If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empowerpoduk.com. Bowser is back! Ha ha! Bowser! Bowser! Ah! Everyone calm down! The Super Mario Brothers can take care of the kingdom. Let's go! On April 1st... Toad, pack our things. Woohoo! The Galaxy... Whoa! ...is waiting. Ha ha! Who is this? Nasha! So some cool dinosaur just shows up and he's now part of the group. Cool. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, only in cinemas April 1st. As you've heard it say already on state media and online, we will make sure that we will never be in a position to be attacked again. What does that tell you? It tells you that if they get to keep that 400 kilos of enriched uranium, that is worth 10 bombs. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durenpoul. And this week we're actually going to interrupt our usual series. I mean that sounds terribly formal, BBC. Because in light of the US-Israeli war with Iran, we think it's really important to bring to you an expert historical view of what's going on in the region right now. And honestly, we couldn't think of anyone better for this extra special episode than the formidable journalist, Christiane Amanpour, a CNN anchor, the host of the X Files podcast with her ex, James Rubin. Best named podcast of the year, definitely. And also she had an escape from Tehran during the 1979 revolution. We're so thrilled to have you, Christiane. Thank you very much for being with us. Growing up in Tehran, I mean, right from the get-go, you have this vantage point that many people listening will not have. Just tell us a little bit about, you know, your situation in Iran and what that was like. My mom, you know, English and Christian, my father, Persian and Muslim got married and they had four girls. I'm the oldest one and we all grew up and lived in Tehran until the revolution. And actually most of my family, even beyond the revolution. I was in Iran for most of 1978 because I had left high school and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and where to go to university, etc. And I therefore was able to see the revolution unfolding because 1978 was the year of the uprising against the Shah. And the revolution finally materialized and became an Islamic Republic in early 1979. So I saw all that coming from what everybody of my milieu was, a royalist, monarchist society. We lived under the monarchy. There was no discussion of politics. There was not free speech. There was one state-controlled media and that's the way it was. But if you were on side, you were on side. And to be fair, there was a lot more rights for women. The Shah was trying to drag the country into a more prosperous future. It was discovering its oil wealth and it was a very close ally of not only the United States but Israel. It was considered a major piece in the chessboard to protect the West from the Soviet Union and communism. Therefore, it was a mega player in the Cold War and it was a mega oil exporter after the Arab oil embargo over the Israeli wars in the Middle East and became a very important supplier to the West. So all of that and then all of that was crashed with the revolution. How far did that world totally crumble for you in 1979? Did it feel like an immediate full stop for your family, for your life? For my family and for the system, of course, one day we woke up and we were told that everything we believed in was 180 degrees the wrong thing. The people who we admired were either executed, imprisoned or denigrated. The system that we thought was serving the majority of the people was crashed. It's a revolution. So people were turned into refugees, into exiles and those who stayed gradually realized, particularly women, that their rights were not going to be respected. Having said that, Iran became a highly, highly literate and educated society. Education was available to a much, much bigger trash of the population than it had been under the Shah and women were brought into the system. The Shah started it, but women today have much more rights in Iran than they do in the rest of the Muslim world. They can vote, they can drive, they can work, they're in parliament, they can be elected, etc. But their fundamental legal rights were essentially cast aside. The rights the Shah brought in to protect women under the law, whether it's property rights, whether it's inheritance, whether it's custody, whether it's all of those kinds of rights, the Shah brought in for women. And the first thing Ayatollah Khomeini did, that was back in 1979, when he took over, was go straight to the Ministry of Women, it was the first created by the Shah and closed it down. Go straight into the streets and tell women, no, sorry, you thought we were going to let you not wear your headjabs if you didn't want to. You thought we were going to bring democracy, but we are not. You will all go back under the veil. And that really made many people who had supported the revolution, even within the middle class, who had supported the revolution, thinking it was going to bring democracy after the Shah's monarchy, realized that Ayatollah Khomeini had committed a bait and switch in front of all the world's cameras in exile in France. He had given this lie, basically, that he was bringing democracy and human rights and women's rights to Iran. The idea that people have of Iran these days, how does it mismatch with what you think they should know about the Iran that you know? Look, it's really difficult because the revolution coincided with one of the worst acts in diplomatic history, which was the revolutionaries taking the US Embassy hostage, holding those hostages for 444 days and making them enemies of America, starting with the death to America, great Satan, all of that stuff. And holding these diplomats hostage in a way that had never, ever been done. It violates all laws of diplomatic immunity and relations between sovereign states, etc. So that, basically, 47-year-old wound is huge still in America and also in Iran because they did it, the revolutionaries will say they did it because they feared that once the Shah was let into the United States, you remember in 1979 for medical treatment, that that would be a launchpad for a CIA coup against this Islamic Revolutionary government to bring the Shah back. Why? Because they remembered the 1953 coup that brought the Shah back and toppled the quasi-democratically nominated Prime Minister Mossadet. And so they were very concerned about that was an MI6 and CIA coup to bring the Shah back because MI6 was concerned about the price of oil and the Anglo-Iranian oil company, which would be nationalized. And the Americans were concerned about communism, the Cold War and losing their peace on that chessboard. But that created a huge trauma in the Iranian psyche. And so, you know, there's just so much that each side doesn't understand or doesn't realize about each other. And that's playing out right now as well. Christian, do you think it was the Iran-Iraq war that got the revolutionary regime into this sort of defensive contra-munda against the world posthumously, which in a sense they're still in? I absolutely do. And I do think that if any of the current war planners have not gone back and look at that history, they will be missing a huge piece of vital information and vital knowledge. Because you remember that there was the revolution and then Saddam Hussein, who had always longed to have control of the Shah al-Arab waterway, which is a small piece of waterway that's actually shared by Iran and Iraq on the Persian Gulf that leads then into the Straits of Homoes and allows the export of oil. Under the Shah, there had been a deal between Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to share that. As soon as the Shah was toppled, Saddam Hussein decided this was an opportunistic moment. Iran is weak. What are these Mullahs? What are these Ayatollahs? They don't know how to defend, etc., etc. And therefore, in September 1980, invaded Iran, thinking like Vladimir Putin did over Ukraine, like now, Israel and the United States think over Iran, that it's just a week at most and the regime will be crushed. And as you know, it lasted eight years and it was ended around the table in a draw. So, Saddam didn't win. Iran, by surviving, claimed to have won. But what they did then was form the Basij, really, really entrenched the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. These were formed to guard the revolution. This is a whole ideological military establishment that has lasted those 47-plus years. I remember documentary for CNN. They had bought this incredible video from an Australian production company and they had been given access to the front in the mid-80s. And they had gone to see this nascent teenage force of boys called the Basij whose role was to inter-Aliya be human mind sweepers, to clear the front for the tanks because they didn't have the technology. But that mentality, that mentality is what people have to understand now. Khomeini said, no, we're not surrendering. We're going to keep going until finally there was a negotiated end. And he said, we have to drink from the poison chalice to survive and to continue our future. We've got an oil crisis now. We've got isolation now. We've got threats of attrition now. I mean, how far is that pattern going to be mirrored now to that of the 1980s, do you think? Well, I think some of it is being mirrored as you just outlined. I think that, you know, many people, and again, I can drag it out of my archives, there were serious Americans and other scholars and experts who had worked on this who believed that Iran might moderate a little bit with the death of Khomeini. You remember that happened in 1989, about a year after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. He died early June 1989. And all the hopes, I think, and the wishful thinking of the West and Israel, I guess, were that this would somehow nobody could match the charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini, which is true. No leader did match the charisma. But instead, the next supreme leader was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had been president throughout the Iran-Iraq war and who had been wounded by a bomb attack by those who were against the regime. And he is the one who came in and further solidified the strength and the ideology and the mission of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC. And he became so entrenched with them and made the theocracy and the military intertwineable. So this now, what exists in Iran, is not just a theocratic revolutionary regime. It is a theocracy military revolutionary government. All those words, ideological. And people may have thought that when the time comes for Ali Khamenei to pass away in his sleep, you know, he was 86, old and ill, then maybe, maybe it will inevitably lead to a gradual moderation inside Iran. Well, that didn't happen because the U.S. and Israel used that as their first target, wiped him out, wiped the top layer out. And then what happened? They nominated his son. Now, it might not have happened. Mujtaba Khamenei was not the most popular one. And in fact, Ayatollah Khamenei wrote several times that unlike the monarchy, we are not a hereditary system. Okay, we will take the best and the brightest to be our supreme leader. Well, no, Mujtaba is not the best and the brightest. He wasn't a top-top Ayatollah. It wasn't even an Ayatollah. It's just been labeled that we don't even know whether he's actually running things right now. We haven't actually seen him. There's all sorts of rumors that he was either very badly wounded in the attack on the first day of the war that killed his father, his mother, his wife, and other family members. He has not been seen. A statement in his name was put out. But importantly, this is a very hard-line statement. We will not surrender. The Straits of Hormuz will stay closed. So this is where we are. And on the oil issue too, that's the only retaliatory point in an asymmetrical war that Iran is using and warned that it would use. You know, if we're to carry on that mirror image, does it carry on? Because the 1980s brought decades of insularity, a build-up of pressure in Iran, and also a build-up of pressure in the region, as if this region needed more pressure at all. Is that where we are heading? Is the same calculus going through President Trump's mind that this could be Venezuela, where we have somebody who's friendly to us, who can do business with us? Or are we facing another few decades of a spiraling situation that he's going to pull more and more nations in? Hard to know about another few decades. This is not Venezuela. Period. End of story. There's no Delcey Rodriguez. And if there was, as Trump himself said, we've killed them all. The people who we thought that we might want to reach out to maybe could team up with Reza Palavi, create some kind of transition. For me, it was very scary right now. Unlike the first Gulf War, which we can talk about, and even the second Gulf War in terms of the military, there was a clear mission in terms of the military objective at the beginning. The politics stepped in and basically screwed it all up. But here, there's not even a clear military objective. It keeps getting changed on a daily basis. If you take President Trump's constant talk to the press in these micro interviews that he's trying to control the situation and affect the situation on the ground, saying these things and posting these things on social media on a daily, sometimes by-daily, sometimes hourly basis. There's conflicting missions and end-game strategies articulated from the Pentagon. And I just do believe that this is a very, very scary thing. And right now, we can't call it a war in Iran. It's a war that is now in Gulf, the region, and it just has. And now President Trump is, I think, demonstrating a certain amount of reality, but maybe a bit of desperation and panic, calling on all these countries, allies and others, including China, who he's been dissing for the whole year. That he have tariffed. And I guess, William, that he's dissed and dismissed the whole year and threatened and bullied. Come and help us open the streets of Hormuz or else. None of these countries signed up for the war. None of them have their immediate interests at stake, but are going to be very, very caught up in a global recession if that happens, in an ongoing oil crisis, which shows no sign of backing down right now. There is no Del C Rodriguez that we see, you know, they called for the IRGC and the Basij to lay down their arms and surrender to the people. How? How does that happen? How? How does that happen? And let's just not forget that in the first Iraq war, and this is very important because the military was successful. I saw it. I witnessed it from the beginning. It was a three-week military campaign. It did cause Saddam Hussein to go, but they had said, very similar to now to the, then they're called the Republican Guard in Iraq and the police. The normal army lay down your arms. Don't fight us. And after the war, we will partner with you to rebuild a new Iraq. And sure enough, they laid down their arms. They didn't fight. The first thing that the American occupation forces, the CPA, Coalition Provisional Authority did was to rip up the playbook that the State Department had come up for, rebuilding Iraq after that war, handed over the Pentagon, and they went into full debarthification. IE, they fired all the military, all the security, and created an insurgency. They birthed AQIM, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They birthed eventually ISIS and huge flows of migration. It was a disaster. You've been wonderful on your podcast. You seem to indicate in one of the recent issues that Trump, you think, is completely miscalculated, that he thought there was going to be, that even the threats would bring them to the negotiating table. Do you think he has any understanding of Iran that he's getting any good advice? Because the impression seems to be that he's got these two estate agents, Jared Kushner and Wyckoff, providing amateurish and biased information. Do you think that he's flailing from a lack of information and a lack of briefing as the State Department being completely ignored? Well, yeah, and also the American people being ignored. There are polls that say 60% of Americans do not want this war. They do not support this war. Including the Maga base. So what does this tell us? I mean, who is the Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder here? Well, I think, you know, to Willie's point and your point, I think that this is the big problem. You see at the beginning, if you remember, they eviscerated the State Department and all the institutions that were full of people who had been studying these issues, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, all of that kind of stuff for decades. So most of those people essentially have been fired. And in the big positions, the cabinet positions, they are loyalists and sycophants whose jobs depend on appeasing and flattering the President of the United States. I do believe, because it's been reported, I don't know firsthand, but it's been reported, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Cain and others, did try to tell President Trump, they war-gamed in this. They said, President, there's this issue of the Straits of Hormuz, there's this, there's that, and there's the other. On top of everything else, the Arab Gulf allies, the Gulf states said to President Trump, please don't do this, because Iran will do what it's doing now. They have come over here and they have told us that this is their retaliation plan. First, we strike Israel, if Israel strikes us. Then we strike American bases in all your countries, if America strikes us. And then if that doesn't give them a message, then sorry guys, we strike your economic hubs. And that's exactly what they've been doing to the actual point. And they've also said, and we have the Straits of Hormuz, and we will close it off to the international oil trade. And that's exactly what they've done. Except remember now, they're saying that we have the trade, the Straits are open to any country that is not at war with us. The only countries that cannot come through the Straits of Hormuz are American and anybody else who's in this war. So I think that this is a real problem. And to William's particular question about the negotiators, Whitcoff and Kushner, for me, the only thing you need to know is that on the record, Whitcoff told Fox News on the Sunday before the war started, so a week before the war started, just ahead of negotiations, that the president is frustrated. That was the word he used. That the Iranians are not capitulating. That is the word he used with all these military assets there. Surely they're scared. Why haven't they capitulated? And this was weak just about before the war started. So this was meant to be to try to get them to the negotiating table. I've also heard that the goalposts around the negotiations about stopping enrichment and all the rest of it, I've heard from very good sources inside and outside of Iran that they were changed at the last minute. By Kushner and by... No, by Trump. Kushner and Whitcoff sent the messages to Trump and he either under consultation with Netanyahu or just on his own changed the goalposts on that issue, on the nuclear issue. So I think that's a problem. They've had bad experiences negotiating with this Trump administration. Of course, the West doesn't believe that Iran negotiates the good faith. I would just point to the last time temperatures were seriously lowered was under the JCPOA, the so-called nuclear agreement, which took two years, but was whether you like it or not, a perfectly adequate for the time arms control agreement. It did not address everything. It was a nuclear arms control agreement in the manner without the treaty status of what the US would do with the USSR. You mentioned Netanyahu there, which of course is a crucial element in this story. I mean, there have been lots of speculation about how far Netanyahu pushed Trump into this. And it was Netanyahu's game that obviously something he's we've seen these clips from him from 20 years ago, trying to push America to attack Iran. How big a factor do you think Netanyahu and Israel has been in this entire outbreak of war? I would say instrumental. I think he even said, I didn't hear him say it, but I saw it quoted, I've been waiting 40 years for this. Finally, I have a partner in the United States to get rid of this malign influence and reshape the Middle East. And as you know, in the past, whether it was under Obama, Biden, Netanyahu would make these visits to Congress that the Republicans would ask him. He would diss the sitting president of the United States and say, don't agree to any of these agreements with Iran, etc. So he's made his position very, very clear. Again, though, I think that he has confused tactics with strategy. There is absolutely no doubt that Israel has some of the best intelligence in the world, whether it's against Hezbollah with those exploding pages or whether it's finding where they are on that one day, Saturday, where he wiped out the whole top leadership. But the tactical successes, I think they confused for political strategy that I did this, ergo, this will happen. And that has not happened. But it's really important to understand that Israel's policy under Netanyahu and the right wingers, there's a book written by Ronan Bergman, one of the best investigative journalists in Israel, works of the times, etc. He wrote a book, Rise and Kill First. And it's about Israel's decades-long policy of assassinations to cut the head off the snake and continue to quote, mow the lawn. I'm sorry, these are all the terms that they use to be able to, they think, keep themselves safe. I beg to differ. I don't think it keeps them safe, as we've seen, because each and every time something else grows in its place. So this is one final gamble. And if Israel and the United States lose this, if the regime survives, I don't know where you go next. I saw the last episode, or maybe it was a couple of episodes ago, in your podcast, you're doing this with your ex. You were almost close to tears when he was defending you, James Rubin, saying that you'd been under attack, a lot by Iranians saying you don't speak for us. We find this as well whenever we talk about this. By the way, these attacks are only from Iranians in exile. But I am sad about it, because I've spent my whole life telling the truth about Iran and actually humanizing the Iranian people, who the whole world, including the Brits, including the Americans, including everybody, have dehumanized, have lumped together with the Iranian revolutionary government. As we saw Hegzeff do most shockingly in the description of they are evil doers, they are the worst in the world, and Trump has been using this language too. They cut babies in half and all of the kind of things he was saying on that flight. Yeah, an apple swan, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have to tell you from the bottom of my heart, because I have covered these things for a long time, and I've been on the ground, and I believe that you have to tell the truth, and you have to tell what the people are thinking, what they want. And the Iranian people are some of the most magnificent people in the world, and I'm just going to say that they just are inside. After 47 years of having their rights trampled, of having their basic ability to earn a living, to have a life, their economic rights trampled, all the rest of it, they are still the most intelligent, educated people of that whole region, and I'm just going to say it. And the most pro-American, if they were allowed to be, yes they are. The expat Iranian community, talk about that, because you said that's where the majority of attacks are coming from. And Reza Sharpe, I love you, the young Shah. You've interviewed him. What's your impression? Because he's obviously the toast of Tehran Jalis and all the LA Persians cheering on the internet for him every minute and backing Israel. So what I'm going to say is very unemotional and very factual. Reza Palavi is most certainly the most well-known name of any in the opposition, and there have been a few in Iran, and I do not know the numbers, right? I'm not getting into numbers, who called on him during the protests and who raised his name, I think, at the beginning of the war, in the early days when a certain number of Iranians were jumping up and down, celebrating the death of Khamenei, etc. The issue is that whether it's him or his supporters, they have carved out now a very extreme view of Iranians and what Iranians should be thinking, and very polarized and very polarizing. And they appear to be saying there's no room for anybody who doesn't just blindly support the royalists and the monarchy. This is a big problem because in order to have a transition that is a successful transition, you could look at every post-war reality, you must, must, must be able to unify your country. It's what Ahmad Al-Sharar is trying to do in Syria right now, knowing that one faction cannot rule. It has to be, especially in a country of 93 million people, the vast majority are Shiite Muslims, some of them want to be secular, but nonetheless, you cannot go in saying it's my way or the highway. So that's what's happening online. It's just a very, very toxic belief that if one side loses, the other side has to win, i.e. a zero-sum game. And that's what worries me. And I believe that anybody who wants to be a transitional leader or continue to try to emerge from a dictatorship has to be able to first and foremost unify the country. And that's why I think a lot of this hullabaloo online is very self-defeating for the opposition, while inside, the further this war goes on, for the moment, I can't predict what's going to happen next week, two weeks, three weeks. I just don't know where the breaking point is for either side. But for the moment, the people inside Iran are seeing the war that they thought would liberate them, right? And they wanted, even if it was the United States and Israel, even given the fact that there had been so much bad history between Israel, the United States and Iran, whatever it took the Iranians inside were seeming to say. But now, given that it hasn't happened and we're now into the third week, they are wondering, is this actually against the regime or is it against all of us and the people? They've seen, as you said, William, the attack on the oil depots just, you know, on the outskirts of Tehran. What did that do? Breathing problems, health issues, not to mention being cut off from the fuel to heat their homes to fill their cars, to do all that kind of stuff. Attacks on the water infrastructure, people having a hard time trying to find clean water. Attacks on even residential, whether they're deliberate, whether they're mistaken. I spoke to an Iranian friend who just managed to get news of her family today and she said her entire district of North Tehran, which has no revolutionary guards, has been decimated after the blocks are down. Oh my God. William, this is really bad because that is Reza Palavi's constituency, okay? She's very much from that world. That's where I grew up. I know North Tehran. It's the upper middle class and higher. And they feel that they are directly under assault, that this is just random targeting of residential neighborhoods and they're hunkering down and they're feeling patriotic now. They hate the regime, but they're feeling, you know, persons against the world. And it's really awful because from the Israeli point of view, and I think from the opposition point of view, they'll tell you that these attacks are against the local militias, like the Basij who've got checkpoints and things up. But of course, you know, a big drone or a missile, you know, the blast radius is very big. And so what they're trying to do apparently is kill enough security and military personnel to be able to back off and say, okay, it's now in your hands and these repressive forces have gone. That's wishful thinking at the moment because it is, as you say, and you've got a firsthand view from inside Tehran. And that's where I'm hearing as well, that people are now scared. They're trying to leave Tehran. They're trying to get out. At the same time, the regime is threatening them. They're bringing out their people and in broad daylight, very repressive, bringing out tens of thousands of people to stand up for the regime. So I think it's this is very, very scary. And I do believe that no matter how this ends, Iran's message is to say, we will not be able to end this unless you understand that you will never be able to attack us again. So I don't know what that looks like. And I don't know what the US and Israel will demand as a successful exit strategy. Bearing in mind that you've said, look, I don't know how this is going to end. What is the most likely end game of all of this, Christian, with all of your experience? It will not end unless it's around a negotiating table. Okay, but in that negotiating table scenario, what does it look like? If the regime hasn't been toppled in the next several weeks, it might look like it continues, but with a harder line. As you've heard it say already on state media and online, we will make sure that we will never be in a position to be attacked again. What does that tell you? It tells you that if they get to keep that 400 kilos of enriched uranium, that is worth 10 bombs. Yeah, okay. So that's one scenario. The other scenario is an uprising that gets rid of the regime. Looking less likely now, though, wouldn't you say? I don't know. I've said that was very probable two weeks ago, but it doesn't feel like it now. It doesn't look like it now at all, but we don't know what's going to happen. As I say, as you've just said, it's getting closer and closer to populated areas. And let's not forget what they did at the very beginning, the first day, killed 175 people, including children, based on old outdated intelligence and maps, and all investigations point to a U.S. tomahawk. And the U.S. keeps saying we're looking into it, and apparently they have named a special general officer to investigate it. And people like David Petraeus, the former commander of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, former head of the CIA says that's a must. The United States has to come out and be truthful about that. We almost ran out of time with you, Christian. I've got one last question for you, which is, you know, doing a podcast with somebody that you have in the past violently disagreed with and sometimes wanted to push into a muddy puddle. Not violently. No, no, I'm talking about me and William. I was just going to ask about what is, what is it like for you? I mean, with your ex-husband, Christian, how do you negotiate it? You know what? He's in the U.S. I'm in the U.K. And the idea of it was when I realized that there was just such an awful dynamic in the world that nobody can talk to anybody anymore without it becoming a huge fight, that there's no movement towards any peace talks. It's all in your silos, in your corners. Everybody's verbally attacking everybody. That there must be a way that even people who have differing experiences and maybe disagree are able to talk about the future and to talk about the current realities. And so he was leaving his job after the Biden administration, after Trump won, and he was at the State Department. And I got, hmm, this is an interesting opportunity. And yeah, it's sort of, it's sort of working. Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure. Christian Amonpour's podcast is called X-Files. Of course you can. The X-Files, The X-Files with Christian Amonpour. There is a definite article. Yes. Anyway, listen, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you both very much. A pleasure. Thank you. A huge pleasure. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. Till the next time we meet then, it's goodbye from me. Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durumpour. Thank you.
