Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When protests ignited across Iran in December and reports emerged that the regime was killing thousands of protesters, Donald Trump threatened to intervene then and there. He did not. But the Pentagon began building up a huge military presence around the Gulf region.
And meanwhile, the regime, it turns out, may have killed as many as 30,000 of its own people, according to some estimates. Iran has seen huge protests in the country before. And the regime has responded with violence before. But this time seems something of a different order of magnitude. Some Iranians who oppose the regime have been in the crazy position of hoping for the U.S.
to strike, to bomb their own country, even if it leads to full-scale war. Reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with people in Iran about what that could all mean. Now we've altered or overdubbed their voices to protect these people from reprisal.
It is the topic of the past 40 days.
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Chapter 2: What sparked the recent protests in Iran?
It is the topic that every Iranian would speak about when they would ever meet.
One of the people who spoke with me is a young man who works in a hospital about four hours north of Tehran.
I mean, I'm having a very difficult time processing all these different thoughts because on theory, like on paper, I would be against a foreign invention. I would believe that democracy would only come from within. But looking back at what happens, where are these criminals going to go? We're not going to vote away in a million years.
This hospital worker was stationed in two different emergency wards during the peak of the regime's lethal crackdown on nationwide demonstrations in January. In the weeks since, he has sent me evidence he collected of hundreds of casualties, many of them trauma injuries, from these emergency wards where he was stationed.
These people, these plainclothes agents, for example, remember the grandmother that I told you about? The grandmother that was brought in there to the hospital. The granddaughter who was shot in the ear was crying all the time. And the daughter of that grandmother was undergoing a mental collapse.
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Chapter 3: What does the U.S. military presence in the Gulf signify?
During that entire time that we were attempting CPR on the old woman, the plainclothes agents just stood there laughing. and showing no empathy whatsoever, they were laughing. So essentially, mortal enemies, and they were treating the patients like animals.
And seeing that, realizing that we are already these people's mortal enemies, helped us realize that we are at war to a degree, to a good degree. And fearing a foreign invasion in these circumstances is just... kind of laughable, if you ask me.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
How are you feeling? This is an activist who lives in Tehran. She's in her 20s. She was actually in prison during the Women Live Freedom protests in 2022. Over the past few weeks, she's been attending a lot of funerals commemorating people who were killed in January.
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Chapter 4: How has the Iranian regime responded to protests?
For years, she told me she would have never dreamed of supporting foreign intervention. But now, faced over and over again with the undeniable brutality of the violence from the past months, she's shifted her view. She can't help but want some kind of action from the United States, which would eliminate the regime.
I don't know. You read the book, Waiting for Godot.
Yes.
Yes. It's like we are waiting for you. And we want to attack us because we can't fight back with the government. And I don't know. I think that's a miserable situation for my people. You know, war is not good. And we saw that the war and the foreign engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine, it's too bad. And it's continuing over the years. But it's like we have two ways.
One, the regime kills us. Two,
This woman is an activist in her mid-30s, and she told me she's participated in every political uprising, starting with the Green Movement in 2009. She was in her teens then, so her whole adult life she's been protesting the current regime.
She said that the 12-day war in June with the United States and Israel was still fresh in her mind and had actually made her more cautious about joining the demonstrations in late December.
This time, I kind of... This time, I kind of, I did not participate, right? I just, I observed. Like, I mostly went to the streets by car. It was both the fact that I was scared by the violence and also by the prospect, because it was, it started, it did not start, but it picked up with a monarch's cult.
It was a monarchist movement, and I had the feeling that it's kind of like a counter-revolution.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of U.S. intervention in Iran?
I don't want to choose one of them. I'd choose neither of them. To be honest, I wake up, I feel like I wish there was a war. I don't share that with anyone, but that's just inside my head. I wish there was a war and we were over with it. But I am quite sure about myself that I do not want that, right? It's just personal mood swings. I have come across people waiting for war in that sense.
I mean, like, waiting for a celestial catastrophe, like a miracle that can, you know, save them from this situation. And that's kind of suicidal, you know? People who are very senselessly waiting for that beautiful moment of the skies being bombarded and the earth catching fire and everything exploding and destroying. I mean, it's a suicidal wish.
To me, it sounds people who are living, especially people in Tehran, because Tehran was affected more than other cities.
When you say that Tehran was more affected than other cities, what are you referring to? Are you referring to the 12-day war? Yeah, yeah, the 12-day war.
I mean, we're talking about two traumas. And wishing for that to happen again, it just comes out of frustration and feeling that in either way, if there is a war or not, you have no control over your life and being.
Are there any kernels of hope in all of that? When you think about the future right now, what is giving you hope, if anything?
That is a very hard question, but it's a very difficult thing to find hope. Maybe we will transition to a democracy or maybe we won't. Maybe things will get even worse. But we are not in a situation to worry about this because we are way beyond the no turning back point.
Voices from Iran. All of these people asked to remain anonymous. You can find some extraordinary reporting from Cora Engelbrecht all at newyorker.com.
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Chapter 6: What historical precedents influence current U.S. policy?
We'll continue on Iran and its relationship with the United States in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
If you're serious about change, real change, not hacks, not hype, not quick fixes, this is for you. I'm Rich Roll. And every week on the Rich Roll podcast, I sit down with some of the world's brightest minds, scientists, elite athletes, artists, visionaries, and avatars of personal evolution. These aren't soundbites.
They are long form conversations about health, performance, meaning, and becoming fully alive in a complicated world. Find the Rich Roll podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When the United States instigated a regime change in Iran in 1953, it didn't do so with aircraft carriers. There was no shock and awe. It was a piece of covert business involving the CIA and British intelligence.
Together, they engineered the overthrow of the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, because his government was pursuing a plan to nationalize Iran's oil industry. There were also concerns about the influence of communists in Iran. But contemporary Iran is not Venezuela. Does Donald Trump want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term?
Or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this complex situation might play out, I called on one of the best sources I know on Iran, Karim Sajjadpour. Sajjadpour is a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications.
Let's begin our conversation about now with the most obvious resonance— In 2002, 2003, the American government looked on the leadership Iraq, quite rightly, as horrific. And we went to war with Iraq, and it was a catastrophe. Right now, the United States, under Donald Trump, is amassing a gigantic military force that around Iran.
What do you make of American intentions here, and what is the wisdom of them?
Well, I think part of the challenge we have, David, is that it's not clear in President Trump's head what his intentions are and what his endgame is.
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Chapter 7: How do Iranians view the prospect of regime change?
And he incited protesters to the streets. He said, go and seize your institutions. And Iran drove a giant truck through Trump's red lines. By some accounts, the regime killed as many as 30,000 people over a 48-hour period. We don't know for a fact. And it was very clear that the regime in Iran totally flaunted President Trump's red lines.
And there's recent history on this one when President Obama issued a red line against the Assad regime in Damascus against using chemical weapons. I said, use chemical weapons. And that was one of the foreign policy critiques of Obama's presidency, that that red line wasn't enforced. And what are the implications and messages for other adversaries if we don't enforce red lines?
So I think that's the context of how we got to where we are now. But isn't the context also that...
The United States, I think it was Phil Gordon, a national security figure for Democrats, for Obama, as well as for Kamala Harris. I think Phil Gordon once said, we invaded Iraq fully and it was a disaster. We invaded Libya partly and it was a disaster. And we kept out of Syria and it was a monumental disaster. And now with Iran...
The humanitarian question of the killing of thousands of demonstrators is without question. The question is what to do about it.
The big question is, does the United States have the power to transform Iran's government?
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Chapter 8: What role does Reza Pahlavi play in Iran's future?
Or the right. Or the right. Or the right. Listen, I think that if I... If the last two and a half decades of Middle East history had turned out differently, I think we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Now, I do believe that Iran is a very different place than Iraq and Afghanistan. But I do think we have to be very...
honest in saying that the last two decades has proven that we don't have the ability to dictate our preferred outcome in Iran. We don't have the ability to dictate who comes to power the day after a military attack.
We're told all the time that Iran, unlike other countries in the region, is quite pro-American. What does that mean and what does that imply for what's going on now?
Well, I think this is simply stated after 47 years of living under a theocracy whose identity has been premised on death to America. It's the most secular society, I would argue, in the Middle East and the least anti-American, the most pro-American.
And I think most Iranians have also reached this conclusion that so long as the ethos of their government is death to America and death to Israel rather than long live Iran, this country will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation. There's a lot of nostalgia.
It's an interesting phenomenon, having nostalgia for a period which you never lived, because three-quarters of Iranians were born after the revolution. But they do have this nostalgia for the stories they heard about life before the revolution, when people had social freedoms, when Iran had a dignified place in the world, when the Iranian passport could get you places.
when the country wasn't an isolated pariah state. And so it's not to say that people want to be a lackey of the United States, but I think there's a basic recognition that This nation, which, in my view, should be a G20 nation. It has the human capital for it. It has the natural resources for it. Number two, reserves of natural gas. Number three, reserves of oil.
It has one of the longest continuously inhabited civilizations in the world. And it's punching way below its weight. It could be South Korea. It behaves like North Korea. And so I think there's a recognition among Iranians that this radicalism, this anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism has just led the country into a ditch.
And if the country is ever to fulfill its potential, it needs more tolerant government. It needs a government that prioritizes national interests before ideology. So I believe that it's a society which is capable of representative democracy, but it authoritarian transitions are not usually popularity contests. They're not usually dictated by, you know, the vote of people.
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