"Iran War Diary (Day 35)

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.

Kumars Salehi: Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim. Hello, everyone. It's QMARS. And in Rokea's absence, as she continues to report from the Northern Front in South Lebanon, it continues to be my esteemed pleasure to welcome you to Delete Your Account in close Axis of Resistance-style collaboration with the Colony Archive and the Adnan Hussain Show with Adnan Hussain, associate professor of history at Queen's University in Ontario and medievalist scholar of religion in Europe and West Asia, joining us for the first time and accompanied by Navid Zarinal. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, he's a historian of religion and Iranian modernity. uh and we are forming like voltron to pick his brain and hear what he and other uh iranians around him in tehran uh are thinking and feeling and doing right now so welcome to the both of you it's great to be with you and to meet you uh kumars and to be seeing navid again

Navid Zarrinnal: Thank you guys. Thank you for having this conversation with me. And I look forward to your questions and analysis.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, you know, I, fair warning, I might be a little loopy today. I'm the only one of us, I think, who like just biologically, temperamentally should not be awake right now. But such is my commitment to, you know, truth, justice in the anti-American way. And somebody has to counter program all the nonsense that you're hearing right now from basically everyone else. But yeah, my brain is below 20% charge. So I'm on. um low power mode right now um but I actually have we need we need an enrichment uh program to get you up to like 80 or 90 percent you know I gotta weaponize that intellect I have to assert my sovereignty uh but you are I'm lucky actually that uh I don't have to assert my sovereignty that much today because you if if Sina uh had been able to join us you were really gonna have to do a lot of work Adnan to help me reign him in because Last time I had like serious questions that I wrote for Naveed. And I'm not saying I'm blameless in this, but we didn't get to like half of them. But Naveed, I really want to start just by highlighting again some of your recent work and ask you how you're doing, what you're thinking about personally before we talk about other people's stories and also geopolitical events. You just visited internally displaced families in Tehran who lost their homes due to the US-Israeli bombing. They're being hosted in four-star hotels, the furthest thing from being held, with entertainment and food. And you visited them and documented some of their stories. What struck you the most?

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, so I think we've been watching the Western media so much that we have these Freudian slips. Not that it's not a Freudian slip, but rather we kind of take their vocabulary.

Kumars Salehi: No, that's a Freudian slip. I'm a scholar of Freud, and that's a Freudian slip.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, okay, I got you. No, no, I mean, it's funny, because I saw actually my friend Shahzad tweet this, that they're already referring to prisoners of war that Hezbollah or Iran might be taking as hostages. So it's funny, the kind of double standards and the special nomenclature they use and apply to Iran. But going to your question, it was a very inspiring experience because I went there with some other friends who were filmmakers and we were working on footage and content about what has happened to these people. So basically, everybody who was there had lost their home due to the US and Israeli bombing. I posted a picture of an elderly woman who was a widow. Her husband has passed away. And she lived near the leader's office. So on the morning of February 28th, when they bombed the leader's office. She lived in the same neighborhood, and so her house was badly damaged. And her account was that a young man came to rescue her. So I don't think her building fell, but it became so damaged that it was no longer habitable. But there were other people there whose houses were probably entirely destroyed. Because I've been to the sites, and there are two kinds of destruction we see. One is that the entire building is flattened, that there's nothing left, minus rubble and bricks and such. But there's the other scenario where the structure is still standing, but then the windows are blown out, the doors are shattered, the personal properties are mostly destroyed. And I think she fell in the latter category, but then there were families whose houses were entirely destroyed. And so they were being housed by Tehran's municipality, by the mayoral office, and the entire thing was being paid for. And I think the mayor's office was getting the money from the foundation of the dispossessed or Boniade Mostaz Afin, because they're one of these public state foundations here that have a lot of money. And I think they were providing the funding for it. And then what was also amazing is that they had breakfast, lunch, uh dinner paid for so you know they would go to the hotel um and eat and i even had dinner there because you know they were also uh hosting us as uh journalists and filmmakers and content creators and you know they also gave us you know a hamburger That was pretty decent quality Iranian hamburger, but it was pretty good. And tea also, they were giving us fresh, you know, Persian tea. So, I mean, the whole thing was amazing that, you know, cause I mean, I was thinking that, you know, well, you house them, but they're responsible for their own food, but even every meal was also being provided. And I think the idea is also that the Tehran's municipality will pay for the reconstruction of their homes. It might have a lot of bureaucratic hurdles that they have to go through, but I think the idea is that they will pay for a reconstruction of the home. And I even spoke to a cafe near my home, It's only about a 100-meter walk from my home. And the lady there, her windows were blown out because they targeted a Revolutionary Guard garrison very close to my home. And the windows of that cafe broke. And it had actually, after the windows broke, it had a really cute European-style kind of setting where, you know, there was no window and you were kind of like, you know, you had access to the street. But then she was telling me that the... Yeah, it was romantic, you know, the war made it romantic. But she was telling me that the mayoral office will pay for the windows, again, for the glass to be installed. And she told me that if the glass breaks a second time because of a new round of bombing, then the mayoral office will pay for half of the second reinstallation of glass. So the state is doing all these kind of socialist things in order to help people and keep the spirit high, and they're using the state funds to pay for it. And yeah, and so the families were there and they had, you know, it was such a good atmosphere too because they had entertainment. So there was a clown that came that played for the children. There were young women from the families and they were playing piano and violin and, you know, people were like, you know, attending and kind of celebrating. And there were also more levels of interest. The other interesting part was that there was a cultural element to there were these clerics or mullahs that were also there that were providing kind of cultural programing for the families that were there. So it was very well planned, well organized. And I think it's great that they're doing this in a difficult time for the Iranian people.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, Adnan, anything you would jump in with, there's a lot there. And I, you know, thank you for doing this work, Navi. It's so important.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, I mean, your dispatch videos on the ground from Tehran have been really valuable, I think, in informing people about local conditions and giving a different perspective. And you've covered some very important topics in addition to the treatment of displaced people due to U.S.-Israeli bombardment. I noticed that you recently did a kind of... interesting um sort of account about you know we're all academics or you know people in the so-called knowledge industry and you had uh one thing that I liked is that you you went and you visited this um uh University of Science and Technology that had been bombed and attacked And in addition to surveying the damage done there, you had an interesting way of framing the sovereignty of knowledge and knowledge production to contextualize why this was so important and what was at stake in these attacks. I'm wondering if maybe you could tell us a little bit more about why you think Israel and the US are targeting facilities like this that are civilian educational research, and how that fits into the politics of knowledge and what it really means to be a sovereign nation in this time.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, no, great question. So, I mean, I actually try to frame it historically and say, if you look at colonial history that both you, Adnan, and QMars are familiar with, in the 19th century, what the colonialists, the European colonialists tried to do is that they tried to either marginalized or even fully erased. You know, I don't use the term erased likely because in the kind of the post-structuralist academia, people say everything is being erased. But in this context, I think, you know, if you look at the indigenous knowledges in the Americas or Australia, those were really erased in some fundamental sense. But when it comes to the Sharia and Islamic knowledge, that was more marginalized. It wasn't fully erased. I mean, you still have the Madaris that are functional in the Muslim world and they have kind of preserved and transformed and perpetuated the Islamic knowledge. So you have all that, but what colonialism did is that through the missionaries, through the schools they instituted, through violence, through say the restructuring of the Islamic endowments in the Muslim context, they've really marginalized the pre-colonial knowledges and ways of knowing and educational systems that existed. And so what Iran did is that you don't actually restrict the missionary activity very much. They were not able. So part of the the mullahs, you know, the Shia ulema, part of their power was that they were able to restrict missionary activities in Iran during the 19th century. And the missionaries could only teach the non-Muslim children. But then because of the modernization movement and because of the shock of colonial modernity, What Iranians had to do is that they had to modernize their education system and they had to come up with new technical knowledges to build new things, new industries, new weapons that could withstand the British and the Russian threats in the 19th century. And so what happened after modernization is that Iran also developed a kind of European-inspired and modern educational system. And then after the revolution, instead of trying to rely on foreign expertise, which was the case in the Pahlavi period, even though during the Pahlavi period Reza Shah And his son were also attempting to, in a way, minimize the dependence on foreign expertize. But it was something that, you know, would take time. And then after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, we've kind of developed that indigenous element much further. So even the the carriage bridge that was the biggest bridge in the Middle East that was about to be inaugurated soon, that was bombed by U.S. and Israel. Um, that was a fully indigenous bridge that Iranians, because back in the Pahlavi period, they would bring foreign engineers to build, you know, bridges of the more complex things, uh, in many cases, but in this case, this was a fully indigenous bridge. Uh, but the reason that they, they bombed the Iran university of science and technology. Uh, and I, I went to the site and they bombed, uh, STEM research Institute and the physics building across of it. Uh, and the Islamic studies department were also damaged, but then the, the research Institute, uh, was fully destroyed as you can probably see on my Instagram photo, if you go to my Instagram. Um, and. So the reason that they bombed it was because in that research institute and in that university, they were teaching and developing the STEM fields in a way that contributed to Iran's sovereign defense. Because Iran's missile program, the advanced missile program that it has, that has great GPSs and it can evade all these very expensive American and Israeli interceptors, that is being developed indigenously fully in iran so they first assassinated the professor uh professor of electrical engineering at iran university of science and technology alongside his two children and then they bombed the very research institute that helped support iran's missile program and iran's sovereign defense So you go from so in a sense, in the 19th century, what they're doing is that they are erasing or marginalizing pre-colonial knowledge in order to rule more effectively. But now that they don't care that much about, you know, say, the Sharia, they're more worried about a strong state that, you know, defends itself and that is independent from the imperialist led system. Then what they do is that they come so they don't even use, you know, the kind of old school violence or the missionaries. They just use straight up bombs now. to destroy your university, so you're not able to develop that sovereign knowledge to defend yourself. And this is what happened with the Iran University of Science and Technology.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, I just want to make a brief note. You mentioned the limits of sovereignty and development under the Pahlavi dynasty. And I saw this on Twitter the other day, and I'm sorry, I don't remember who posted it. We probably follow some of the same people, Adnan, so you might know. But somebody posted a story that I hadn't seen before, where in Karaj, there was an attempt during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, the son, to build a steel factory in Karaj. And apparently they tried a couple of times to get funding from the World Bank, and they were denied. And the factory ended up being built, but only because the Soviet Union stepped in and offered to fund the project. And that's kind of a weird alignment for that period of time. The Cold War was 100%. I mean, maybe not as much by that time, but the tensions very much put Iran and the Soviet Union at odds. And yet it was still the Soviet Union that was willing to see an Iran that was able to produce its own steel. And the supposed sponsors of this puppet government actually required a very short leash for their patronage. And they didn't see Iran being able to make its own stuff, even as a vassal state, to be acceptable or, I guess, what a vassal state is supposed to do. You're just supposed to sit there and buy our stuff while we export your raw materials.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, that's an interesting point about the history of development that even the vassal state. And that, of course, is very similar to the story of Iran's nuclear energy and civilian nuclear program is that it was under so much restriction, even though this was a period when The Shah of Iran was basically a pillar of US imperial policy in West Asia, you know, like, maybe even the more important pillar than even Israel at that time in the 1960s and early 70s. It's only after 1967 that the US started itself investing directly very much in supporting Israel. And certainly, of course, after the Islamic Revolution, everything changed and they had to depend solely on Israel. So, you know, Iran was supposed to be this great ally. And what are the benefits of being an ally of U.S. empire if they don't allow you to develop your own economy, continue to make you totally dependent on their science, technology, knowledge for development? that imperialism is the real materialism works but this point about the steel industry i think is also interesting because there's been recently um news coming out about um israel and the u.s targeting steel production and steel factories i believe in huzistan um in uh ahvaz uh the uh huzistan steel company and Mubarak Steel Company in Isfahan province. And I saw something that, you know, was quoting some boast by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they had destroyed 70 of Iran's steel production and it shows that the goal uh whether it's true or not and of course how do they know because you know there's a lot of production that's been moved you know to secret locations or underground Etc so you know one doesn't want to believe anything that the one of the world's great liars in history you know is saying but what it does is that know they are trying to de-industrialize iran this isn't just about so-called regime change you know it is really uh the civilian infrastructure bombing the universities bombing uh industry and so on is to really try and set iran back And so I'm wondering if you have any sense of that, Navid, and also how people's consciousness, because you've done a lot of interviews with people and commented also on the phenomenon of many people returning to Iran in order to stand in solidarity with their people, with their country, with how people's kind of impression of what the West is, know is or the us uh is um you know might be changing when they see the level of destruction and targeting not regime people so-called regime people alone but actually the whole society that's right

Navid Zarrinnal: So I would say that even on the first day of the bombing, or, you know, right before the war, some Iranians had this perception that US, especially US, less so Israel, but because, you know, US is a superpower and

Kumars Salehi: um because of that it kind of has a special status in the consciousness also they just think americans are super cool and it's completely unjustified and there's no way to talk them out of it but it's just a you know a fact that uh americans will always have a special place in the hearts of iranians yeah hopefully hopefully not forever but

Navid Zarrinnal: No, I mean, at least they did before the war. But I would say now things are a bit different. And again, most of the things I say are anecdotal because, you know, I don't have clear data. But the question is whether the data is even reliable because the polling that you see coming from a lot of these Western-based NGOs about Iran are totally bogus. So I think the anecdotal thing might actually be more useful right now. But yeah, I would say that they had that perception and they were saying that, oh, our missiles are not that accurate because we made it ourselves and we're not like the Americans that are the leader in technology and in progress and so on. But the American missiles or fighter jets, when they come, they hit the exact point. But then after a few days, they were like, holy crap, we were wrong. And they're just hitting, I mean, even if they're targeting a military or a security site or something, say, an infrastructure like a steel factory, what happens is that in the process, things that are around that also get destroyed and civilians get killed or cultural sites are impacted. I'll give you one really interesting example from yesterday. So I was just walking near a friend's home. on a relatively crowded street in Tehran. And then they had struck an office building for whatever reason, for whatever strategic value they thought it had. And there was right next to it a building that was a medical center and a pharmacy. And that was also badly damaged. I think they had used either a smaller missile or a smaller bomb. So the medical center was still standing, but it was so damaged that it was not operating anymore. So that's one example of how, you know, even if there's, you know, targeting the military sites and the strategic sites or the factories, you know, things around that get damaged and civilians also get killed. So I would say that definitely the perception of the Americans has changed. And people, Iranians have also realized that they're not interested in making a deal or in peace and that they really only understand the language of force because, you

Kumars Salehi: Someone should tell Javad Zarif that, but we don't have to get into it.

Adnan Husain: I was hoping we would at some point get into it, but let's let Naveed tell us what he's doing and let's come back to that Zarif question.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, I mean, I haven't read the Zarif piece yet, partly because I think it's a subscription to Foreign Affairs or whatever, you know, magazine he wrote for, one of these, you know, Western legacy medias. But I heard bad things about it, so I'm trying to avoid it. And I like Zarif, you know, he's a nice diplomat, but I think he's just a little bit naive about, you know, the West and about American imperialism. But just to wrap up so we can have your analysis too, but basically the perceptions of the Iranians have changed and they're realizing that the way the Americans and the Israelis are conducting their operation is about degrading Iran's industrial base at non-set and even to turn Iran into a failed state. And one last thing I say is the other thing is that in the Western media, I mean, they might say that, oh, if you're a cousin, the starving, you know, we might care about you, you know, or if you're a civilian, we might care about you. But I think we have to step back and also question the very narrative that it's OK to even bomb the military or the security or the strategic side. I mean, who gave the U.S. and Israel the right to preemptively attack? You know, all these military people in Iran, you know, the Revolutionary Guard, the officials, you know, just because they're affiliated with the state, it doesn't mean that it's justified to kill them in this kind of illegal and unprovoked way. So I think the entire war is unjustified and unprovoked. And that needs to be emphasized, even though the killing of the civilians is extra repugnant.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, I mean, thank you so much for that. Yeah, go ahead, Adnan.

Adnan Husain: Oh, no, just like maybe to come to that point, you know, that we, that Kumars, you introduced, you know, because I'm kind of interested in, you know, how political culture is might be developing in Iran under these circumstances of the war. And you've been mentioning, you know, the change in perception of the United States and the West. And that has led to this very determined, defiant attitude expressed by at least a very substantial segment of Iran's population that has been coming out nightly for rallies and chants and just expressing and showing their solidarity with one another and with their government. That is, I think, one of the greatest resources that Iran has for its defense is this sense of public will, connection, commitment that makes any attempt to try and which is why they've gone to just destroying a lot of infrastructure and killing a lot of civilians to try and degrade the capabilities and capacities of the society because any other political goals have clearly been a failure with the reaction of Iran's people. But yet we have this kind of, you know, very important ex-official foreign minister, current, you know, professor of politics at Iran, writing an article advising that Iran should make a deal now or soon, and of course, on good and beneficial terms, but that it shouldn't try and perpetuate the war for formalist kinds of gains on the ground, but actually take a negotiated solution. This will be better, he says, for Iran. But he publishes this not in itilaat, in an opinion piece there, or on some program. You know, he publishes it in English, in foreign affairs, uh journal which is an organ of the council on foreign relations this is like the utter center of the u.s imperial foreign policy establishment what is the purpose of such a thing and Also, since you're there in Iran, what is the reaction that people have had to this kind of overture? I mean, one could argue that perhaps this is a ploy and a way to sort of establish through indirect means kind of suggestion that, you know, there could be some negotiation and then actually end the war and that this is an attempt to confirm posted about it, at least an initial reaction.

Kumars Salehi: Adnan, buddy, you're cutting out a little bit. Could you just rewind like a sentence or two?

Adnan Husain: Yeah, just that, you know, it's different ways of interpreting what the significance of this is, and if it is even a strategy of Iran. I mean, I'm not convinced by that. But I know that Ali Alizadeh on Jeddah, you know, characterized at least in his initial reaction to this publication, that this might open up false impression for the imperialists that there are fissures or differences and that there are, you know, kind of people within the Iranian kind of government or political establishment who would be open and that this will encourage a new attempted wave of assassination of leaders and attempt to do that. Because, you know, Trump has been talking about that he's supposedly, I mean, is it total fantasy or is this exactly the kind of thing that he has been mentioning when he says that, you know, he's in dialogue or discussion with elements in the government that are worth discussing? Because they will actually accept a deal. Well, and then you have Zarif publishing this. I mean, it seems like a really concerning move. So I'm wondering what you think about it and what people are talking about there about this.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, I mean, honestly, thus far, I've only received my friends' reactions, and most of them are not too happy with what is written. I haven't read it myself, so I can't really judge for myself yet. But yeah, most people that I know personally are not too happy with it. Um, other than that, I mean, the, the, the IRIB, uh, channel six, which is the news channel, they haven't really talked about it and their position is that, so the kind of the, uh, announcements or the declarations that they put out is that Iran has not negotiated with the Trump administration in any way, uh, after the war and what Trump, Trump is claiming is false and he might be doing it to, uh, impact the markets that are suffering major instability because of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz or the effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz to hostile ships and cargoes. Um, but regarding the second part of your question of whether, you know, this has some sort of policy impact, uh, what Zarif has written, it's a good and difficult question because I, I don't even sometimes know who is really making the decisions here because I mean, the, the kind of The easy answer is that it's the Supreme Leader, so formerly Sayyid Ali Khamenei and now his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, and they make the decision or they make a major recommendation and then the Revolutionary Guard kind of carries out the policy in accordance with that recommendation. Um, but then you also have, you know, the president and the foreign ministry, and they also have a lot of power in foreign policy, even if the ultimate recommendation or decision comes from the Supreme leader. Um, so it could be that they kind of have a logic of their own and they do certain things that the Supreme leader doesn't approve of. So there are these kinds of tensions within the system, as opposed to say the U S where it's a little bit simpler. I mean, say the U S president has advisors and then. those advisors say, you know, advise the president, the president, you know, makes a decision. It's kind of clear that he he is the commander in chief. I don't know how Canada works with the prime minister, whose name I'm forgetting. And also, he was so cringe because he condemned Iran's unprovoked attack on the UAE. And I'm like, buddy, what are you talking about? Just yesterday, you gave some anti-colonialist speech that the Western countries have not abided by their own international rules.

Kumars Salehi: Our third world is the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, so I don't know how Canada works, but in the U.S., it's kind of clear. You've got that commander in chief who's the president, but Iran is a little bit more complex. And also, Iran's system is a more kind of personal system. Relationships matter. A lot of things are oral. A lot of things happen based on these kind of political networks that are in the system. So you don't have everything documented. It's not like the U.S. where you have these kind of clear documentations about everything, where you kind of follow hard decisions were made. But no, even the US, I'm kind of overstating it because you have all these things that are classified and secret and you have the Epstein regime. So, you know, it's not really that kind of, you know, trackable and documented either. But yes, I mean, I would say that the reformist position or the so-called what the Western media calls a moderate position is out there that they just want to negotiate and kind of, you know, do a semi surrender with the negotiations and they don't want to fight. But at the moment, it seems that the policy that they're executing is the so-called hardline policy, which is the anti-imperialist policy that we will fight because there's no trust in you for negotiations, and we will fight until Iran comes out in a stronger position than before.

Kumars Salehi: So just to follow up, and also for folks that also haven't read or heard about the contents of that foreign affairs article by the former foreign minister under President Hassan Rouhani, Jawad Zarif, the author of that piece. The main points that I've seen repeated also in US media besides that initial outlet are sort of a mutual non-aggression pact of a permanent nature. reopening the Strait of Hormuz to, you know, any and all takers and genociders. And also, you know, just general kind of, you know, shipping all of the uranium out of the country and some of the other, you could call them concessions. And it does sort of seem to add up to surrender, especially given Iran's strategic advantage at this point. but Trump does keep talking about in his most recent address, which is sort of his only real substantial, I think, address to the American people. By substantial, in America, we mean more than three minutes long these days. But it was about 20 minutes, and he keeps talking about working with a new and more reasonable regime. This is kind of their like joke that they're this is like a bit for them where they're just like, yeah, well, technically it's regime change because there's new guys in the regime. It changed. And you're just like, shut up, you fucking Nazi beef heads. But also the possibility remains that Trump isn't completely bullshitting, like maybe they are talking to people who aren't speaking on behalf of the regime right now but could be I hate using this example because I don't know what's actually going on in Venezuela but like somebody who could be like a Delcy Rodriguez figure truly no disrespect to her like I don't want to litigate that right now I just mean like a top insider maybe that doesn't describe Zarif anymore really, but somebody that they can embrace under this banner of more reasonable. It certainly sounds ludicrous now when the IRGC by all accounts is sort of making the big decisions and calling the big shots to call them more reasonable or moderate from the US perspective. But who do you think he could be talking about? Could it be somebody like Zarif? Would he dare like coordinates in some sort of secrecy? And would he even be able to or would anybody in a position to do so be able to without attracting the attention of others in the Iranian security establishment?

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, I mean, I doubt it. Yeah, I doubt, I mean, Zarif is not even in the state, right, in the government right now. No, so I doubt it. I think it has to be coordinated at some level with the different elements. So for now, I think it's just kind of a think piece, but it does reflect a major sentiment within the Iranian state establishment.

Kumars Salehi: That's important. Let me also call attention to some other aspects of this that I would be curious to get your thoughts on. I have like a whole, a tranche of Trump quotes also from that address. I don't know how much of it has been reported on or what the analysis is in Iran. I would be interested to hear, but he added just a couple of points. He said that they killed 45,000 of their own people, referring to the regime which, you know, the regime which kind of indicates to me that the war is going so badly that they decided they had to add another 15,000 to this fake death count. But it just seems like, given we've talked about this before, they sort of helped create the pretext for this by pushing this number of over 30,000 people killed, and the government was behind it all, and there was no terrorism, the terrorists of the regime, or whatever. a lot of it was really comical, but this was like blood libel on like a, like a sliding scale because every time they inflate the numbers, it makes it sort of relatively more acceptable if thousands and thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of Iranians end up dying in, in whatever unfolds. Um, and he, there was a lot of focus on the timeline, like focusing on the timeline at this point, um, feels pointless to me but he did say that the war would be ending a quote very shortly within two to three weeks um during which famously as hegseth also repeated we're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong and he starts listing the durations this is the funny part yeah go ahead

Navid Zarrinnal: He meant the Achaemenid, Achaemenid, the Achaemenid Empire.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, the Hacha Vanishia. Which is not, it's terrible, yeah. No, people posted this map. It would expand Iran by like a factor of three or four, I think. They controlled a lot of territory back then. But he starts listing the durations of all these other U.S. wars. This is another like indication of how poorly it's going and how unable they are to convince anyone in America. I mean, I guess they don't have to convince anyone in America to let him keep doing it. Americans seem just fine with this level of bloodshed, but he basically is like, oh yeah, it took us, we were in Korea for this long and whatever. And in historical perspective, basically to paraphrase Dave Chappelle, how long is 32 days really? And like, He even implied that they might withdraw without opening up the Strait, which is just bizarre. He said the Strait will, quote, naturally open up because Iran has to sell its oil. And as you already noted, Naveed, the Strait is actually perfectly open for anybody who wants to buy Iranian oil or even just be nice. Right. So how much of this is even making news in Iran at this point? Do people care what Trump says? Does it seem at all realistic to you that this could come to an end within the timeframe he indicated? And what are people thinking about that in Iran?

Navid Zarrinnal: Honestly, I'm not going to take anything Trump says and does as a way to analyze or predict the future because it's just so erratic and ridiculous. So I think I would look more to the circumstantial evidence and other things that are happening or the circumstantial evidence around uh trump's you know declarations and tweets and whatever um because i mean yeah i mean it's just unprecedented i would say in my lifetime to have a leader like this at such a high level and i mean back then i mean back in say 2020 no wait sorry 2016 is that that's when he became president so in 2016 I remember I made fun of the liberals for being like, oh, this guy is so dangerous and blah, blah. And I was just saying he's like the rest of them. But now I stand corrected that honestly, it's better to have someone like Obama or Biden in office than someone like Trump, because I mean, if I was an American who cared about, say, my country's longevity and interests as, say, a superpower, then I think it's better to have someone like Obama in power than someone like Trump. But anyway, sorry, I said this point so many times on your podcast.

Kumars Salehi: No, you're just doing a bit at this point. Like, I love Obama. Like, ironically.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, half ironically, but I do miss him at some level.

Kumars Salehi: Also, you know, I voted for Kamala Hitler. We've all made this calculation.

Navid Zarrinnal: See, Adnan has it easy because he can only vote in the Canadian elections.

Adnan Husain: Actually, I can vote in the U.S. I am a U.S. citizen. Oh, crap. Yeah, I get the benefit of participating in a totally useless and meaningless choice between these two parties.

Kumars Salehi: But yeah, yeah. You got to the core of what I meant when I asked this question, certainly that people so you would say that people also in Iran are not paying close attention to. Not really.

Navid Zarrinnal: They kind of joke about it and the news kind of like puts it on as kind of a joke, but they don't take it seriously. I would say it doesn't have a major impact on the policies here.

Adnan Husain: I think the Lego videos and anime production that have been so thrilling to the world as part of Iran's counterinsurgency or insurgency in the Sy War have really made that point that people may hear about it, but they kind of lampoon it. and pillory and mock, you know, with a good interesting political point. So those have been just amazing, you know, like the one that talks about the foundations of U.S. empire and all of the victims, both from the settler colonial experience in North America to global south victims of U.S. imperialist war, you know, in like less than two minutes, like the whole thing is put together in this kind of vivid, humorous, engaging, but politically useful way. And so I think that's one thing that I think is interesting and, you know, worth thinking about a little bit more is how Iran has advanced very much in its diplomatic information war messaging, you know, kind of going around mainstream media because it knows the US mainstream media is not going to you know report on conditions in iran or articulate iran's message fairly or accurately no matter what the statements of its officials might be and so on they will take small clips and twist it and all of that and so this is a way of going directly to global public opinion to get a kind of different counter view. But I found it interesting that President Massoud Pazeshkian actually just a few days ago made a direct appeal to American public. And that was a kind of interesting letter You know, I'm wondering how that is. I don't know if you've had a chance to read it, but he makes some interesting arguments there that seem to suggest that he doesn't understand something about the internal political situation in the United States. And I found a few kind of key arguments to make political points that might be effective to an American audience. Yeah.

Navid Zarrinnal: Yes, I mean, with that Pesachian letter, I mean, I think he's playing the Tucker Carlson game that, you know, it's really Israel, not America. And you should not be fighting this war on behalf of Israel, even though it is also really an American war. And Israel, in a way, is an American base in the West Asian region. But I think both Tucker and Pesachian have a good point prescriptively. So, I mean, I would say descriptively since, you know, 1967, as Adnan mentioned, There has been a kind of a divergence of elite interests between Israel and the U.S. and in terms of the convergence of the political policies. But it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. And I think prescriptively, the U.S. should move away from Israel because, you know, in the long term, it would also put American interests in jeopardy. So if you're someone like Tucker Carlson, who's interested in your country is staying a superpower, then it doesn't really make sense to be supporting Israel no more in the way that they're supporting Israel. So prescriptively, I think, you know, US should move away from Israel. And I think Pesach Gyan understands this and kind of he was playing that PR game when he wrote that letter. And Adnan, you're right that I think the Iranians have gotten better at PR over the years. I mean, one point that I often think about is that they don't really need to be good at PR because I give you one kind of anecdotal example. So I went to the Melita Museum. I think it's called Melita in Lebanon. It's a Hezbollah museum where they kind of have, you know, some of the Israeli tanks that were captured when Hezbollah expelled the Israeli forces from South Lebanon. And in there, there's this photo of all these Israeli soldiers that are running away, and a couple of them were black. And I was telling a friend there jokingly that if they were good at PR, they would not put a black soldier there to not say that the Israeli army is diverse. But then she told me that it doesn't matter because this is not for the globe. This is for the Lebanese. And there's no reason for them to be attuned to the political sensitivities of the Canadians or the Americans or the EDI stuff that the Americans or the Canadians are interested in for PR. Sorry, not EDI, it's DEI, diversity. Since DEI is kind of going out of fashion in academia, I forgot the acronym for it. but diversity, equity, inclusion. So there's no reason for Hezbollah to care about that or kind of do that in their PR. And the same way, my position is that should the Iranians even care about the American sensibilities? And I think at some level they should, because Iran is a big country, you know, it's kind of engaged with the world now. So at some level they should, but I don't think, you know, they should put their entire messaging in a way that would be appealable, say, to the Americans. But in certain small areas, especially in the diplomatic arena, I think they should. And I think Pesachkian, the foreign minister, Arakci, et cetera, they're doing that right now. And they've gotten better at it, including with the Lego movies that they're releasing. But they also have to be careful not to alienate their own supporters here who might not really be interested or the whole American political sensitivities might not be comprehensible to them. So I think they should play the double game in kind of fighting the PR war. And I think they've been doing it more effectively this time around.

Kumars Salehi: Here's what I would say, and I love that you put this in terms of descriptive and prescriptively correct, because I have heard the argument from people that I respect that we should strategically play into the possibly sometimes anti-Semitic, I would say kind of very, very much so on the right, anti-Semitically inflected, like, Zog adjacent conspiracies about how Israel is actually in control of the US government. And I think that this converges also somewhat with the narrative of like material interests also not aligning. I think that this is true to an extent, but we have to acknowledge that like Israel exists and has been supported by the US. And I've heard others make this point that we have to acknowledge that Israel has a function as a sort of a militarized attack dog, creating dissent, scaring the shit out of everybody, putting a gun to everyone's head in West Asia as a sort of outpost of colonialism of Western white capital. And it's precisely through the exercise of sort of extreme, unreconstructed violence through Israel that the U.S. has maintained such a strong foothold in that region over the years. And we see now how globally significant U.S. control over West Asia is in terms of our relative position here as the global hegemon and in many ways our absolute position. And if you're talking about like the petrodollar, for example, and all of this is now being threatened and seemingly uh these trends towards us decline are being exacerbated but it's you know this is dialectics right like it's not like if they had stayed you know in a more restrained posture um the contradiction of China rising, multipolarity, the US losing its imperial reach would have just gone away. I don't think that this is the sort of thing where we can say there is no US interest in making sure that there is no sovereign Iran. I think that there very much is a US interest in preventing a sovereign Iran. what people like tucker are probably comfortable with is the idea of uh this you know this paleo con like we're just another white country uh we have no obligation to take in immigrants but also we have no obligation to control everything um even question the extent to which tucker himself would be comfortable with the extent of global american decline i think it's very likely that he wouldn't um you know i remember him clapping after the venezuela operation in the white house along with trump um i saw that yeah and so i would i would say that it's entirely possible that this descriptive truth is still necessary to assert that like we're going to end up barking up the wrong tree or being very, you know, painfully disappointed that we will eventually, I think, seem naive for thinking that we could use anti-Semitism or sort of American conservative nationalism against empire. I think the people that are so ideologically you know, paleo con or nationalist or isolationist, whatever you have, you know, whatever you want to put it, are so few ultimately. Just like so many people on the left are probably not as anti-imperialist as they think they are once you start talking about the quality of life that we've been enjoying for the last, you know, eight or nine decades, you know, going away. So I wonder what you think about that, just as a, this isn't necessarily like a, you know, ear to the ground, what are Iranians thinking question, although I wonder if there's a discourse about this, but I do think that at the end of the day, like there's not this easy dichotomy ever between being right and winning, like that you can't win without being at least a little bit right and being super wrong in this case, just feels like just another manifestation, maybe even of that Iranian, well, going back to the possession letter, that Iranian naivete about, you know, how you can actually appeal to Americans.

Navid Zarrinnal: Well, I say one thing quickly, and that is especially because the Leader Account audience, you know, they're interested in kind of the inner left issues of the U.S. If the U.S. loses its status as a superpower, I mean, you mentioned that, you know, the quality of life that the Americans have been joined for the past seven decades might go away. But in some ways, I could also even see the reverse of that, because, you know, if it loses status as a superpower and it starts investing in its own people as opposed to these foreign wars, maybe people will have, you know, a better education, better health care. I mean, they might lose certain things, you know, such as, you know, the power of their passport might decline a little bit or that, you know, there might not be these extravagant, you know, just like amazing skyscrapers in every city, but you know, they might have better healthcare and education. I think the vast majority of people prefer to have better healthcare than seeing a skyscraper or a, you know, a fancy mall in a big city.

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, that actually leads into, I want to be respectful of your time. So please, please bluntly let us know if you have to go. I got another 20 minutes. Okay, very good.

Navid Zarrinnal: 15, 20 minutes.

Kumars Salehi: Since you brought up skyscrapers and fancy malls, I do want to talk about the regional. We often talk about the regional relationships with Hezbollah, with Ansar Allah, with the Axis of Resistance. But I want to focus a little bit also on the regional relationship with the U.S. vassal states, the GCC countries that have been getting pounded. Obviously, as time has gone on, people have seen various data pertaining to this. The US bases obviously have been largely destroyed and strikes on the Arab countries in the Gulf have decreased and strikes on Israel have increased and increased in in ferocity and destructive power. But it was very important. And this is a phrase that came out of the early messaging from the Islamic Republic officials after the war began. that they want to kill the idea of Dubai. And for me, that is such a powerful statement. It was an early indication that something very different is happening than what we're used to because I realized this is actually so universal. Like as somebody who is like a West Asian background and grew up here, there is a Dubai in my head. I even say Dubai, right? Dubai, or that's probably what we say, you know, we see it the Persian way. So who says that's right either. But like, there is a Dubai in my head. Kill the Dubai in your head was what I heard when I heard this messaging from Iranian officials and it feels, so important that these countries are now being truly forced to choose between a regional a security framework that includes Iran and excludes US and Israeli interests, or this permanent antagonism dividing the region. I've heard mixed things really from people who know better than me about those countries, about whether this will ultimately push some of the uh countries in the gcc or in the region um away from collaborating with the us and israel because they've seen that actually all the us needs them for is protecting israel and and making money um or will they kind of say well well this like this seems to be the more mainstream certainly Western narrative, that the assumption is that, well, how would the Gulf Arab countries ever forgive Iran for attacking the bases there and also damaging, obviously, things that are part of the country as well? It's not like literally only bases have been hit. but i do think that that's a an open question that i hesitate to be dogmatic about um will the extreme effective and necessary retaliation against the gulf arab states by iran ultimately work in favor of regional unity or against it

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah. So I'll say something quickly because Adnan has been quiet for some time and then I'll turn it to him. But basically, exactly what you said, I'm not dogmatic about it either. And I think the tankies are a little bit too optimistic right now that somehow after the war, the GCC will just kick out all the American bases and we'll kind of turn towards multipolarity and all that. But my position is that it's difficult to predict, but I would say that if it happens, it would be a gradual process. So it's not something that would happen overnight, but rather, I mean, we saw before the war that the Saudis and the Pakistanis made a defense pact because I think the Saudis realized that they cannot put all their eggs in the American or the NATO basket. But I think it is something that will happen over time, but not immediately after the war. unless there are popular revolutions in places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia. I would say because they're not hungry, it's pretty unlikely that they would have a popular revolution.

Adnan Husain: well that was a very um excellent economical kind of summing up of i think an important point i mean i'm hopeful that it might be more uh kind of uh region changing you know inshallah if um the war continues and they are forced to choose uh you know more seriously but until that happens yes i think they will be clinging to other options um As you said, Bahrain, Saudi are the places where there's more potential in some ways because there is a large Shia population in Bahrain that I recall seeing some videos that the initial strikes on the US radar installations at the base there for the Fifth Fleet being very celebratory. We've seen that there have been demonstrations, So, you know, there are potentially big changes, but I actually had been wanting to ask you about Pakistan and you referenced this mutual defense pact between Saudi and Pakistan that you know, is interesting. And you put out a very fascinating video about Pakistan's relationship to Iran, the long historical and cultural Persianate kind of influences, you could say, for a millennia. the fact that they have a long border Pakistan has been very helpful about Iran's sovereignty being needed to be respected but yet at the same time because it is not a normal sovereign state either its military class is totally in the thrall of like having a good positive relationship with the United States and they've been also reinforcing certain aspects of Saudi's potential resistance against some kind of integration into a regional framework with Iran by providing some possible nuclear umbrella and so forth is that it's in this real double position and we often talk about the West Asia side but we don't think about what's happening to the east of Iran and how much that might make a difference. I'm wondering if you have any further thoughts and analysis since your interesting video, or at least some of the key points from that, about how to think about Iran's relationship to Pakistan, Afghanistan, India in this broader context. You know, is that a kind of key that we might be missing? I was on a panel recently in Philadelphia on the situation in Iran, and one of the panelists was a South Asian anthropologist. So we had a chance to think about it. But when I was, I thought, oh, it would be really great if Naveed could be on it because he knows Pakistan and he's been talking a little bit about it. So what do you, you know, what do you think about that relationship and the direction things might take as a result?

Navid Zarrinnal: Yeah, I mean, although one qualification and that is I know Pakistan more through my heart than through my intellect. So I'm not, you know, an expert per se. But I mean, yeah, the way I see it is that it's similar with, you know, say I mentioned the possibility of a popular revolution in Bahrain. Um, and you also mentioned the Shia element. I think that helps in because, you know, Iran does kind of have the affinity and the alliances with the Shias of the West Asian region. But in Pakistan, I mean, about, I think 20 or 25% of the population is Shia, but that's not the only element, even the Sunnis. I mean, I was seeing some, you know, poll and, uh, the Pakistan was probably the single, nation that showed the most support to Iran during the current war. So even the Sunnis in Pakistan, I mean, I recently appeared also on Amanullah Taref's Eon podcast, the English version, because he also has an Urdu version. And I think some of the feedback was a bit negative because there is still that kind of, you know, Iran is a Shia country that we might not trust. And you kind of maybe have that in some Sunni countries. But overall, I would say, you know, the Sunnis and the Shias of Pakistan support Iran. But I think that the political and the military elites, they're kind of in a conundrum, because on the one hand, they kind of want to get closer to Iran, but then they're scared of the U.S. reaction, whether it's in terms of sanction or cutting off the military cooperation and whatever else that they might be benefiting from, or some of the economic cooperation perhaps. I think they are in a conundrum, the Pakistanis, but I think if the popular sentiment is more respected through figures like Imran Khan, who was sidelined, then you would have more support. The more support you have, even in Afghanistan too, I think Iran and Taliban have a decent relationship right now. It's not the best relationship, but it's a decent relationship, and that could also develop And India, they've gone in the Israeli direction, unfortunately. So there's not much hope there as of the immediate future. But I think with Pakistan and Afghanistan, there's a lot of possibility for regional cooperation that would weaken American and Israeli power in the West and South Asian region. But unfortunately, it's not something that will happen overnight. But I could get into my kind of tanky persona and say that will happen tomorrow, the liberation. So maybe that will be... Well, inshallah.

Adnan Husain: But, you know, we do also have to pay... ...validities on the ground. But, I mean, I think just on the Modi on India, you know, it's kind of a funny thing because you're right, preceding the start of the war, during the build-up, you know, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, went and, you know, humiliated himself by, you know, being, you know, really supportive of Israel and, you know, a massive nation like India to take up this kind of position. It was, you know, somewhat demeaning, I would say, to the dignity of India, and people may have felt that. But, you know, once the war started and the Strait of Hormuz was closed to certain, you know, hostile countries, suddenly he started tweeting an awful lot in Farsi. He learned Farsi overnight, you know, and was trying to communicate a different perspective, you know, because so much of their energy comes directly from the Gulf. So, You know, I think we will, changes won't be completely final and dramatic in the short term, but I think there are some longer term trends. You're right, Navid, to say we can see that there could be real South Asia because of the Ramadan war and Iran's position. So fascinating stuff. We will watch and see.

Kumars Salehi: We can watch and see and make nuanced observations, or we can just keep talking about the China-brokered Iran-Saudi, whatever that was. I think that was doing a lot of work for a while in my optimism that we were all going to come together a little bit more as a region or West Asia. kind of de-escalating a little bit from the U.S. imposed divisions. But yeah, it remains to be seen.

Adnan Husain: Kumars, it's obvious that that was considered a threat in the way that it gave you optimism and me and people in the region that, oh, there might be some regional policy here. That's clearly also what alarmed people. united states and israel is so this war is in some ways of course it's about you know continuation of like the you know greater hegemony or uh you know the possible hegemony of a greater it's precisely because you know they have to thwart other possible alliances and arrangements that might bring peace and prosperity to the region outside of the direct u.s system that that's why we had all this build up in war in some ways you could say it's a response so we one hopes that if iran is successful in its resistance that there might be opening up a more permanent possibility for those kinds of cooperation and regional arrangements to go forward

Kumars Salehi: Yeah, no, that's a very encouraging thought. Navid, why don't you share any final thoughts of your own and we'll let you go. Oh, you're muted still.

Navid Zarrinnal: So, I mean, my final thought is just kind of continuing the last thing that Adnan said, that if Iran, I mean, Iran, I think is winning at the moment, but I mean, we don't know what will happen in the future. But say, you know, the war ends and Iran comes out victorious, then I think the regional and the neighboring countries will also gain some confidence to actually create a new world and also really make the shift towards multipolarity and also the weakening of Zionism and Israeli apartheid in the region. So that's the hope. And even the Iranians, the last thing I say is that even the Iranians, because after 47 years of resistance, they were upset that all I'm left with is inflation and a crappy car manufacturing business because the cars are Iranian made here and they're not great. And so this was their perception. This is all I'm left with. But now that Iran is winning this war, or at least it appears that it's winning at the moment, they have more confidence now. And they see that the price they've paid for the resistance has paid off in a way. The U Chicago professor, I think his name is Robert Pape, if I'm not mistaken, he even had an analysis today and he's a very kind of pro-empire, pro-America, not even America first, he's kind of the traditional liberal pro-America guy. And he was saying that, you know, now there are four centers of power in the world. So it used to be Russia, China, and the U.S. But now with what has happened with this war, Iran has become this fourth center of power. So this has given confidence to the Iranians, if it's true. And I hope that it would also give confidence to the region as a whole in combating imperialism and moving us towards a more multipolar world order.

Kumars Salehi: Amen. Inshallah. Honestly, I want to thank you so much. And I look forward to our next conversation. And this is a great thing we have going here. And I want to make sure everybody also knows where to find you both actually, especially those listening, I would recommend that they run not walk to YouTube to subscribe for the Colony Archive and the Adnan Hussein show. Follow the amazing work that Navid is doing reporting in Iran and Adnan hosts some of the most wonderful and illuminating and deep conversations.

Navid Zarrinnal: But the main work right now is on my personal Instagram. But the tag is yeah. So because that's where I don't sell my post, the tag is the Colony Archive, but it's where I'm posting most of the stuff on Instagram now because TikTok is Zionist run now. So I have fled to Instagram, even though it's Zuck around Zuckerberg, at least Mark Zuckerberg has that kind of nice Obama, you know, personality to him. So. So, yeah, Instagram is where you can see some of the updates about the war.

Kumars Salehi: OK, of course, the Adnan Hassan show and yours. Mm hmm. That's right. And let me just let me just finish saying about Adnan's show. It is absolutely one of the places where you get the most, I think, illuminating Marxist Leninist tanki, but also very much Muslim. And as you would put it politically, she perspectives that I think is exactly the configuration that I don't know if it all works together. I'm still trying to work that out for myself. But this Very much feels like where I want to be. I want to thank you guys here for being with me. And we'll catch you next time.

Adnan Husain: Thank you, Kumars, for hosting and letting me join you in discussing with Naveed. And it's great to see Naveed again. We wish you safety and continued. We will continue following your work. And, you know, may Allah protect you and the Iranian people, inshallah.

Navid Zarrinnal: Thank you.

Adnan Husain: Very good. See you later, haters.