Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Coco Kahn. And I'm Sophie Duker. So attentive listeners and watchers will notice that Sophie is not in fact Nish Kumar. No, but I am still a black slash brown person that makes bigots angry. We didn't want to lower the diversity count, you see. Oh, no, of course. Yeah. No. Curly hair. Big thoughts.
Sophie is stepping in the hot seat this week while Nish is off having a break, which is good because he doesn't take breaks. That's an aside. Sophie is a comedian and writer. She's performed at the likes of Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, and she's actually won both Taskmaster and Celebrity Mastermind. Here's a taster of Sophie at work.
I know some people don't like it when you talk about identities. They don't like it when gay comedians talk about gay stuff or women comics talk about girl stuff or Croatian comedians. Bang on about Croatia. But if I don't talk about my pain on stage, how else will I make my therapy tax deductible? What a little cutie, monetize the trauma. Right, so Sophie, brace yourself.
It is not a light week to be cutting your teeth on a politics podcast. On the show today, we're asking, genuinely asking, is this World War III as conflict escalates across the Middle East? Yes, it's bleak. And as oil prices surge because of this conflict, inflation will too, which is bad news for a chancellor who has just delivered her spring statement on the economy.
Okay, so first up, the small task of catching you all up on World War III. So on Saturday, all eyes turned to Iran after the United States and Israel launched a full-blown attack on the country. The Ayatollah Khomeini, that's Iran's supreme leader for the last 37 years, was killed along with senior figures from the regime.
And before the world had time to absorb that shock, Iran retaliated, launching a barrage of strikes targeting Israeli and American bases across the Gulf, including Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain, as well as some civilian locations like hotels. So far, the Iranian Red Crescent Society has estimated that more than 1,000 people have been killed in Iran since the conflict began.
Among them were 165 schoolgirls and staff after a primary school was bombed, the worst mass casualty so far. Meanwhile, influences in Doha and Dubai turned war correspondents, capturing bombs raining down over luxury skylines. This situation is moving extremely quickly.
As we record on Wednesday, there are overnight reports of explosions across Iran and Lebanon from Israeli strikes, and Iran has continued to carry out drone attacks. An emergency evacuation flight is due to leave from Amman tonight, but thousands of Britons are thought to be stuck in the region. And, as we'll discuss later, the economic consequences of this war are already being felt globally.
So initially, Keir Starmer had refused to let the US use British bases to bomb Iran. But on Sunday, the Prime Minister changed tack, posting this recorded statement saying that there would be some support, but only in a limited way. The United States has requested permission to use British bases for that specific and limited defensive purpose. We have taken the decision to accept this request.
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Chapter 2: What recent events have escalated tensions in the Middle East?
So on Sunday, a British RAF base on Cyprus was struck by a drone. And on Tuesday, the government confirmed it is sending a Navy warship to defend it. Now, if like me, you need just a moment to figure out how we got here in the first place, our special guest, Sanam Naragi-Andalini, is here to help.
Sanam is a peace strategist, founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network, or ICANN. She's Iranian-British. She's a commentator on Iran and has spent nearly three decades working on global conflicts and peace building.
She was awarded an MBE for her services to international peace building and women's rights and was an architect of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. She also has a podcast, by the way, it's called If You Were In Charge. So she's basically a classic woman underachiever. Welcome to Pod Save the UK. Thank you very much.
I really wish we had you on this show in better circumstances. There's clearly so much you could talk about. I do just want to ask you, how are you? How are your family? I know you still have family in Iran. This must be scary. Thank you very much for having me. We have a little meme going around in Farsi that says, I'm okay, but don't ask me how I am because I will cry.
And I think that that's really the state that... We're all in. You wake up in the morning and... You know, you go on your social media and you hear that B-52 bombers, which are these gigantic monsters of planes that drop. I don't really understand the military, you know, 170,000 tons, you know, like these things that it's all the military gizmo stuff.
But it's these gigantic planes dropping gigantic bombs that are now they have shockwaves in a city of 15 million people. They've bombed 10 hospitals already, neonatal units. schools. 181 kids under the age of 10 have already been documented as having died. Over a thousand civilians have already died. We don't know how many soldiers. And in Iran, you know, Iran has the old-fashioned draft.
So it's just, you know, if you're 18, 19 years old as a boy, you get sent off to the barracks, and we don't know how many of them have been killed. So it's This morning I woke up and I was like, I wish it was yesterday morning and the day before and the day before.
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Chapter 3: How did the assassination of Iran's leader impact the conflict?
So that's how it is for us right now. We have the comfort in the UK of not having necessarily felt war directly. But what you've described there is that essentially every single citizen will know someone affected by this. Absolutely. Because this is an illegal war, whatever that means. No war is ever good.
But we've had situations where the Security Council gets together and they make some determination that, you know, we have to go to war. often very circumspect and dodgy. But in this particular case, there is no agreement. It was a preemptive strike. There was no reason for it. All of the rationale that they gave of nuclear weapons, it's all false.
And everybody's coming out and saying it was false. And they were in the middle of negotiations between the United States and Iran with the Omani foreign minister. And the night before the bombing started, in a very unprecedented way, he came out on American television to say, we're very close to a deal. They have made concessions. You know, we're just ironing out the details.
And then the next morning, the bombing started. So that's one side of the story. And then the other side of it has been that the Israelis have been working with the Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in America. He's 66. He's actually never had a job. But, you know, what's that? Yeah. Who needs qualifications to run a country? But...
But he has been almost like a pied piper for Iranians to say, you know, we're going to have freedom. We need the West to come and help us. We need this military attack because we're going to have freedom. And so, you know, lots of people who are desperate and, you know, both in Iran and outside are like, yes, yes, we rally around.
We want the military attacks, assuming that they would be sort of targeted at the heads of the regime. You know, a little bit like kind of Venezuela style kind of decapitation, as they call it.
Completely a misunderstanding the nature of the Iranian state, which is much more complex, but even more so completely being hoodwinked by what the Israeli agenda was and has been for many, many years in the region, which is expansionist. And so four days into the war, we're now seeing... that they are targeting things like police stations and the infrastructure of governance of the state.
So banks are closed. People can't get their money out. Passport offices are closed. People are trying to leave. Yesterday we heard from someone saying they've hit the police station, so the policemen are out in the streets. So you're creating... A sense of statelessness, right, of absolute chaos because they want the country to be fragmented. And this is just four days in. So that's one side.
And then the Iranian regime has been retaliating and they are fighting the might of the American people. military power. And so their strategy from the beginning, and they said, if you come at us, we will come at your bases. So they've been targeting the American military bases. Some economic infrastructure, like the Americans moved their soldiers from bases to hotels.
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Chapter 4: What are the economic consequences of the ongoing conflict?
I am no fan of the Iranian regime. I mean, I came to England because they were persecuting my family. So it's not that I have an affinity at all with the state. I just think that when you go to war against a country of 93 million people, you need to understand, first of all, what is the nature of the state and why? And what is it that you're doing?
Chapter 5: What role does the UK play in the US-Israel conflict?
And what are the consequences of that? And the question of the nuclear weapons was, they didn't have it. They haven't had it. The IAEA, the UN body that deals with atomic bombs, energy and weapons, has again categorically come out and said that they didn't have anything.
And frankly, if you remember in June, the Israelis and the Americans bombed Iran and they said it's, you know, whatever capacity for enriching uranium, et cetera, et cetera, has been disabled. So that's the basic, there's a lie that is being floated around and it's very similar to Iraq, 2003. But even if that was true, am I right in thinking that waging war to prevent
something happening, that's not allowed. That's not allowed, no. It's getting a bit minority report that, isn't it? Like, oh, you might commit a crime, so now we will inflict harm on you and all your siblings. That's right. You might come and rob me blind, so I'm going to come and kill you first. I mean, that's not really how it works.
The other thing from a UK standpoint, which really upsets me, is that We sit on the UN Security Council as a permanent member. There are five permanent members and 10 that roll in every two years. It's the UK, the US, China, Russia, and France.
The United Nations was created at the end of World War II with the premise of giving us some international infrastructure for international law, prevention of war, to prevent the scourge of war for future generations. That's what the exercise is. The Security Council is the body that's meant to do it.
We sit with the greatest responsibility for the prevention of war and upholding international law. We're meant to be the firemen, not the arsonists. And what are we doing kind of enabling all of this? And the UN didn't come out of just, oh, somebody had a good idea at the end of World War II.
It was 500 years of human history of thinking about how do you put guardrails around how we treat each other and nations and powerful nations and war, sort of might versus law. 500 years, millions and millions of people dying, two world wars. to finally get to this international system that we've all benefited from. The level of irresponsibility is just extraordinary. And we have to ask, why?
Why are we doing this? Who's benefiting? What's the end game? What are the risks? And, you know, let's talk about it before we just make the decision to join in. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. When it comes to sending money abroad, many providers claim to offer free fees and competitive rates. But don't be fooled.
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Chapter 6: How is the UK government responding to the crisis?
You know, something like that, because these are also all of our resources that are going. Yeah, and it's not just the moral repugnance of genocide, obviously. You know, they trot out this line that, oh, you know, Iran's a hotbed of terrorism. So it's like, you bombed a little girl's school. You just made a load of terrorists, you know. No, and also, who is the terrorist? Yeah.
What is terrorism, right? If it's about invoking terror, what are we doing? And it all goes back, you know, literally it all goes back to the question of Palestine, because while all this is happening in the West Bank, they have been terrorizing people to, you know, and the settlers are there and they're trying to take that land and they're trying to annex it.
So making us chase over here and seeing this sort of horror show. Meanwhile, they're doing something else over there. And it's been framed as anti-Semitism if we criticize it. This has got nothing to do with Judaism. This is about a political ideology of what I call extreme Zionism, of an expansionist state political ideology. It's got nothing to do with faith. We have...
Jews living in Iran, 50 synagogues that have been always active. You know, it's got nothing to do with that. But they framed it like that so that they scare us into being silent. And at some point, you just can't. You have to speak up. We have a responsibility to say, what is going on and why are we getting dragged into this?
What you said about terror and who is the terrorist and also about international law, it feels like the strategy has no end game other than to cause that sort of destruction and chaos.
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Chapter 7: Who is Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and what insights does she provide?
It feels like it's almost desirable to kind of like bypass the formalities and exercise that strength. And here in the UK, when we're being like, why is our government involved with this? It doesn't feel like there's any sort of resistance to that ideology. It feels that Star must put up a pretense of not going along with it for a while.
And then now it's just kind of like, okay, as long as there's the flimsiest convenient lie for why we should be associated, we'll go along with it. If I put aside my ethics, love saying that, put those aside for a second. Britain not standing up to America and saying we don't want to be dragged into another illegal war. We've already done this before. It played very, very badly for us.
In fact, it kept our government, kept our party out of office for nearly 14 years. And we're in a really bad place. We're not going to do that again. But there's this idea that we have to do it so that we get special treatment. But then you look at the tariffs and we didn't get special treatment. And then you look at big tech and how it's destroying our country.
And we don't get any treatment where we can try and legislate or regulate against them because we're told that we can't do that and we should sit down and behave. Is this just Iraq all over again? Is this just a repeat of history? It's a combination of things. So from the Middle Eastern standpoint, it is absolutely Iraq all over again.
And I wrote about this in 2019 because, you know, every once in a while there's like the drums of war, of going to war with Iran. And I lived in America and it was like, you know, lots of voices pulling it back.
and saying in diplomacy etc but imagine this imagine that Iraq had turned into a viable democracy governance they had the oil they had there would be a rich country they had educated people it you know it could be a pretty it could be a powerhouse in the region legitimate political powerhouse what would they do on the question of Palestine?
Would they turn a blind eye and say, oh, we don't mind what Israel is doing? Or would they actually stand up and stand as a kind of bulwark against what Israel was doing? So it's to their benefit that Iraq turned into a mess. Same playbook in Syria, same playbook in Libya. And in a way, it's been three countries that have benefited. So Israel, because it can do whatever it wants.
A UAE, which became the economic powerhouse, and then also militarily they started to sort of, you know, trying to push their weight around in places like Yemen. And then Saudi Arabia has been interesting because Saudi Arabia for a number of years was exporting really extreme jihadi sort of Wahhabism, basically.
The Saudis then have decided, have realized that this kind of extremism isn't to their benefit. So now they're trying to sort of reform and go in a different direction. And being in the region... They understand that for them to prosper, the neighborhood has to be prosperous as well. So there is an alignment between Iran and Saudi and the Gulf states and so forth.
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