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Josh vs the News: How to Think About Iran Without Losing Your Mind · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:03
well well well uh there's been a lot to digest in uh recent days and weeks this is one of those
0:08
things you know sometimes uh a news event happens and i'm like ah i gotta talk about it
0:14
zeps is on we gotta get out there we gotta get zeps's perspective immediately instantaneously
0:20
hot take first draft of history i felt like that after the bondi terrorist attack for example
0:27
where I sort of had a bunch of things that had been welling up that it was time to finally say.
0:32
And those aren't always perfect, but at least they're raw and from the heart.
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And I don't know
0:36
about you, but I'm like, how have you been feeling over this Iran campaign?
0:39
I have felt mostly
0:43
befuddled a little bit and conflicted.
0:46
And I got to say, deeply underserved by the media
0:52
commentary.
0:53
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I feel like from places like public broadcasters
0:58
and legacy news outlets, I get a constant drumbeat of what the latest things that are happening in
1:04
the war are and how hypocritical the war's aims are and how Donald Trump doesn't seem to be a
1:09
strategic genius, as if we needed this pointed out.
1:13
And then on social, I see a lot of ranting
1:17
and raving about, well, look, I'll give you some examples about, you know, how the evil American
1:21
empire is up to it, what it always does, which is steamrolling the bodies of innocent people.
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And
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there's no 30,000 foot kind of bird's eye picture of like, what does this moment mean?
1:35
We've gotten bad at sort of wrestling.
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We've gotten bad at writing the first draft of history
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rather than writing the first draft of the first draft of the thing that is going out right now
1:44
about the thing right now.
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It's like we're living in a constant present with no kind of historical
1:50
context.
1:51
Most of what I am hearing on podcasts and reading online and seeing on social is about
2:00
what the market's doing.
2:02
If it's a more conventional or conservative outlet, it'll be
2:05
like, what's happening to oil prices?
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Is Donald Trump going to get spooked by what's happening
2:09
to markets?
2:09
How long is he going to hold on?
2:10
If oil keeps getting expensive, what is the
2:12
implication on airfares?
2:13
What is the implication at the gas pump?
2:17
Was it a mistake not to bring
2:19
along the Arab states when Iran responded to the initial invasion by bombing the Gulf states?
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Then
2:25
couldn't Trump have put together a coalition of Gulf states and been very careful about not
2:30
alienating the Qataris and blah, blah, blah?
2:33
Then there's questions about international law.
2:35
This
2:35
is very illegal, but isn't it interesting that Australia and Canada are sort of tepidly
2:39
supporting this.
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And so does that mean that we live in a new international law environment?
2:44
I
2:44
mean, that's all very important.
2:46
Then there's the question of why is he going to the war?
2:48
He's got
2:48
all these shifting rationales.
2:50
He said it was about the Iranian people.
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And he said it was about
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getting rid of their long range ballistic missiles.
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Then he said it was about regime
2:58
change.
2:59
And then he said it was about the nuclear program.
3:00
Well, after the 12 day war last year,
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where they went in with the Israelis and they supposedly took out the nuclear program,
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they emerged from that saying it was a triumphant success now they say that the Iranian nuclear
3:12
program poses a threat and that's the rationale for this war well which is it maybe that war didn't
3:18
work and what about the school bombing isn't it terrible that children were blown up in a school
3:23
of course it is terrible I don't want to sound like I'm making light of that but at the same
3:27
time we're now into a multi-week long war and the Iranian casualties are a thousand apparently
3:34
uh you know everyone is a tragedy but in war that is a pretty low number when you're raining down
3:43
that many bombs um and that school if you have heard about the school bomb i mean it's hilarious
3:48
but like if it wasn't so sad it would be funny donald trump was asked you may have missed this
3:54
because it only happened in the past i think 12 hours or so he was asked while he was golfing
3:59
about the school, the bombing of the school where children died.
4:04
He didn't say,
4:07
well, the school was actually part of a naval base up until some years ago, and the Iranians
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carved off part of the naval base.
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They shrunk the naval base and turned part of it into an
4:18
elementary school.
4:20
And what's probably happened is that there's been a terrible mistake and that
4:24
though that wasn't updated as a target.
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And unfortunately, in taking out the naval base,
4:29
we made a terrible mistake.
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That is probably true.
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Instead, he said, well, I don't know who shot the school.
4:36
It could have been anyone who shot the school.
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Maybe the Iranians did it themselves.
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They may have.
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The school, however, was taken out by a Tomahawk missile.
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And there are only three countries that have Tomahawks.
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the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
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So if it wasn't the United States, it may have been the UK,
5:01
but I reckon it was probably the Aussies who took out the Iranian school.
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So at least Trump has somebody to blame.
5:07
Mea culpa, ladies and gents.
5:09
But now I'm doing exactly what I just said we shouldn't do,
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which is pore over the details as if we're going to find anything useful
5:16
about the future of human civilization and our lives on this planet
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by focusing on the minutiae of the day-to-day squabbles
5:25
and the day-to-day flotsam and jetsam of the war.
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There's also a lot of news today about the fact that Trump doesn't seem to know
5:35
what the duration of the war is because he said that it's almost over
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and then Pete Hegseth said that it's only just beginning.
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And he said, well, it's both.
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He said it's a new beginning for a whole new Iran, but in terms of the actual campaign, it's almost over.
5:55
What's missing from all of this is not some terribly difficult strategic oversight that I believe that I will be able to bring you in these minutes that we share.
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that's going to pull back the veil and reveal what this will all mean
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in the vast cosmic mosaic of human history.
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What's missing is basic humanity and solidarity
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that would have us focus the Iranian people
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as the sort of locus of our attention.
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Where is the care for the Iranian people?
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I don't mean performative, knee-jerk, virtue-signaling about how this is a terrible humanitarian attack on the Iranian people, because that's just fatuous bullshit that you know is going to come from anybody who has an instinctive aversion to using the military to ever do any good.
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And they would probably have been saying the same thing during World War II when we were fighting the Nazis.
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I mean actual actual care you know an actual instinct of taking into account who are these
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people as a people what has their history as a people been what is their national destiny as a
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people and what impact might this have on that for me I think they Iranians deserve at least that
7:28
they deserve at least a portion of our consideration as we talk, get angry about
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Trump or we try to rationalize why he went around Congress or whatever.
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So let's just talk about that for a moment.
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And to do so, just to set the stage, I just want to
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clarify that when I criticize the dewy-eyed left-wing sympathy for this or that civilian
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casualty.
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I'm not being selective about which side I'm criticizing because I'm also not saying
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that we should be having chest-thumping right-wing militaristic solidarity for the Iranian people's
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liberation at the hands of the Americans.
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It's interesting that the opposition to the war
8:13
inside the United States seems to be coming most vociferously from right-wingers who give even
8:21
less of a shit about the Iranian people than the neoconservatives or Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth
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do.
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I don't include Donald Trump there because I don't pretend to know his mind.
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But I suspect that actually in a quiet moment over a seltzer water and a Big Mac, he would
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probably say, you know, these Mujahideen assholes have been having a coming because the Iranian
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and people deserve better.
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And I suspect you'd probably believe it.
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So Marjorie Taylor Greene,
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now I'm quoting, you can always tell when I pick up a piece of paper that I'm about to quote
9:00
something.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know her, right?
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Former Republican member of Congress,
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head of the Make America Great Again movement, total Trump lapdog until she split with him over
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the Epstein files.
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And she was a Trump devotee and now she attacks him from the right.
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She says
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the Republican Party and the Trump administration are a, quote, bunch of sick fucking liars.
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We voted for America first and zero wars.
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The executive director of the American Conservative,
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which is a magazine, the flagship magazine of American conservatism,
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writes, this is, quote, an elite-driven war, driven, frankly, by the deep state.
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Tucker Carlson, a former celebrated Trump water carrier
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and former Fox News host
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who's arguably the biggest podcaster on the new right
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calls the Iran strikes, quote, absolutely disgusting and evil
10:02
and note that this is all because they believe
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that they should be putting Americans first
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and not wasting a dime on these Iranians
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it's not because they think it's a that trump's strategy is a misguided way to assist iranians
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it's because they don't think that iranians deserve assisting i'm not implying this war
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is necessarily going to help iranians i'm just saying that the focus of our arguments about it
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should be about primarily whether or not this great and ancient civilization and people and
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ethnicity like what what does what impact does this have on them the ones on whom the bombs are
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raining down.
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Not is the bomb going to hit them on the head today, or is it going to hurt a child
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today?
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What does this all mean?
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What does this all mean for them?
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All of those right-wing potshots
10:53
at Trump are indistinguishable from what you would expect to be coming from the left.
11:00
And indeed, the Saturday before last, Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda, beautiful lady, lovely gal,
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gorgeous lass, a bombshell in her day, and also the embodiment of bourgeois anti-war activism
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during the Vietnam War.
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They wheeled her out and she spoke at an anti-war rally in
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Los Angeles, deploring, quote, the horror of Trump's dangerous and insane war.
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Here in Australia, there's a Greens candidate, a gentleman, he's of Muslim extraction.
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He's,
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I think a Lebanese.
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I don't want to get his ethnicity wrong.
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But he's a Greens candidate.
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He describes himself as an award-winning poet.
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That's in the one-line bio.
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So you know that anything that he says about this
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is going to be florid and thought-provoking.
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So on social media, he posted about the Iran campaign,
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quote,
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So I don't know about you,
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But I think we should give him another poetry award for that one.
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So suffice it to say, there's a lot of reflexive tribal allegiances on display
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and not a lot of care about the great and ancient civilization of Persia.
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And just to bear, I don't know if you heard me talking to David Frum the other day,
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but you should go back and listen to that.
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It's interesting.
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David was in the George W. Bush administration.
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He was a neoconservative.
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He was in favor of the Iraq War.
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He, in fact, wrote the portion of George W. Bush's post-911 State of the Union Address, where he talked about there being an axis of evil of Iran and Iraq and North Korea, provided some of the pretext for the Iraq War.
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in fact was in favor of going into Iran or taking strong action against Iran back then
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and has since become a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a very measured and thoughtful
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person about American power and American democracy and he pointed me to the counterfactual
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of Portugal.
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Portugal in 1980 had the same size economy as Iran.
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They were about equally wealthy.
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They had similar histories in the sense that, I mean, obviously not culturally, but politically,
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they were coming out of essentially a military dictatorship.
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And since then, Portugal has turned
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into a rich Western liberal democracy, and Iran is now poorer than it was in 1980.
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There is no reason why that had to be the case.
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You can imagine a counterfactual in which the
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mullahs didn't take over Iran in the Iranian revolution and screw up its economy and create
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to corrupt state and punish their political enemies and jail and torture anyone who didn't
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like them and export the wildest and most stupid ideas around the region, fund the education of
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young Muslims all across, well outside of Iran, I'm talking about in Lebanon and all over the
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joint where they have proxies and Palestine, fund the education of young people to convince them
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that the best thing that they can do is to pick up a Kalashnikov and learn about small arms and go
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and kill as many Jewish children or American assets as they can via Hezbollah or Hamas or
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any other of their proxies.
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They've squandered enormous resources on intentionally creating
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just shitty little mischief-making nefarious ways that they can make life difficult for the Saudis,
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for basically all of the Arab states, and in particular for the United States and its allies,
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and in particular, particular for Israel.
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So you can imagine a world in which the Iranian
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revolution doesn't happen, and Iran today is, you know, maybe it's not quite as rich as Portugal
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because it's not in the European Union, but it could be Turkey, right?
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It could be Jordan, which have much better standards of living,
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you know, caveat on Erdogan and his misdeeds there.
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Of course, the reason why the Iranian revolution happened in the first place
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is because the CIA and Western powers had been supporting a dictator
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who nobody liked, a benevolent dictator, but the Shah of Iran, you hear about him from the early
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50s until he was toppled in the late 70s in the revolution.
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So it is worth being mindful of the
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principle of blowback here.
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We put in the Shah because he's the best person, but then the people
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don't like the Shah.
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So the people rise up and they put in someone who's much, much, much, much
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worse.
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And here we are 45, 46, 47 years later, and the whole country has been squandered and we have
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to go back in and fix the problem that arose because we had been trying to fix a prior
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problem.
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So it does give one pause about unintended consequences, which of course is
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the whole kind of superstructure under which all of the other debates about Iran are taking place.
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How can we know what exactly it is that Trump is unleashing here?
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The other obvious remark that
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comes to mind when we're talking about blowback is the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, where you've
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got a situation in which, you know, the Soviets going to Afghanistan and the Americans think it'd
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be a great idea to fund regional proxies to make life difficult for the Soviets and bleed them dry
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and push them out.
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And, you know, maybe that was great because maybe it accelerated the collapse
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of the Soviet Union.
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Maybe it wasn't so great because those Mujahideen then took over the
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country and flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York City, you know, a few decades later,
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less than a few decades later.
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So you never quite know exactly what the spillover is going to be.
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But I do think that we should at least be talking about this in the context of
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what it means for the Iranian nation and the Iranian people, and then the wider region,
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and then us, rather than starting with either bleeding heart, crocodile tear sympathy about
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Iranian schoolchildren as a pretext of taking another swipe at America and Donald Trump,
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or on the other hand, rah-rah-rahing about how terrible America, how terrible Trump is because
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he's not putting America first, or on the other hand, carrying water for Donald Trump because,
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hey, the Iranians were bad guys anyway, but why didn't he go to Congress and et cetera, et cetera,
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et cetera.
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All of that is downstream fundamentally, I think, from where my heart has been trying to
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locate my response, which is, what does this mean for Persians?
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That being said, let me park that
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big thing for a moment and say a couple of things about the the other stuff as well just to help us
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all kind of you know know that we're on the same page or at least consider the consider my page you
18:22
don't have to be on the same one um so congress and the constitution uh trump is doing something
18:29
incredibly illegal um it is a war it's obviously a war this is not a small you know this is not
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I don't know, this is not what he did, you know, where he just goes in and kidnaps a head of state
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and then puts them on trial and says, well, it wasn't really a war, so I didn't need Congress's
18:46
approval.
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In the framing of the US Constitution, the genius of the founding fathers was that they
18:54
took all of the roles of a monarch and they split them up and they got three buckets and they put
19:00
some of them in one bucket and some of them in another bucket and some of them in another bucket,
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the three branches of the United States government, which was basically a way of writing down sort of
19:11
what Britain was already doing in a de facto way, but then made it much easier for subsequent
19:16
countries like Australia to conceptualize and articulate the exact way that the Brits had been
19:23
sort of doing it because the Americans were like, no, this is how you actually do it.
19:26
This is how
19:26
you actually write it down on paper.
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And when it comes to war, those three branches, you know,
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Obviously, there's the branch that decides what is going to happen in the country, which is not the president.
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That's the Congress.
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That's the legislative branch.
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They decide what to do.
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And then what they decide goes over to, and this is not just in war, this is in everything.
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This is your little civics primer, in case you've forgotten it.
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The branch that decides what's going to happen is the people's representatives.
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Then they tell the president what to do.
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And the president is the executive.
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He runs all the things.
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He has the police and all this kind of thing working for him, all the actual people, the public servants and the postmen and the FBI.
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And he gets the military and he then goes off and does what Congress has told him to do.
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And if there's a squabble or if there's a disagreement or if people need to understand, you know, what they're – if either of those branches try to trample on the citizens' rights, then you have this third co-equal branch, which is the judiciary, where you can resolve problems and they can decide what the Constitution means and so on.
20:33
and in the framing of the constitution the founding fathers thought okay well it makes
20:37
sense to make the the initiation of military force reside with the people in their elected
20:44
leaders in congress that's the deciding bit about what we're going to do as a country and then the
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operation of the war passes over to the running everything to the you know the doing the stuff
20:54
that congress uh broadly authorizes you to do bit which is the president trump is not the first
21:01
president not to go to Congress and ask permission to go to war.
21:05
But it's the first time in American
21:07
history that such a large military campaign has been undertaken without even an attempt to go to
21:15
Congress or even a fig leaf about why not.
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I mean, this is black and white, unconstitutional.
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He is breaking the law.
21:24
I hope that it is somehow tested at the Supreme Court.
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It would be
21:27
extraordinary to me, not that I'm a legal expert, for the Supreme Court to side with some arcane
21:32
precedent when the violation here is so flagrant.
21:37
I mean, he has said, he's called on Iran,
21:41
he's called on them for unconditional surrender.
21:44
How does unconditional surrender
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arise in any situation other than warfare?
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You don't go out and buy a coffee and accidentally
21:55
get into a conversation about the barista's unconditional surrender.
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Like, unconditional
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surrender only happens when one thing is going on.
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That is war, my friend.
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There's no other
22:07
scenario in which you insist that your adversary unconditionally surrender.
22:13
Maybe a board game,
22:14
maybe a very enthusiastic, like, you know, multiplayer board game.
22:19
But then I don't think
22:21
I don't think that's what Trump's talking about.
22:24
So he had to go to Congress, and then maybe international war is a little bit more ambiguous.
22:29
David Frum certainly thinks it is.
22:31
Of course, he comes from a worldview that sort of poo-poos international law in the first place, or at least poo-poos the types of pointy-headed, wonky international lawyers who proclaim themselves to be the embodiment of what international law means.
22:48
because to people who do poo-poo international law,
22:52
they just think it's a game rigged by a bunch of countries
22:56
that have no regard for rules in order to constrain the actions
23:00
of countries that have much more of a regard for rules like ours.
23:05
And they're not entirely wrong about that.
23:08
You know, if you think about which countries you would rather,
23:11
which countries have a greater respect for process domestically,
23:15
that is.
23:16
It is Western liberal democracies.
23:18
And you could argue East Asian countries as well have
23:21
a great respect for process.
23:25
So the idea that you would have a bunch of sort of slightly corrupt
23:29
and cynical countries at the United Nations deciding that they're going to make it impossible
23:36
for countries that believe in democracy, liberalism, and process to expand democracy,
23:43
liberalism and process to more countries because that's in violation of rules in a context in which
23:49
nobody else gives a shit about the rules apart from the people being constrained by the rules
23:53
by other countries who actually don't care about rules except when it's pragmatic for them to do so
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in constraining us that's i think the kind of shape of the anti-international law argument
24:05
with which i have some sympathy but not so much sympathy that i think it's okay you know states
24:10
that one man, one man in the United States,
24:13
one man who's not even authorized inside the United States
24:16
to make these decisions, let alone international law,
24:18
should just be able to launch a war against his own constitution.
24:23
And anyway, not good, not legal, not legal, not okay.
24:31
But, but that can't be the end of the story.
24:37
It can't be.
24:39
we've got to be able to hold some shades of grey here
24:43
like we're losing our capacity if we ever had it
24:45
to not be tribalistic and black and white about everything
24:50
got to think about these things in
24:53
a bunch of different ways
24:55
first
24:57
the Iranian people and the Iranian nation
25:00
and the Persian civilization and their destiny
25:03
plus the other ethnicities in Iran
25:06
I don't want to completely ignore everybody else, the Kurds and Druze and Yazidis or whoever else is there.
25:15
So first, them.
25:17
Second, what does this mean for the entire region?
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Third, you can bring it back to us and say, what does it mean for international law?
25:29
And fourth and only fourth, I would say, what does it mean for America domestically?
25:32
Although if you live in America and you're worried about American democracy, you're allowed to reprioritize that.
25:39
But I think for everybody else in the world who's yelling on Instagram and posturing about this, that is the correct hierarchy of consideration, regardless of where you fall on any of those issues.
25:52
So here's the but, here's the bit that comes after the but
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After having stated all of those qualifiers about international law and domestic law
26:01
This is something audacious
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It may not turn out to be audacious
26:11
Many of the people who, I think, oppose the war
26:15
Would love nothing more than for the new supreme leader
26:18
Who is the son of Khamenei
26:20
Khamenei to just basically reinstate the status quo ante and go back to where things were.
26:30
That would be, I think, a terrible tragedy and probably second only in badness to the
26:38
whole country falling apart into a civil war that expands into a regional war.
26:44
Iran has been run by shitheads for a long time and after October 7th 2023
26:57
when Iran's proxies in Hamas now Iran didn't know about the exact timing of the attack because
27:04
Hamas started getting worried they pulled the trigger earlier than they had intended to and
27:09
they didn't want to talk to Iran because they just didn't know where Israeli spies were and
27:12
they were worried rightfully so it turned out that Israeli spies were all over Iran like like ants in
27:21
Swiss cheese to coin an analogy and when we and when we saw the the exploding pager pages in
27:29
Hezbollah and the you know the mobile phones and then the taking out of the Iranian I mean there
27:34
It was so obvious that the Israelis for years had been building up the capacity to pull off a decimation of Hezbollah and Iran itself.
27:46
So Hamas chickened out at the last minute about telling the Iranians they had been debating.
27:49
We know this from minutes of Hamas meetings that were seized by the Israelis in Gaza.
27:55
They were talking about whether or not to actually loop the Iranians in.
27:58
and the Iranians were not privy to the exact logistical details of the October 7th attack,
28:05
but were absolutely privy to and enthusiastic about and supportive of, both materially and also
28:13
ideologically, the general thrust of Hamas doing a final push on Israel that would knock the
28:21
Zionist colonial settler state, as they call it.
28:24
Well, they call it worse things than that,
28:26
as people on social media who are more sympathetic to the Iranian worldview call it.
28:33
They were very enthusiastically behind that and indeed, of course, had been funding and
28:37
coordinating Hezbollah to potentially do the same thing out of southern Lebanon.
28:45
So after October 7th, the status quo had become intolerable to Israel.
28:50
they just felt like we don't quite know exactly what to do here but this is no longer okay we
28:57
cannot live with iran doing this funding these people who who just spend all day every day
29:05
plotting how they're going to kill the maximum number of jews not just i'm not talking about
29:08
people in palestine i'm talking about people in the hezbollah fighters in lebanon i'm talking
29:13
about iranian proxies all over the region i'm talking about the iranian revolutionary guard
29:17
I'm talking about the mullahs in Tehran.
29:20
You know, this was not to people who think, well, of course, I mean, you know, October 7th was terrible, but it was a jailbreak.
29:26
I mean, what do you expect?
29:27
The Palestinian people were suffering.
29:29
Yeah, I mean, that's 10% of it.
29:32
90% of it is that there was a wild-eyed, theocratic, medieval bunch of Jew-hating, women-hating, religiously deluded people.
29:47
violent, homicidal, genocidal mischief makers, to use the most polite term,
29:55
controlling the biggest and most powerful and important adversary of Israel in the region.
30:01
And so as far as Israel was concerned, I think they figured that they were going to roll the
30:05
dice and take their chances.
30:08
Iran was Hezbollah, Iran was Hamas, Iran was exploding cafes,
30:12
Iran was jihadists relentlessly working on nuclear weapons.
30:19
Wasn't going to happen.
30:20
Wasn't going to happen.
30:21
Like, there's only so much that Israel was going to take.
30:27
And so I think once they decided that they were going to actually strike Iran,
30:31
after the success of last summer's, you know,
30:33
limited 12-day campaign against the nuclear facilities
30:36
and after the decimation of Hezbollah,
30:39
then then i think it became clear to the americans to trump that well if the israelis are going to
30:44
if the israelis attack then iran is going to respond by sending a bunch of ballistic missiles
30:50
into all and iran had said this this is their open strategy if we get attacked we're not just
30:55
going to respond to the attacker we're going to respond to all uh american associated assets in
31:01
the region which means all of a sudden there are iranian missiles raining down on bahrain on dubai
31:07
on Abu Dhabi, into Saudi Arabia, they're blowing up oil fields.
31:11
And my understanding is that once
31:14
Trump understood that that was going to happen anyway, might as well go in and roll the dice.
31:20
It's audacious.
31:21
They've been a pain in the ass, not just to America.
31:24
This isn't like,
31:25
oh yeah, well, they're a pain in the ass to us, but we're a pain in the ass to them.
31:28
So who's to
31:29
say what's right or wrong.
31:30
No, they ask any Arab, ask one of the 400 million Arabs across the Middle
31:37
East, what contribution the Iranian regime has made.
31:45
And they will tell you to a man and a woman
31:48
and a child and a birdie and a lion and a lamb and a porpoise to an eagle.
31:55
Not good.
31:56
Not just not
31:56
good, bloodthirsty, bloody awful.
32:03
And this doesn't mean that there aren't other awful things going on in the region.
32:06
You know, Saudi Arabia, terrible, not good folks, historically, on human rights.
32:14
Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, not nice, unjust.
32:22
the war in Gaza, completely indefensible on a humanitarian basis, the way it was conducted.
32:29
But that doesn't change the fact that systematically and persistently,
32:33
the huge obstacle to the development of the region and to comity between Jews and Arabs
32:41
in the region, I mean, the thorn in the side of every attempt to do anything constructive,
32:47
constructive meaning democratic, liberalizing, pacifying
32:52
has been this hornet's nest of guys who you really wouldn't like
32:58
if you met them, whose opinions you really wouldn't share.
33:03
You know, the mullahs in Tehran were assholes and they had it coming.
33:09
So Trump rolls the dice and takes his chances
33:16
and he says
33:19
maybe things will be better in Iran
33:22
if it's not run
33:24
by 14th century
33:26
sexist, gay-hating, Jew-hating
33:29
homicidal, genocidal
33:31
fundamentalist, religious fanatics
33:33
who are trying to get a nuclear bomb
33:39
and then people say
33:40
well okay
33:42
he did that
33:42
but now because he did it
33:43
in breach of international law, it's going to give carte blanche to all of these other countries to
33:47
break international law as well, which is a concern that I have.
33:50
And when I say people say this,
33:52
mea culpa, I say it.
33:55
But then I think, well, it comes back to the question of who actually
33:59
obeys rules anyway.
34:00
I mean, if you're a shitty little dictatorial regime somewhere,
34:06
are you actually not skirmishing with your neighbors because America doesn't?
34:14
I mean, maybe you are to some extent, but I'm just not sure.
34:18
Like, a lot of countries do a lot of naughty things,
34:22
even when the United States isn't doing naughty things.
34:26
We'll have to see whether or not more countries do more naughty things
34:30
now that the United States does naughty things,
34:32
or whether more countries think,
34:34
now that the United States does naughty things,
34:36
I'd better be careful about doing naughty things,
34:39
because they might do naughty things to me.
34:42
the obvious sort of glaring frightening analogy is china and taiwan which you know has been bandied
34:48
around well if american can do this in contravention of international law if they can
34:52
bomb iran what's stopping china from using the same rationale to be honest i don't think the
34:58
chinese communist party needs much of a rationale for trying to take on taiwan apart from the
35:05
rationale that they've had ever since the communist revolution in china which is taiwan is ours and
35:11
it's part of the part of the mother country and there will be reunification one day um i heard a
35:19
conversation on the radio on public broadcasting about like you know what is the difference between
35:25
china taking on taiwan and uh you know america's rationale for taking on iran like what what how
35:32
is Iran a different case from
35:35
Taiwan?
35:36
And the reporter was saying, well, I mean,
35:38
really the only salient difference
35:41
is that, you know, so Taiwan
35:42
is more stable
35:44
and it
35:47
has a, you know,
35:49
I guess a more sophisticated
35:50
democratic process than Iran
35:52
does.
35:53
So that might provide
35:55
some pause as to why
35:56
it would be legitimate to take out
35:58
Taiwan.
36:01
And
36:02
I was driving my car and I was thinking, you've got to be shitting me.
36:05
Seriously?
36:06
That's the best you can do about why there's a difference between Iran and Taiwan?
36:11
That Taiwan is stable and democratic?
36:14
That's the only difference?
36:15
What about the fact that the Iranians have been paying for bombs to blow up in cafes,
36:22
for people to be radicalized all over the region?
36:25
I mean, they've been spreading small arms across all of these crazy groups.
36:30
have been paying for the groups to indoctrinate yet more groups.
36:33
They are absolute, unalterable,
36:37
Jew-hating, woman-hating, Western civilization-hating, America-hating
36:44
maniacs who divert all of their country's resources into causing mischief and trying
36:51
to get nuclear weapons.
36:53
That doesn't come up on your sophisticated public broadcaster political
36:59
geostrategic reporters cap when you're thinking about why there might be a difference between the
37:05
the moral legitimacy of going into taiwan versus going into iran
37:12
um so yes just parking that on international law international law matters it should always matter
37:22
It just may not matter as much as everybody thinks.
37:28
And we shouldn't talk about international law as if it doesn't also matter when people are a bunch of giant assholes.
37:38
I'm talking about the Iranian leadership, a bunch of giant assholes who torture dissidents and pay medieval religious perverts to indoctrinate young kids all over the Middle East that the best way to spend their time is to pick up a Kalashnikov and learn how to rig small arms and munitions to inflict maximum civilian casualties.
38:02
That also isn't good, as well as breaking international law not being good.
38:10
interesting to note on Australia and Canada and other medium-sized powers that have sort of backed
38:15
the war, the language is interesting.
38:18
If you actually listen to it, like the people have said,
38:20
oh my goodness, I can't believe countries like Australia are backing the war.
38:23
When you go back
38:24
and listen to what the Prime Minister said, he said that he supports the United States' attempts
38:29
to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
38:34
He didn't say technically he supports the war.
38:36
He didn't say he supports regime change.
38:38
He didn't say he supports the liberation of the Iranian people.
38:41
He didn't say he supports the removal of long-range ballistic missiles from Iran.
38:45
He didn't say that he supports the killing of the leadership.
38:51
He basically just repeated something that we've said a lot, which is that we support America's attempt to denuclearize Iran.
39:00
But he said it at a moment in time at which everyone thought that it meant that he was supporting the war.
39:05
So I thought that was moderately canny.
39:08
So bringing this back to the Iranian people,
39:14
Iranians are, it sort of sounds fatuous to say that they're a great people
39:20
and it maybe sounds slightly racist to other people who aren't Iranians
39:23
to say that they're great people.
39:24
Like, you know, isn't everyone a great person?
39:26
But no, I mean, some civilizations do really well
39:28
and some civilizations are retrograde, shall we say.
39:33
There's no reason why the Iranian, the Persian civilization, let's call it that, should have been ruled by such regressive dickheads for the past nearly half century as they have been.
39:45
Iranians are successful everywhere in the world.
39:47
Like, go to any country in the world and look at the Iranian community.
39:52
They're a bit like Jews.
39:55
They're a bit like Koreans.
39:57
Go to any city, find the Koreans, find the Jews, find the Iranians.
40:01
They're always doing well.
40:02
They're always doing well.
40:05
I mean, imagine if Iran today was as if the Iranians of Los Angeles
40:12
had the natural resources of Dubai,
40:16
or pick some other oil-rich Gulf state that's comparable to Iran,
40:21
and combine it with the economic dynamism of the Gulf states
40:24
and maybe the sort of development ethos of a Turkey,
40:29
it would be the defining country of the region i mean it would be far and away the most opulent and
40:39
progressive and sophisticated and cosmopolitan country um it's also relevant that iranians are
40:47
are people they're not just people they are a people you know so when people think about
40:52
you know, our misadventures in the Middle East in recent years, and Afghanistan and Iraq.
41:00
Well,
41:01
you know, Iraq was a bunch of lines drawn on a map by some Europeans who knew nothing about the place
41:08
after the First World War.
41:10
And if you'd asked an Iraqi who they were,
41:18
perhaps prior to Saddam Hussein taking over
41:21
but maybe even after
41:23
they wouldn't say I'm a proud Iraqi
41:25
they'd talk about their family
41:27
they'd talk about their clan
41:28
they'd talk about whether they're Shiite
41:29
or whether they're Sunni
41:30
or whether they're Druze
41:31
or whether they're Kurd
41:33
you know that was not a country
41:37
certainly not a people
41:39
same with Afghanistan
41:40
you know a bunch of tribes
41:42
who have different languages
41:44
and you've got Pashto and Urdu
41:45
and you've got this
41:46
You've got the people who live in the Waziristan Mountains.
41:49
And, you know, it's sure you can try to reform that country.
41:53
You can try to give that country opportunities.
41:55
But at the end of the day, it's not a country.
41:57
You know, ask a person in Afghanistan who they are, who they are.
42:02
And talk about kin.
42:04
And talk about the state of Afghanistan ruled out of Kabul.
42:10
Iran is a country for the Iranian people who are a people who have had a country there for thousands of years.
42:16
it's a civilization you know so similarly to uh it's a bit the same with sort of palestine like
42:25
at the risk of getting myself in trouble i'm not demeaning the existence of palestinian
42:30
national aspirations but if you'd asked if you take any palestinian any adult palestinian today
42:36
and you'd asked their grandparents who are you they would have talked about tribe family kin
42:43
and maybe then they're Arabs.
42:45
I mean, Palestinian is just the name that has been made up for the Arabs
42:48
who happened to be in the part of the Middle East
42:53
where after the Ottoman Empire lost the First World War,
42:57
the British controlled a mandate that they called Palestine
42:59
and then Israel got started.
43:01
And because they hated Israel so much and, you know,
43:05
they wanted that bit of land back.
43:07
And so those Arabs identified themselves as Palestinians.
43:10
doesn't mean that their aspirations to live free and equal lives
43:15
in a state of their own are illegitimate
43:17
national aspirations come up legitimately all the time
43:20
but they're new, they're new is the only point
43:23
in Iran we're not talking, you know, you ask
43:26
you take any adult Iranian and you ask their grandparents
43:29
who they are, and they're Iranian
43:31
you ask their grandparents, they're Iranian
43:33
and their grandparents, they're Iranian
43:34
and their grandparents, they're Iranian
43:37
so I'm curious about like what does this audacious illegal strike do if anything to the future of
43:48
Persia um I don't know that I don't know the answer to that question but I know that
43:58
we should be sparing more of a thought for it and we should be sparing more of a thought
44:02
for the thorniness of the predicament of Iranians.
44:07
Like, they're in a position that is not dissimilar, actually,
44:12
and I'm pivoting now from the questions about them as a people
44:14
to them as a tool of our conversations and our geopolitics.
44:21
Iranians find themselves in a position that I can sort of empathise with
44:24
because it's not that dissimilar to Jewish people,
44:28
and it's not that dissimilar to Palestinian people.
44:32
By which I mean they are co-opted by opposite equally evil sides.
44:42
They are sort of used as pawns both by, you know,
44:45
so the religious extremists in Tehran and also the Trumpist liberationists
44:52
will both claim to be standing on behalf of the Iranian people.
44:56
And the actual center of gravity of Iranian public opinion is,
45:00
fuck you both.
45:01
like who well we don't want either of you we don't want trump and we don't want the mullahs
45:07
and similarly you know the palestinian center of gravity the moderate center of gravity perhaps
45:15
is we don't want hamas and we don't want to be subjugated by israel are those our only choices
45:22
like can we not have that and same with jewish people jewish people are like most jewish people
45:28
around the world are like screw Netanyahu screw the occupation of the West Bank screw the way
45:35
that the war in Gaza was conducted and also screw all of you who are saying that all of that means
45:40
that we don't get to have a state within the borders of the state that we were given in the
45:46
40s and screw all of you who are so selective about the way that you criticize the Jewish
45:52
people's right for you know self-determination against all of the other people's rights for
45:58
self-determination that you think are noble.
46:01
So there are quite a lot of these, well, there's a
46:03
handful of these peoples who find themselves constantly torn and pushed and tugged and
46:11
nudged in various directions and co-opted by cynical people who are trying to use their
46:16
plight in some way, in some self-serving way.
46:20
They're used as other people's playthings.
46:23
Jews get used as pawns for other people to make big points about Zionist conspiracies globally
46:31
or the bloodthirstiness of the Jewish state or whatever.
46:34
There are subtexts all over the place.
46:37
The Palestinians probably have the worst of it of any population in the world in terms of being
46:42
used as playthings.
46:43
They are pawns, not just for right-wing Israelis who want to have a boogeyman
46:52
that they can cynically use to their political advantage,
46:55
not mentioning any names, current prime minister.
46:59
But they're also equally abused and used as playthings
47:04
by Arab leaders all over the Middle East
47:06
who want them to be suffering
47:08
because they like having a thorn in the side of Israel
47:10
and they will not take a single Palestinian
47:11
into their own country
47:12
because they have contempt for them.
47:15
And they know that it plays well on the Arab street
47:18
to have a distraction that everyone can get angry about
47:20
and put a target on the Jews back in Israel
47:23
instead of having to account for their own corrupt regimes
47:26
across the Arab world.
47:29
So you cop it from both sides when you're these people.
47:34
Other similarities between Jews and Palestinians and Iranians
47:37
is that they have to deal with extremists
47:39
claiming to act on their behalf,
47:41
which, trust me, is frustrating.
47:44
You know, the Iranian people have to constantly be told
47:47
that it's their noble calling as the Iranian people
47:51
to spread the glory of the revolution across the region,
47:54
and that's why they're paying for all these, you know,
47:58
proxies in Yemen and Lebanon and in Gaza.
48:03
You know, most Iranians are like,
48:05
screw you and your revolution.
48:06
I wasn't even alive when your stupid revolution happened.
48:09
You're just a corrupt old bunch of religious dickheads.
48:12
Give us an economy.
48:14
Give us peace.
48:16
similarly you know jews are always i mean like most jewish people like netanyahu and like all
48:24
you know smotrich and ben gavir and all these right wing right wingers in the israeli coalition
48:29
who are talking about the great destiny of a greater israel and you know like stop it
48:37
stop being extremists on our behalf stop raining bombs down on apartment blocks in gaza because
48:42
you think that that's for the benefit of the Jewish people and using our historical trauma
48:48
as a way to justify the misdeeds of today.
48:51
Quit it.
48:53
And Palestinians have the same thing,
48:55
like stop helping Hamas.
48:57
You know, like the second Intifada, there would have been a lot
48:59
of Palestinians who would have been saying, I don't think this is a great idea to be going
49:03
and blowing up children on buses in Israel.
49:07
Stop working on our behalf.
49:09
Thanks, but no thanks,
49:10
extremists?
49:11
Why are you using our plight as a way to justify your own psychopathy?
49:17
And on a wider scale, Muslims face this all over the world, because Muslims are stuck in this
49:22
situation where they've got this small faction of maniacs who claim that the purest form of Islam
49:29
is jihadism.
49:31
So after something like the Bondi terrorist attack, it's not only a traumatic time
49:35
for the Jewish people.
49:37
It's a traumatic time for the Muslim people as well.
49:40
We're like, why do we have to have these stupid extremists
49:42
claiming to act on our behalf?
49:45
So I feel personal, maybe more than most, empathy
49:50
as a Jew for Iranians and for Palestinians.
49:55
There are parallels.
49:58
And another, I suppose another common thread
50:01
between those three peoples is that their future is precarious.
50:06
nothing's guaranteed.
50:10
Iranians are probably more secure than Palestinians or Jews.
50:14
There's certainly a lot more numerous.
50:17
But there's a real question mark over what the future looks like
50:23
for each of these three peoples.
50:27
I think the future of Israelis is probably secure.
50:31
They've got nuclear weapons.
50:33
but the future of the Jewish diaspora is not at all secure.
50:37
I wouldn't be at all surprised if in 20 or 30 or 50 years,
50:42
you know, most Jews in the world have had to leave
50:46
and go back to Israel,
50:47
or maybe the United States might be the exception.
50:50
We'll see what happens with the far-right's embrace of anti-Semitism.
50:53
But the daily indignities of being Jewish
50:57
are obviously becoming more and more,
51:01
and certainly the daily indignities of being a Palestinian in Palestine
51:05
have gotten much, much, much, much worse in recent years.
51:10
I mean, appalling.
51:13
I'm thinking of the way that the current right-wing Israeli government
51:16
has used the cover of the Gaza war and these other conflicts
51:19
as a way of clamping down on the rights of Palestinians
51:21
in the West Bank in particular.
51:25
And the future of the Iranians is uncertain.
51:27
this sense of what's going to become of us
51:33
why are we going through all this?
51:34
is this a moment of possibility and aspiration
51:37
or is this a moment of degradation and terror?
51:41
what's around the corner?
51:45
while we're all banging on about
51:48
what did the Greens candidate say?
51:50
fucking evil cunts fuck this murderous fascist empire forever
51:53
okay great, great mate, good on ya
51:57
hope that gets you elected in you know whatever super muslim electorate
52:04
you're running in just to be reflexively anti-american about everything and essentially
52:11
defending a status quo that has caused so much bloodshed and mayhem and has stolen the future
52:16
of the iranian people for almost half a century but america bad trump bad trump orange bad man
52:26
Fuck the murderous Zionist empire colonial settler pigs
52:34
Of course, Trumpists are just as unsophisticated
52:37
And find it just as difficult to think about Shades of Grey
52:44
But I just thought that it was supposed to be the right
52:48
that had cartoon caricature interpretations of goodies and baddies.
52:55
You know, it was like, it struck me as a very sort of Cold War thing.
52:59
I mean, you see, it's also a religious thing, right?
53:01
I mean, the right has always been good at this Manichean worldview
53:05
of darkness and light, of good and bad, you know,
53:09
of not having the left's squeamishness about, well, you know,
53:13
maybe things are complex and, you know,
53:15
maybe the reason why people commit crimes is actually because they were abused as children,
53:19
and the right is always like, no, crime, bad.
53:22
Law and order, good.
53:25
Ronald Reagan, you know,
53:26
America, good.
53:27
Evil empire, bad.
53:30
And so I always just expect the right to have a simplistic
53:33
worldview of goodies and baddies.
53:36
And now it strikes me that the left has gotten as bad
53:40
as the right at having goodies and baddies.
53:44
It's just the opposite, goodies and baddies.
53:48
It's like everything is a morality play
53:51
that you can fit into your preconceived framework.
53:57
For the left, the baddies are white supremacists,
54:01
Western democracies that hide behind a pretense of Western civilization
54:05
to actually inflict their hegemony upon the innocent, victimized people of color around the world.
54:14
It's a male structure of power that inflicts and oppresses women.
54:19
It's a heteronormative gender binary that erases the lived identity and experience of transgender people.
54:28
it's a
54:33
yeah it's
54:35
a whole system that apologizes for the fact
54:37
that we live in an irredeemably white
54:39
supremacist society
54:41
and that we're too blind to even see it
54:44
I mean that seems to have
54:45
become the main left wing narrative so when something
54:47
like the Gaza war happens
54:49
it's easy
54:51
there's a clean articulate
54:53
white guy in a suit raining
54:55
bombs on poor
54:57
huddled people of color.
54:58
I mean, could you get a better emblem that is going to trigger our
55:06
post-colonial guilt as leftists in the West?
55:10
It was perfect.
55:12
And similarly here, you've got a
55:14
buffoonish, mega wealthy, crass American, ignorant of the world and world politics,
55:21
not strategic in his thinking, inflicting fire and fury on,
55:28
I don't want to say brown-skinned people,
55:30
Iranians, people of color.
55:32
Let's muddle on that question.
55:36
But, you know, it fits into the framework either way.
55:45
It's just so easy.
55:48
It's just so fatuous.
55:49
It's just so tiresome.
55:51
It's just so boring.
55:55
So instead of thinking about this as a morality play,
55:58
I think we should think about the Iranian people
56:01
as a people in a particularly sticky bind,
56:04
like the Jewish people, like the Palestinian people,
56:07
because they are co-opted by evil people on both sides.
56:13
They are used as other people's plaything.
56:16
they are conflicted internally about their relationship to extremists
56:20
who claim to act on their behalf and their future is uncertain
56:24
and like the Gaza question and like the Jewish question
56:28
the question that should dominate in this Iran war
56:31
is what should we make of a conflicted
56:35
people who are hemmed in by cynical forces
56:40
and if you speak as that Greens candidate did
56:44
you are siding with mullahs you are siding with the side that has
56:51
destroyed the future of the iranian people for the past half century
56:58
i'm not making a black and white sort of binary here he is by intent by speaking in a way that
57:05
makes it impossible to have even a glimmer of sympathy for any alternative view for any view
57:11
that might fracture or let some light in
57:15
to your cloistered, dark echo chamber of certainty
57:19
about how evil and stupid America is
57:22
and Israel and Jews and Americans
57:26
and how universally
57:28
and constantly and permanently
57:31
and unquestioningly virtuous
57:35
the Muslim and Arab side is.
57:39
And to be clear,
57:42
most of the muslims and i say arab because he's an arab not because iranians are arabs they're not
57:48
but most of the muslims in this situation are not on the side that the greens candidate who
57:54
claims to be sympathizing with them is they're not on the side of the mullahs they're not on the side
57:59
of unquestioning of having an unquestioning reflexive antipathy to american intervention
58:06
in decapitating their regime.
58:09
They're uncertain.
58:10
They're frightened.
58:11
It's complicated.
58:14
They don't know what's going to become of them
58:16
or their kids or their grandkids.
58:22
Like we owe them better
58:25
than to constantly make this all about us.
58:29
All about our own parochial internal interpretations
58:32
about what Trump means for this or that.
58:40
I think we have an opportunity in moments like this to grow up a little bit
58:44
not intellectually but just empathically
58:50
the Iranian people have been screwed over for a really really long time
58:52
and it hasn't been Israel and America who's been doing the screwing over
58:59
it's been some awful people who've been keeping them hostage essentially
59:02
and that doesn't mean that this is the right way to react to that
59:10
but can we just pause the fucking relentless chattering
59:13
about who's right and who's wrong because of some technicality
59:19
and try to just spend a moment having some empathy
59:23
for the quandary that they're in
59:28
the quandary that Palestinians are in
59:31
the quandary that the Jewish people are in?
59:40
I had a conversation this morning with my daughter
59:44
who has her first test of her life,
59:47
her first exam.
59:48
She's in third grade.
59:50
And in Australia, they have this thing called NAPLAN,
59:53
which is like a national grading system,
59:55
and they start doing it in third grade.
59:57
And so she's having her first test ever today.
1:00:00
and I channeled my dad who died last year
1:00:03
because he would always say to me before a test or an audition
1:00:05
he'd always look at me and say
1:00:11
go into this with a cool head and a warm heart
1:00:18
not a cold heart and a hot head
1:00:23
and as I was halfway through saying that profound aphorism
1:00:29
to my eight-year-old daughter.
1:00:32
She said, oh, warm smile?
1:00:35
Go in with a warm smile?
1:00:37
And I was like, sweetie, maybe you're a little young
1:00:39
for Pop's wisdom.
1:00:45
And I noticed, I thought it was so sweet
1:00:49
because she had no idea what I was talking about,
1:00:50
but she thought she was helping me.
1:00:52
She was trying to assist Daddy
1:00:55
in finishing this complicated string of thoughts.
1:00:59
And the only time she'd heard the word warm being used in the context of a metaphorical interpretation was probably a warm smile.
1:01:07
She probably doesn't hear about other things being warm unless they're literally warm.
1:01:09
So she offers it.
1:01:10
Made me realize at every stage in your life, you don't know what you don't know.
1:01:16
You don't know the limits of your own worldview.
1:01:19
as my dad started you know dying from alzheimer's and his brain started shrinking and shrinking
1:01:26
there was a moment where he was aware there was a period where you're aware as you're getting
1:01:30
dementia but then you get to a point at which you just don't you don't you don't know what you don't
1:01:34
know and of course in every moment actually it's not true that you're aware as you're getting
1:01:37
dementia because although you're aware of the great trajectory you're not aware of the moment
1:01:40
by moment trajectory again it's the sliver of light that is just the now like we're all just
1:01:45
living in this permanent present, right?
1:01:48
And no one more so than someone who's suffering from
1:01:50
dementia.
1:01:51
And so he didn't know that he had just asked the same question three minutes ago.
1:01:56
How
1:01:56
could he know?
1:01:57
And how could my daughter know that it's not a very constructive suggestion that she's
1:02:01
making?
1:02:02
This may be a long way to cast a bow, ladies and gents, but it's made me think today
1:02:08
about how important it is for us to understand that we don't know what we don't know.
1:02:16
my daughter can't know that she is not at roughly the same intellectual level as Daddy.
1:02:24
She thinks we're about the same.
1:02:25
You know, she knows I know more stuff and I have more power,
1:02:28
but we're about the same.
1:02:31
So did my dad once he'd lost his mind.
1:02:35
And so do I.
1:02:38
Of course, so do I.
1:02:41
I think that I know
1:02:44
what there is to be known
1:02:46
because I'm me
1:02:48
and if my brain was bigger
1:02:49
was big enough to show me the limitations of my own
1:02:54
intellect and wisdom
1:02:57
then it would be bigger
1:02:58
and it wouldn't be smaller
1:02:59
and I wouldn't be able to see the gap
1:03:00
it's very hard
1:03:02
so
1:03:04
Trump knows
1:03:06
as much as he can know
1:03:09
and he doesn't have the self-awareness to know what he doesn't know.
1:03:13
Part of getting old and wise, I think, is learning more and more
1:03:16
what the limitations are on your own knowledge.
1:03:18
Like no one is more self-certain than a 22-year-old male.
1:03:24
But we need to sort of realize that any interpretation
1:03:29
that you hear about this conflict, any wise person you hear on a podcast,
1:03:34
any authority that you hear talking on the news,
1:03:36
anyone who you read writing a column, by the way, I have a new column in the Australian Financial
1:03:41
Review.
1:03:41
Read it every weekend.
1:03:43
No, every other weekend.
1:03:45
All of those voices are limited by
1:03:49
the fundamental, basic, epistemological, cognitive problem that we are limited human beings with a
1:03:57
limited number of cells in gray matter in between our skulls.
1:04:02
And the world is incredibly complicated
1:04:04
and has multiple strands of culture and politics and regret and revenge and emotion and just
1:04:14
inertia, institutions and systems, rules and, you know, predicting, claiming to have certainty
1:04:23
about what the outcome of this thing is or saying that you know that it's a bad thing, this war.
1:04:30
it's beyond the can of mere mortals which is why i've chosen to revert back to like
1:04:38
a sense of i guess loving kindness towards the iranian people and a refusal to jump on any
1:04:44
bandwagon about whether the war is a bad idea yeah okay quibble about the legality of it it's
1:04:51
definitely illegal raise concerns about american democracy raise concerns about international law
1:04:57
all that's fine, you can have those conversations.
1:05:01
We just shouldn't have been having those conversations first.
1:05:07
They should be the fourth and fifth conversations,
1:05:09
not the first and second ones.
1:05:12
But it feels better to hate on Trump
1:05:16
than to try to have some empathy
1:05:21
for the potentially momentous undertaking
1:05:26
that the Iranian people are undergoing right now.
1:05:35
Final thoughts.
1:05:36
I think this war will be good for Israel and terrible for Jews,
1:05:40
as much of the Israeli government,
1:05:43
which I think is true of much of what the Israeli government does.
1:05:47
It reinforces every stereotype that anti-Semites have about Jews.
1:05:50
They're pulling the rings.
1:05:52
They're puppet masters who actually just whisper in Donald Trump's ear
1:05:56
and get him to do all of their nefarious bidding for them.
1:05:59
They're violent and bloodthirsty.
1:06:00
They don't care about human life,
1:06:02
especially not the lives of non-Jews.
1:06:07
Yeah, they're nefarious behind-the-scenes players.
1:06:09
There's a Zionist conspiracy that is always warmongering,
1:06:12
causing all the wars in the world,
1:06:13
to quote my fellow countryman, Mel Gibson.
1:06:18
Another random thought,
1:06:19
if it turns into a civil war and puts pressure on Europe
1:06:23
the same way that the Syrian civil war did,
1:06:26
then it will be incredibly challenging for liberal democracies across Europe and will embolden the far right.
1:06:32
So, fingers crossed.
1:06:34
I mean, that's the obvious reason why you wouldn't roll the dice like this if you were a sane president.
1:06:43
And the final positive thought is if it ends up working and if somehow Khamenei's son is not the ruler,
1:06:51
but the ruler is a more modernizing figure, you know, an MBS, still a corrupt mass murderer, but like a slightly more liberalizing corrupt mass murderer who's willing to stand up to jihadism and to cooperate with a world community that wants prosperity and modernization and liberalization.
1:07:14
then
1:07:18
I mean an Iran that decides that
1:07:20
jihadism is a dead end
1:07:22
would be
1:07:23
I mean the whole Middle East could
1:07:26
look like Dubai
1:07:28
or at least like Jordan
1:07:31
so
1:07:35
keep your head about you
1:07:37
have a cool head
1:07:38
and a warm heart not a cold heart and a hot head
1:07:41
we can all
1:07:42
agree that it wasn't Trump's right
1:07:44
to roll those dice.
1:07:47
It wasn't his right domestically.
1:07:48
It wasn't his right internationally.
1:07:51
But if we're going to live
1:07:53
in a lawless world,
1:07:56
I am glad that now
1:07:58
and for the next little while,
1:08:00
it's the countries that
1:08:02
still give the tiniest little shit
1:08:04
about democracy and freedom
1:08:08
who are the ones that are imposing
1:08:10
their will.
1:08:12
Take care.
1:08:13
I'll see you next time.