his genius as a politician, he kind of dug his own grave. Yeah, he alienated so many of his traditional allies, including the Shah himself. He could have gained these powers if he just went to the Shah and said, you know, Your Majesty, I need to enact these policies. Please, could you help me? I mean, you know, he could have
you know, hid behind the Shah, behind the legitimacy of the Shah, and the two could have worked things out together. But guess what? When you are trying to give the appearance of, well, being a backstabber, well, guess what? People will stab you in the front. Well, there you go. That's our best attempts to explain the checkered political history of Iran in the early part of the 20th century and at the very beginning of the Cold War.
Mohammad Mossadegh. As we said, his memory resounds until the present. Iranians to this day, convinced that their one chance for a proper liberal democracy was thwarted by the CIA, still invoke Mossadegh when they shake their fists at America and at the West.
reasonably to some extent, but I do think that it's a little bit over-egged. I think that there, well, as I say, it was much more complicated than that. Nonetheless, as we'll see in the next episode, very soon after Mohammad Mossadegh's downfall in Iran, an Arab leader of immense historical importance learning from Iran's failed experiment of oil nationalization and negotiations with the West would create an even greater geopolitical earthquake.
I mean, of course, the president of Egypt, Kamal Abdel Nasser. Very ominous.
On the next episode, we'll tell you all about Gamal Abdel Nasser and his impact on the Middle East. This is your biweekly reminder that if you're not doing so already, you can follow the show at MH Conflicted on Twitter and Facebook and argue over the finer points we've raised with other fans of the show on our Facebook discussion page. You can find that by searching Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group over on Facebook.
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extra also for just 99p per month. And that, as they say, is that. Please join us in two weeks time for another exciting episode of Conflicted. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Rowan Bishop. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.