The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - February 04, 2026


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #32 ｜ Iran war？


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

131.47054

Word Count

2,638

Sentence Count

156

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary

In this live episode, Firas Maudad talks about the U.S. preparations for war with Iran, and why is this happening? What does it all mean, and how does it look like it could end up?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to a new live episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.
00:00:06.740 As usual, this is another live episode. Please step in with any questions, comments that you
00:00:13.420 might have, and I will read them at the end as I normally do. Today, we are going to be talking
00:00:18.860 about the preparations for war with Iran. And why is this happening? What does it all mean?
00:00:25.800 And how does it look like ending up? Because striking Iran is a pretty complex task.
00:00:33.980 Now, as you can see from the map that Samson is showing you here, this is Iran and the wider
00:00:40.980 Persian Gulf region. Geographically, Iran looks like a fortress. It is not really invadable,
00:00:49.740 except for the southern part of the country, the southwestern part of the country, to be precise,
00:00:57.980 where you would need to build up a ground force in Iraq. And the reason that I say that is that
00:01:03.780 as you look at this map, you see that there are these endless mountain chains sort of protecting
00:01:11.560 the Persian heartland. And then there is this kind of salty desert here in the middle. And the logistics
00:01:19.960 of just sending ground troops into a country like that are incredibly difficult. That's why the Iraqis
00:01:27.560 struggled so much during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war, which was really focused on this area,
00:01:37.440 the flat area by Ahwaz that has a lot of Iran's energy resources, actually. And that is, in fact,
00:01:49.440 relatively invadable. Whereas beyond that, you hit these mountain chains. And then for any ground
00:01:57.260 force, it becomes incredibly difficult. So what we're looking at realistically is a series of
00:02:03.380 airstrikes. And the Americans have been building up their capabilities all over the region. CNN has a
00:02:11.760 decent summary of the buildup here. What you see first is a huge number of American bases and presence
00:02:22.360 all over the region. You also see the movement of the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. You see a lot
00:02:32.800 of new aircraft that are there for surveillance. You see a significant number of destroyers and
00:02:44.560 aegis cruisers that are there to be able to intercept Iranian missiles and fire into Iran. You see a buildup
00:02:53.360 of multiple new air wings. And a lot of this buildup is actually focused on places like Jordan,
00:03:00.000 which is probably going to be the area from which the U.S. strike comes because you have this empty
00:03:09.480 airspace over Syria and Iraq where there isn't much air defense. You can get straight into Iranian
00:03:15.200 air defenses here. And the Iranians, in order to target Israel, have concentrated their own missiles
00:03:22.720 pretty much in this area and along the mountains here with a plan to be able to close the Strait of
00:03:30.940 Hormuz, which we're going to talk about, and with a plan to strike into American bases. Again, given the
00:03:39.180 distances, this is an ideal location to hit the bases in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman. There's a naval refueling
00:03:47.680 station here. Kuwait has a bunch of American bases, all of these locations. So you see the Iranian missiles
00:03:56.900 are concentrated all along the west and south of the country, whereas a lot of the nuclear assets are
00:04:04.780 deeper inland, including in the vicinity of Tehran, the capital, which sits right around here where I'm
00:04:12.020 moving the mouse. So the Americas are engaged in this buildup. It looks like it's going to be an aerial
00:04:17.760 strike. They've deployed the kind of electronic warfare aircraft that they would need to be able
00:04:24.580 to do this. These are the EA-18 growlers, which sort of are helpful in suppressing enemy communications
00:04:34.000 and air defenses and air defenses and so on. And with those, the U.S. can try to shut down
00:04:41.240 communications. They've pre-positioned a lot of refueling aircraft. You need to refuel right outside
00:04:49.120 the Iranian airspace, go in, strike, go out, refuel again, and then return to bases. And the plan looks
00:04:59.440 like it's first to suppress Iranian air defense systems and then strike at various key targets
00:05:09.220 and then see what happens. And obviously, in anticipation of pretty big waves of Iranian missiles
00:05:19.720 coming in, the U.S. is boosting its air defense. And they've deployed new THAAD system, terminal high
00:05:27.260 altitude area defense. They've deployed Patriots, which proved to be ineffective against a lot of
00:05:32.020 the Iranian missiles. And they will use their own aircraft to intercept the drones, which travel
00:05:38.680 slowly over longer distances so they can be more easily intercepted this way. But it's worth remembering
00:05:45.840 a few things. The first thing is that the IRGC has been planning for the Americans trying to launch
00:05:57.160 a decapitation strike against Iran for some time. The IRGC is the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps.
00:06:05.860 It's not actually the Revolutionary Guard Corps. It's the Revolution Guard Corps, because it's supposed
00:06:11.700 to guard the revolution rather than just export it. But anyway, that's just a minor thing that gets on
00:06:19.560 my nerves when people mistranslate these kinds of terms. And part of their preparation has been to
00:06:25.600 decentralize their own command so that if the head leadership in Tehran were annihilated, the regional
00:06:33.440 branches of the IRGC would continue to operate and would remain in control of the country. And they
00:06:41.380 would be in various underground bases all over Iran. And from these bases, they would continue firing
00:06:50.560 until they got a command to cease fire, essentially. So they would be able to fight independently of the
00:06:58.060 command structure. And that's how we saw Hezbollah fighting against Israel, where after the various
00:07:04.740 decapitation strikes, which were incredibly successful, incredibly successful, on the ground, in terms of
00:07:12.340 ground fighting, and in terms of the short-range missiles, Hezbollah was not disrupted.
00:07:18.020 And what the Americans would hope to do would be to take out the air defense systems first.
00:07:24.520 And then, having taken out the air defense systems, they would then try to identify the entrances
00:07:31.340 of the underground bases that the Iranians have built, and pretty much seal the Iranians in their
00:07:39.480 bases. Now, these bases have logistics equipment to enable them to open new tunnel entrances,
00:07:45.800 even while a war was ongoing. But if you flood the zone with surveillance aircraft, you can detect when
00:07:54.140 this is happening. The issue really is an issue of scale. Because detecting Hezbollah opening new tunnel
00:08:02.980 entrances in an area as tiny as South Lebanon, here is South Lebanon, you're looking at a very small area,
00:08:12.120 40 kilometers wide, 40 kilometers long, absolutely tiny, is not comparable to identifying the possibility
00:08:22.800 of new tunnels being opened all along this geography, where some of the locations of the underground bases
00:08:30.900 would not actually be known to the attackers. And so that creates new complications.
00:08:37.620 And the Iranians went as far as to develop new kinds of concrete that would allow them to withstand
00:08:48.180 airstrikes, so that only the heaviest ordinance, which is in limited supply at the end of the day,
00:08:56.220 would be effective against their systems. So that's what you're dealing with. But then there's the
00:09:02.720 question of why is this happening? I mean, there's the United States on one side of the planet.
00:09:10.560 And there's Iran on pretty much the other side. And the Iranians don't want to close oil exports for
00:09:19.740 the region, because that means that their own oil exports can't go. And because it means that the
00:09:25.220 Chinese would go crazy, so they're fine to let the oil keep flowing, they're not really capable of
00:09:32.720 invading other countries around them. The U.S. can absolutely stop them from, say, you know, the fear
00:09:39.120 when Saddam invaded Kuwait was that Saddam would continue from Kuwait and then seize the eastern
00:09:45.400 province of Saudi Arabia, which is where the oil is, and continue from there to the UAE and be able to do
00:09:52.680 that and be able to sort of dominate the oil exports of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi, and the UAE. Qatar is not a
00:10:01.780 serious oil exporter. And through that, become immensely powerful and blackmail the world. The Iranians
00:10:08.160 are not in a position where they can invade these countries right now. Like, they just can't do it. And they
00:10:13.460 don't seem to have any plan to do it. So while the U.S. wants to make sure that nobody else controls all of
00:10:19.020 this oil, Iran isn't even trying to do that. And the answer is Israel. That's the only answer. And you see that
00:10:28.120 the top decision makers in Israel are heavily influenced by people like Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel,
00:10:35.300 obviously a Brazilian billionaire who is also a homosexual, whose former boyfriend met a sticky end
00:10:46.340 when he apparently fell from the 17th floor after having invited himself to a party that Peter Thiel and
00:10:56.000 his husband were holding. And Peter Thiel is obviously deeply connected to J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance was working
00:11:03.960 for Thiel early on in one of his hedge funds. And then it was Thiel that financed J.D. Vance's run for the
00:11:13.360 Senate. And then now J.D. Vance is the vice president. In the same way, Trump is financed by the Adelson
00:11:23.020 family, also a Brazilian family. He said that it was because the Adelson's paid him $100 million that he
00:11:32.180 recognized that the Golan Heights, which the Israelis took away from Syria in the 1967 war, are sovereign
00:11:40.140 Israeli territory. And then you have Marco Rubio, who was vetted by Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle and now
00:11:50.420 TikTok, who basically made sure in his connection to Israel that Marco Rubio would be absolutely loyal
00:12:00.360 to the Israelis. And so he funded him against Trump in 2015 for the 2016 presidential campaign and has
00:12:08.700 been backing him ever since. So you see the situation where the influence of one particular group over
00:12:18.960 American foreign policy is so immense as to get them to engage in another Middle Eastern war,
00:12:25.120 even though Trump's whole rise to power was predicated on no more stupid wars in the Middle East.
00:12:32.840 Let's not get sucked into the Middle East again. We don't want to do that again.
00:12:38.240 So here we are. The Americans have pretty much placed the assets that they would need to place
00:12:43.860 if they were to go to war with Iran and they're ready. And now it's a question of, do they, don't they do it?
00:12:53.600 And I'm going to argue that there's a good chance that they don't do it.
00:12:58.020 Because unlike what I've seen on X, where there are allegations that the Epstein files were released
00:13:06.720 in order to embarrass Trump and force him to escalate on behalf of Israel against Iran,
00:13:15.540 my view is the opposite, really. My view is that the Epstein files make Israel look so bad
00:13:23.980 that it helps curtail Brazilian influence over American politics. And it helps Trump negotiate
00:13:34.720 with the Iranians more effectively and impose things on the Israelis that they wouldn't have
00:13:40.360 accepted. Now, before continuing, let's take a quick trip down memory lane.
00:13:47.220 From 2011 onwards, Barack Obama, Trump's predecessor, was doing everything he could to negotiate a deal
00:13:55.220 with the Iranians. And then you got, in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
00:14:01.400 which was supposed to exchange the full removal of sanctions on Iran for the partial dismantlement
00:14:11.180 of the Iranian nuclear program and placing the nuclear program under permanent international
00:14:18.280 surveillance. I say permanent, even though some provisions of the deal had a 10-year time limit.
00:14:25.700 But there was still enough there that would have allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency,
00:14:33.900 the UN watchbody that looks over nuclear affairs globally, to keep monitoring Iran and preventing Iran
00:14:42.580 from actually building a nuclear weapon. What happened afterwards? What happened was that without an
00:14:49.560 invitation from the President, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the American Congress and spoke
00:14:57.780 against the deal and tried to push Congress to fail the deal and to thwart it, except that Obama did not
00:15:06.880 sign it officially as a treaty, so it didn't have to go through the Senate. So to get around Obama trying to get
00:15:15.100 around Congress, what happened was that Congress passed a huge batch of sanctions against Iran
00:15:23.260 that were identical to the sanctions that Iran was under over the nuclear issue, except that they targeted
00:15:31.220 Iran for having the IRGC and backing militias in the region and having a missile program and so on,
00:15:39.100 meaning that Obama could sign a deal with the Iranians, but he couldn't fulfill his part of the bargain
00:15:46.540 and remove the sanctions, meaning that the deal was in fact never fully implemented.
00:15:53.660 So the Israelis have a history of being able to foil American presidents who want to make agreements with
00:16:04.000 Iran behind, not behind their backs, in opposition to what they perceive are their interests.
00:16:11.600 So with the release of the Epstein files, you kind of get something different,
00:16:18.160 which is that if you look at the Epstein files, you see a massive amount of influence
00:16:24.240 for Epstein and the rest of his ethnic network over policy globally,
00:16:31.200 that makes Israel looks really quite bad. And that can be used by Trump and by allies of Trump in order
00:16:41.600 to reduce the influence of the Israelis and be able to make some kind of agreement. So my take on the
00:16:48.640 Epstein stuff is pretty much the opposite. It doesn't hurt Trump as much as it hurts Israel. And in that sense,
00:16:58.080 it creates some kind of opportunity for a deal, given that the Iranians now see that the Americans are
00:17:06.800 ready to go to war. So that's one thing that I wanted to get across in this. And the Americans have,
00:17:14.640 you know, two options. Either they bomb Iran or try to color revolution Iran.
00:17:21.680 And to some extent, the protests that we saw in Iran showed that the color revolution option has failed.
00:17:29.200 Because it wasn't just the Iranian security forces killing protesters. They did that. They absolutely killed protesters.
00:17:38.480 But then you see some reports online saying that the Iranians actually killed 80,000 protesters.
00:17:43.200 What? That just doesn't pass any kind of sniff test. And if you look at the trajectory of the figures
00:17:52.080 during the Iran protests, which happened, they ended, I think, one or two weeks ago,
00:17:57.200 and had gone on for around three or four weeks, you saw the first death toll saying 500 and then 1,500.
00:18:04.560 Okay. And then 2,000. Okay. And then it jumped to 3,000. Fine. Then it jumped to 20,000.
00:18:13.680 And then it jumped to 80,000. And again, if you go back memory lane, you will remember that when
00:18:23.280 in 1990 and 1991, the Americans were trying to justify kicking Iraq out of Kuwait after Saddam had invaded,
00:18:33.120 you had these lurid stories about the Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators in Kuwait.
00:18:40.640 And you had then obviously the weapons of mass destruction stories in 2003.
00:18:46.800 And you had the stories about the Russians kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children.
00:18:53.600 All of these things never actually happened. Like it just didn't happen.
00:18:58.640 And now you're seeing this dynamic where you see people who are very supportive of Israel
00:19:04.960 saying that there were armed protesters in Iran and saying that the protesters,
00:19:13.760 this is from Mossad commentary, saying that the protesters are in open revolution and are seizing weapons
00:19:20.080 and attacking the government. And you see this kind of stuff and you go, well, hold on a second.
00:19:25.600 And this was an attempt at colour revolutions. And that's what actually happened. And the colour
00:19:33.840 revolution failed. And so the regime survived. And since the colour revolution failed, the only two
00:19:42.080 possibilities here now are a negotiation with the existing regime or going to war.
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