In the latest episode of Trigonometry, we re-unite with journalist Matthew Saeed to talk about the Iran crisis, and why he thinks the regime in Tehran is not subject to the M.A.D. doctrine.
00:02:28.120Let's perhaps start with Iran, which I think it's worth saying is not a regime that is likely to be subject to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
00:02:43.820The doctrine of mutually assured destruction is what prevents people with nuclear bombs from initiating a first strike because they worry that in the counter-strike they will be eliminated.
00:02:56.180So it's a very strong doctrine that even though there are nuclear weapons in the world, we have not yet, thankfully, be subject to a nuclear holocaust.
00:03:06.620And it's worth saying that even a relatively small nuclear conflict, like between Pakistan and India, which almost flared up recently, would not be localized.
00:03:15.840It would lead to a nuclear winter that would affect farming around the world and could kill hundreds of millions.
00:03:22.020We don't think enough about that risk.
00:03:25.140So why do I say that the regime in Tehran is not subject to that mutually assured destruction doctrine?
00:03:33.560The reason is because they're religious fanatics.
00:03:35.840They believe that they have absolute truth, many of them in the regime, and that anyone who disagrees with them by implication are infidels.
00:03:43.640They believe that if they can take out infidels, they will go through a door into heaven and be blessed for eternity.
00:03:55.200I might have mentioned in the previous podcast that my father was born as a Shia Muslim.
00:04:01.160Most of his family are moderates, as are many Muslims around the world, but there are a few that are fundamentalists and believed that my father was an apostate and that he deserved to die.
00:04:12.400I've looked people like this in the eyes, and I know that they are implacable.
00:04:16.860In those circumstances, in fact, one other bit of context, if I may briefly, I was 10 years old when the Iraq-Iran war ignited, and for obvious reasons, I took quite a deep interest in that war.
00:04:30.480And a lot of people don't seem to know about the 20,000 child martyrs who were indoctrinated by the fanatics and the clerics who took over after the 79 revolution to believe that the greatest duty they could perform for Allah was to walk and sometimes run into minefields and up against machine gun fire to clear a path for the adult military coming in behind.
00:04:56.780And they died, their limbs strewn across battlefields, and they were then glorified in government propaganda, held up as icons of the revolution.
00:05:07.540And young people, and I've got 11 and 12-year-old children, are so influenceable, impressionable.
00:05:15.580And the fact that the people who are supposed to protect them indoctrinated them into what is effectively a death cult seems to me very good evidence.
00:05:24.140In addition to all the more contemporaneous stuff, the repression of women, the killing of people who are homosexual, the funding of genocidal proxies that are committed to the elimination of Israel, tells me that if they got a nuclear weapon, it is likely they would use it.
00:05:41.560Let's not forget Ahmadinejad said that Israel was a scourge that should be wiped from the pages of history.
00:05:47.060The supreme leader called it a cancer, and I could envision an ageing fanatical leader initiating a first strike and then looking at the radar screen and seeing the inevitable response in which that person would die in thinking, I am closer to Allah.
00:06:03.880I don't think that's true of Vladimir Putin. I don't think Putin is prepared to die for his ideology.
00:06:12.740He's a venal corrupt leader of the old school. He's worth billions. He had a Black Sea palace. He's got a young girlfriend. He wants to live.
00:06:22.240I think the same is true of the North Korean leader with his harem and his looted opulence.
00:06:28.800It is not true of religious fundamentalists who glorify martyrdom. That's a long first answer.
00:06:35.400But that is why I think, even though I have severe reservations about what Israel has done in Gaza, very, very severe reservation. We can talk about it.
00:06:44.320I do really want to say that when they operationalise against the regime in Iran, not the people of Iran, 70% of people in Iran hate the regime.
00:06:54.320They've been immiserated. GDP per capita is like $4,000 compared to $50,000 plus in Israel, a progressive, capitalist, free society.
00:07:04.360I think right-minded people should support them, given what we know about uranium enrichment.
00:07:10.120Well, that's where I was going to go next, because I see a lot of people who haven't looked into this, or perhaps you have, making the argument that, look, this is just another regime change war.
00:07:20.600We've heard all these arguments before. This is just like Iraq. It's WMD. They don't have a nuclear weapon.
00:07:28.120This is just Israel using the opportunity to go after somebody they've been wanting to go after for a long time.
00:07:34.160So what is, you know, lay out your concerns about the nuclear weapons programme?
00:07:39.740It's categorically different. I opposed the war in Iraq. I thought Afghanistan was probably a mistake, because I don't think we had a clear idea of what would happen to either of these places after an invasion.
00:07:53.560The CIA thought that Iraq would welcome democracy. It would become a Jeffersonian liberal state.
00:07:59.920Not realising the deep Klan divisions in Iraq would almost certainly lead to civil war, notwithstanding the Sunni Shia divisions.
00:08:09.020So I can understand why people are concerned, as am I and probably you, about what might happen if the regime falls in Iran.
00:08:16.460However, the counterfactual here is nuclear weapons, potentially nine or ten nuclear devices, being held by a millenarian cult that is committed to the destruction of Israel and calls America the great Satan.
00:08:37.020Remember what I said earlier, a nuclear war of that kind, even if it occurred between Israel and Iran, would kill hundreds of millions of people around the world.
00:08:48.380It's why I find the American first doctrine, sensible doctrine in many ways, but you have intricate global supply chains around the world, which furnishes America with all of the material wealth that they've grown accustomed to.
00:09:01.360They're not isolated from what will happen there, neither are they from what's happening in Ukraine, but a nuclear war would be catastrophic.
00:09:10.700And so in those circumstances, I do think that this is different. It's an order of magnitude, two orders of magnitude different to either Iraq or Afghanistan.
00:09:21.880But what's the evidence is what people will say, because, you know, if it's just Benjamin Netanyahu saying they're close to getting nuclear weapons, that's not persuasive to a lot of people.
00:09:30.220Well, you will have read, I think, probably the International Atomic Agency.
00:09:34.400No, sure, sure. I can see I'm doing all the work.
00:09:37.240But this is, I did read it in full. It's a 20-odd page document.
00:09:41.980And you will know that these are effectively, you know, civil servants who are paid to inspect and offer a point of view.
00:09:50.440And obviously they have incentives too, do they not?
00:09:52.820They don't want to miss Iran's building of a nuclear weapon and then be blamed in the future for one of the great calamities to have befallen the earth.
00:10:01.260Neither do they want to be, if we do invade and they haven't got quite as close as we had thought with the WMD in Iraq, they don't want to be held responsible for that.
00:10:08.540So I think you read it in full, think about what their incentives are, and then try and get a sense of what they're really trying to say.
00:10:14.640And I invite anyone to read it, because I think they'll come to the same conclusion that I did, which is that Iran, they say, explicitly are in breach of their obligations and non-nuclear proliferation, that they have been deceiving and dissembling for a very long time, and that they can't account for some of the enriched uranium that they think Iran has made.
00:10:35.300I think what they're telling us is that Iran, this is a big, complex country with complex terrain, I think what they're saying is they can't discount the possibility that they're reasonably close.
00:10:46.760How we define imminent is probably quite difficult, but in those circumstances, I can certainly see why Israel, with the air defences down, with what they've done with Hezbollah, taking this opportunity to try and get rid of that threat once and for all.
00:11:01.240Matthew, there is a clip that is doing the rounds of Tulsi Gabbard, who's head of national security under the Trump administration, on the 25th of March, addressing the Senate, saying that Iran did not have nuclear weapons.
00:11:16.800The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003.
00:11:26.500The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorise its nuclear weapons programme.
00:11:33.840And there'll be a lot of people going, well, that's somebody incredibly high up under the Trump administration saying that.
00:11:52.340I suspect what has happened is that Israel say they have intelligence.
00:11:56.940I mean, viewers will say, well, you know, they would say that.
00:11:59.960But remember, this is an independent group of people.
00:12:02.680And as I say, they have incentives of the right.
00:12:04.500It must be very difficult to write those reports, because what I've noticed over the last 48 hours is those who don't want there to be conflict to taking out sentences,
00:12:12.140and those who think they should be taking out, I think read it as a whole and get a sense, and then weigh that up against what it would mean if this fanatical group got hold of the weapons.
00:12:22.700And then I think the logic of what Israel is doing makes perfect sense.
00:12:26.480Because I think another thing that people don't really understand is the Gaza situation is obviously tragic and awful, but it's a glorified proxy war.
00:12:35.400That is a war between, effectively, Iran and Israel.
00:12:39.680It's just Iran are funding Hamas, and they're funding Hezbollah as well, and Lebanon, in order to create this situation.
00:12:46.000So it could be argued that this is Israel just simply going to the source of the conflict.
00:12:50.740Exactly. I mean, this is one of the great ironies of the Middle East, is that Iran has assembled a whole range of proxies, and its interest is in Israel fighting with them, because that diminishes Israel's strength.
00:13:26.620And I feel, to go to Constantine's very legitimate question, that Israel was playing into the hands of Iran after the October 7th atrocity,
00:13:35.340by flattening Gaza and alienating global public opinion in a way that has really shattered Israel's reputation into a million pieces.
00:13:47.320Do you mind if we park that and just stick with Iran for now?
00:13:49.480I really want to have that conversation, but fully, rather.
00:13:52.020So let's stick with Israel just for the moment.
00:13:54.880So the question was always going to be, this situation was fundamentally unsustainable.
00:14:03.700It's unsustainable to have Iran and Israel in close proximity, because Iran was going to do whatever it could in order to destabilise Israel.
00:15:01.820They're worried about the ramifications of the Middle East and the relationship with America, which obviously is the ultimate guarantor of Israel's security.
00:15:38.520And this gradually weakened the core of the Soviet Union.
00:15:43.560And he said that there are lots of covert things that could have been done to undermine the Iranian regime.
00:15:49.380So, for example, they turn the Internet off when there are protests against the regime.
00:15:53.640And that obviously takes away a lot of the fuel for agitation.
00:15:58.900He said we can go in there and get Starlink and get it up so that people can do it.
00:16:03.460And he had a whole range of other mechanisms that could covertly and relatively inexpensively go after the regime and that it might then fall.
00:16:11.260And the other way, of course, is what Netanyahu is doing, which is actually going after them with a full frontal assault.
00:16:19.640And the other is a status quo, where you hope that the time, which is the Iran nuclear deal, would deter them from going to higher levels of enrichment.
00:16:44.800Before we move on, I think it's worth asking as well, how fragile is the Iranian regime?
00:16:50.200Because it always appears to the outside layman that these regimes are strong and powerful, and then literally overnight they tend to fall.
00:16:59.120Is that a possibility with the Iranian regime, or is their stranglehold on power simply too strong?
00:17:06.120One thing that has struck me about Western foreign policy in the post-war era, and we may have discussed this when we briefly debated the concept of diversity, is that the analysts were too monolithic.
00:17:22.260They were almost all white, middle class, Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates, trying to make sense of nations of which they really had no idea, particularly the tribal and clan dynamics.
00:17:33.960So Iran, forgive me, Iraq, a classic example, Afghanistan, they had no idea that you've got the Pashtuns, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks who've been fighting for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
00:17:47.480The animosity is absolutely vast there.
00:17:49.440The Taliban were effectively a Pashtun organization, and that's why they recruited so many Pashtuns to what they were saying, because they could go after the Uzbeks and the Tajiks.