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I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Mohammed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California.
He's an Iranian expat and a real expert on Iranian politics, as well as their nuclear program.
He has years of great articles covering all this stuff for quite a few different places, and especially at antiwar.com.
And I hope you're writing something about what's going on now.
But I want to talk to you without having read what you have to say about current events yet, because I know it's going to be good.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Mohammed?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me on your program again, Scott.
Very happy to have you on here.
All right.
So a thing is going on in Iran.
Is the CIA behind it or not?
What do you think?
No, I think the roots of the problem are within Iran.
Of course, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies try to exploit it.
But the root cause of the problem is within Iran.
We had eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during which he and his administration plundered the National Treasury, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of oil income at the height of oil price of $150 per barrel.
And then on top of that, we have had several elections over the past four or five years, in each of which the hardliners have lost very badly.
Therefore, the demonstrations in Iran actually did not start with people protesting what's going on, which is actually very bad.
The economy is in bad shape.
People thought that with nuclear agreement, there would be an opening, and the economic situation would improve because foreign investment would flow to Iran.
But that hasn't happened.
But what happened at the very beginning was that the hardliners organized some superficial protests in one of the large cities against the Rouhani administration.
The plan was to spread these controlled demonstrations to other cities, and therefore declare that Rouhani is not competent enough, and impeach him in Iranian Parliament Majlis and remove him from office.
But that backfired because as soon as those controlled demonstrations began, other people, ordinary people who have justified grievances and who are worried about their economic plight, the future of their children, and so on, some of them joined these demonstrations.
And therefore, the control of these initial demonstrations that was in the hands of the hardliners got out of hand and spread to some other cities.
But at the same time, we have to remember that these demonstrations, first of all, have happened in small towns and cities, and they haven't spread to any of the major Iranian cities.
Simply because the middle class and the intellectuals, and even teachers that have had strikes, workers that have had strikes against low wages, and so on, did not join these demonstrations simply because they think that under the current condition in the Middle East and with the Trump administration in power, they would exploit this situation and may create a situation like, for example, what happened in Libya when they talk about humanitarian intervention, went in, destroyed the country, and left it for terrorists and all other sorts of bad people.
So to summarize, the initial demonstration was actually controlled by the hardliners, but then other people joined in, but not large numbers.
They greatly exaggerated in Iran.
I'm not saying that the situation is good.
No, I'm saying the economic situation is very bleak, and people do have legitimate complaints.
There is high unemployment, and the investment that was supposed to flow to Iran hasn't happened.
And of course, one reason for it is that the Trump administration has been pressuring European companies and European government not to allow investment in Iran.
But it is not what they make it to be here.
And at the same time, of course, CIA and other intelligence agencies try to exploit it.
But as I said, the root cause of the problem is within Iran.
It doesn't have anything to do with CIA, or at least this is in my opinion.
Well, so yeah, now I'd read quite a few things that had said about how the right-wingers, the religious right, had started these protests to try to hurt Rouhani.
And then I'm not certain of the timeline here, but I also read, I don't know if this is true or not, but I also read that Rouhani had, I don't know if this was in retaliation or maybe this came first, that he had released some information that had previously always been held secret that showed just how much money the mullahs and all their, you know, so-called religious organizations are getting from the central state.
And that it was basically just huge graft and everybody could tell.
And it was really embarrassing for them.
And that was part of what turned the protests against the religious right, too.
That is completely correct.
When Rouhani submitted his proposed budget for the next Iranian year that begins on March 21, 2018, he made the budget completely transparent.
Actually, I think he served the nation by doing so.
Because by making the budget completely transparent, he showed that these religious organizations that actually don't do anything useful for the nation receive a huge amount of money every year without even, you know, reporting to the government about how they actually use those funds.
And this, at the same time, the budget proposed that the price of gasoline, for example, should be increased and the price of some food and stuff should increase because the government has a budget deficit.
And, of course, that made a lot of people angry because they saw that these religious organizations, these right-wing religious organizations that are against free elections, that are against, you know, social freedom, political freedom, and so on, receive all these huge sums of money every year without doing anything useful for the nation.
And that also was a factor in what has been happening.
In fact, a lot of people warned, you know, warned the majority of deputies, the parliament, that unless you revise the budget and reduce drastically the budget that these religious organizations receive and devote that to development and creation of jobs and helping poor people, you're going to run into trouble.
So that also was an important factor.
And, in fact, both Rouhani and the other reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, I think they have served the nation by making, releasing this information, as you said.
This was always secret, but they made their annual budget transparent and, therefore, they informed people that, look, this is what we are forced to give to these people.
We cannot control it because there is higher authority, but we know what's happening.
So that also was a factor.
All right.
So now, I wonder, though, how bad this will hurt Rouhani, too, though, because, and I think probably if you go back and check the archives, it sounds familiar to me that we talked about then, you know, when Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal a couple of years ago, that he was kind of overpromising about just how much economic relief the Iranians could expect to see from the nuclear deal and the relaxation of U.S. sanctions, and how, especially under Trump, that has really not come to pass, although even under Obama, they found every loophole to really not live up to the American side of the deal there that they could.
And now it's getting worse again.
So is that really hurting him that he gave up too much and got too little in return?
Oh, yes.
In that sense, the hardliners in Tehran have been attacking him because he had, as you said, promised the Iranian people that their economic plight will greatly improve because foreign investment will flow to Iran and a lot of jobs will be created.
But that hasn't happened.
Iran needs something around $500 billion of foreign investment over the next decade or 15 years.
But so far, the Rouhani administration has been able to attract only about $20 to $30 billion foreign investment, which is a far cry what the country actually needs.
He may have overpromised, but I think he sincerely believed that once the nuclear agreement is signed, things will improve.
But at the same time, you have to remember that when the nuclear agreement was signed, nobody could predict that a guy like Donald Trump will be elected president of the United States and take this hardline policy or approach towards Iran, whereby he's attacking Iran every day.
He's threatening Iran every day.
And he wants to basically abrogate one of the most important foreign policy agreements that this country has had with a major country in the Middle East, namely Iran.
So it's a combination of things that have happened over the past two and a half years since signing the nuclear agreement between Iran and five plus one.
Yeah.
You know, there's a new piece right now in the Daily Beast here by Spencer Ackerman.
The Iran nuclear deal could be dead in 11 days.
Yes, there is a deadline, January 11, at which the president should announce what he's going to do, because he basically passed the buck to Congress to do something about canceling the U.S. side of the agreement in 60 days.
Congress didn't take any action because a lot of people thought that the agreement is a good agreement, at least as far as the nuclear side of things are concerned.
European countries also made it clear that even if the Trump administration withdraws from the agreement, they will stick with it.
So Congress wisely didn't do anything.
And of course, the president is angry about it.
And he's determined to destroy this because he doesn't think about U.S. national interest.
All he wants to do is to destroy one of the achievements of the Obama presidency, just as he has gone after Obamacare and things of that sort.
So he may do something very destructive on January 11 and use this demonstration as an excuse to do this.
It seems like a big part of it is he's just embarrassed that he has to recertify that Iran is not bad every three months like this, or every two months, whatever it is.
And so he wanted Congress to get rid of that requirement so that basically, yeah, they're in compliance until I say they're not, instead of I have to keep saying they're in compliance all the time, which he doesn't like for just stupid political reasons.
But then Congress wouldn't do him that favor.
And so now what's he going to do?
Is he going to really ruin this deal just for political stupid reasons, for surface PR reasons?
Apparently, this is what he's going to do.
I mean, he doesn't care what damage that kind of action does to this country, to the United States.
I mean, just look at how he has caused it up to Saudi Arabia and has been helping that nation commit war crimes in Yemen.
Yeah, well, there's a whole other discussion.
But hang on now.
So there's a very astute observer here on Twitter.
When I put out this Ackerman piece about the Iran deal and treason responded, hey, the Iranian regime has to wait 11 days before the Iranian people stop the Iran protests and rally behind the regime in solidarity and start protesting the U.S. for nigging on the Iran deal by not waiving the U.S. sanctions.
So which makes perfect sense, right?
Donald Trump, by siding with the protesters in the opposition, he discredits them already.
But then if he really does provoke this fight with the Iran deal and try to ruin the Iran deal like this, God, I can't imagine.
But OK, I mean, if they do that, then that absolutely would help strengthen the Iranian regime and turn those protesters right back into...
I mean, they're all nationalists anyway, but this would make them nationalists behind this particular regime again, in current circumstances.
In fact, they were today, just today, they were very large demonstrations in many Iranian cities in support of the government.
And the main reason, I would say, is that people are afraid of what Trump might do.
Donald Trump has zero credibility within Iran.
I mean, we should not listen to a minority of Iranians who live, let's say, in the United States and pretend that, you know, if the United States does this or that, the Islamic government in Tehran will be overthrown.
It won't be overthrown unless there is a war.
And if there is a war, then the whole world will see its effect.
But as I said, just today, there were many, many demonstrations around the country, not because necessarily people support the government, but rather because of the fact that Trump has been threatening Iran.
He's talking about human rights for Iranian people.
Well, if he's really interested in human rights for Iranian people, then why is he trying to cancel the nuclear agreement that can help improve the economic plight of Iranian people?
Why is he pressuring European Union to stop doing business with Iran?
Why is he helping Iran's archenemy in the region, Saudi Arabia?
Why is he selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, where this country is involved in all sorts of plans against Iran?
Why is he, you know, goes out of his way to attack Iran and to dehumanize Iranian people, calling it a terrorist nation?
So he has zero credibility.
And by doing this, he actually helps the hardliner, because hardliner would say on January 11, we told you so.
We told you that we cannot trust the United States, but you negotiated, you signed the agreement, you delivered your part.
Look what the United States is doing.
So this is basically playing into hands of hardliners in Tehran.
And I'm sorry to say there is not a shred of rationality or wisdom in this administration, at least as far as Iran is concerned.
Well, and you know, the previous interview today is with Peter Van Buren.
And, you know, mostly the theme of it is that Bush fought a war directly on behalf of Iran in Iraq.
And then Obama tried to make up for that by backing the terrorists in Syria.
But that ended up backfiring in favor of Iran again.
And Iraq war three, another one in favor of Iran and enhancing their powers.
So now, from the point of view of the American empire, damn it, Iran has increased in power and influence somehow.
And we've got to do something, even though it's all their fault.
They'll never take responsibility.
They'll never say, well, let's stop making it worse.
And so now, you know, there seems like they're more agitated and more willing to start a crisis with Iran than they have been for a while.
I totally agree.
Five years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I published an article in which I said the most important beneficiary of the invasion of Iraq was Iran's hardliners.
They consolidated their power at a time when they were very weak.
They spread their influence into Iraq because they had supported these exiled Shiite groups for many, many years.
They had supported them, armed them, trained them, provided funds to them.
And then the same Shiite groups came to power after the invasion of Iraq.
And then by supporting what was happening in Syria, the terrorists in Syria and so on, they again helped Iranian hardliners to spread their influence and power to Syria.
So what are we complaining about?
We are the ones who helped them.
And any government, any regime, no matter how dictatorial or democratic it is, would take advantage of the situation to spread its influence.
So now, all of a sudden, Iran is this monster that we presumably created in the Middle East, and we need to curb its influence.
I mean, that's not going to happen unless, of course, there is another huge war, which if they start a war with Iran, I don't believe at this point that they will.
But if they do, then every war that we have had in the Middle East will be child's play compared to any war with Iran.
So let's hope and pray that that won't happen.
Yeah, well, you know, they talk about, well, we have Iran surrounded.
Well, that just means they put a bunch of our guys within range of their missiles, that's all, all up and down the, you know, Arabian side of the Arabian Gulf, as they try to call it, in the Persian Gulf there, but also at Bagramer Base in Afghanistan and in Iraqi Kurdistan and all the new bases there.
Oh, there are many, many bases.
I mean, of course, everybody in Kuwait, too.
All of America's forces in Kuwait are right there within range.
Not of an offensive Iranian threat, but certainly a defensive one.
Yes, I mean, the U.S. has a big air force base in Qatar.
The U.S. 5th Fleet is in Persian Gulf and is headquartered in Bahrain.
The U.S. has large military bases in Afghanistan.
And now, although the Trump administration promised repeatedly that when ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, they would withdraw their forces from Syria, now that ISIS has actually been defeated, they are saying that they are not going to withdraw from Syria.
James Mattis, Defense Secretary, said we are not going just to walk away.
So what are they going to do?
Trump just signed, you know, an executive order or something like that to provide $400 million worth of weapons to Syrian Kurds.
So basically, they are building military bases for themselves in northeast Syria, in the Kurdish region, which is totally illegal.
I mean, there is no agreement between U.S. and Syria to build U.S. military bases there.
And they want to use that military base, presumably, to confront Iran, because what they say is that because we couldn't defeat Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and because ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria, and because Iran has great influence in both Iraq and Syria, now Iran has a direct land route from Tehran or anywhere in Iran to Iraq, to Syria, to Lebanon.
And therefore, we have to prevent this land route to be operating, because Iran will use that to send troops and weapons and so on to Syria near the Israeli border or Lebanon.
But these are all fantasies.
I mean, the Iranian government, with all the economic problems that they have, are not going to stay there, you know, at least not at the scale that these guys are talking about.
They have to withdraw whatever they have.
And in addition, they have an agreement with Russia, and Russia will not also allow them to stay there.
And meanwhile, they can fly plane loads full of guns to Lebanon any day of the week without a road.
Exactly, as before.
I mean, they have done it before.
So there is nothing that prevents them from doing it.
And I don't even think Bashar al-Assad wants Iran to stay there for the long haul, because he would need to somehow reconstruct his image with Syrian people if he's going to stay in power for a while longer.
And therefore, all these things are just basically fantasies, because neocons in the United States want war with Iran, because they want to go after Iran.
And this has always been their plan.
They are obsessed with Iran, and they want to attack Iran.
They want to find an excuse to attack Iran.
So they make up stories after stories after stories.
I mean, just listening to Nikki Haley at the UN just makes me nauseated.
And this is really a terrible administration, at least as far as Iran is concerned.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
So now, when it comes to the protests and the different factions protesting against the different power factions, I guess the different factions of people protesting against the different factions of power, left, right, town and country, and whatever divisions.
So who's your group here that you identify with?
Are they out there in the street protesting?
Are they too worried about being the accidental sock puppets of the Mossad, or what?
I identify with people who peacefully protest against the terrible economic situation.
But I have been writing several Farsi articles published in Iranian websites that are saying that while we should protest the bad economic situation, mismanagement, corruption, and so on, and while we have a legitimate case for complaining, we should also be careful about not allowing these to be exploited by the exiled Iranians in the United States of the type that support Trump and support regime change and so on.
Not because I am opposed to regime change, but I want a regime change that is done by Iranian people inside Iran through whatever means that they want to do it.
If they want to wait for the long haul and hope for reform and have gradual, incremental reform, that's their decision.
If they want to revolt and have a revolution of the type that we had in 1979, that's also their decision.
And I support any decision that they make, because I'm here to support Iranian people, my people, my native country, to do whatever they want.
I believe in reform, and by reform I don't mean just the reformists that once in a while get a share of power in Iran and then they are expelled from power and then they come back.
I mean it in a much broader sense.
I support reform in the sense that I believe any struggle for democracy and human rights that is peaceful is a reformist struggle.
Opposed to that is revolution and war.
And I don't, of course, support revolution, because I don't think revolution at this point for Iran will lead to anything positive.
We already had a revolution in 1979 and we know what happened.
And at the same time, I think because of the situation in the Middle East, if there is a bloody revolution in Iran, this may lead to disintegration of Iran, because a lot of these foreign powers have talked about and have helped ethnic minorities in Iran.
And if there is a revolution where the central government loses control, then Iran may disintegrate and disappear as it is now.
So I think that is harmful to the Iranian nation.
So I support peaceful reform, peaceful struggle for democracy and human rights.
I support the peaceful demonstrations that people have against what's going on in Iran for bad economy, corruption, nepotism, and all sorts of discrimination.
But at the same time, I am mindful of the fact that foreign powers want to exploit this.
And I've made this clear in my Facebook page, in my articles that I published.
And in fact, my Facebook page has a very large number of readers, even from within Iran.
And I know that majority of Iranians, at least I know, support such a view, support the view that, yes, we need to democratize.
Yes, we need to have a system that respects human rights.
Yes, we need a system that...
Well, now, if it was up to you, would you have the, I know you said you're against revolution, but would you have through, you know, referendum or whatever, would you abolish the position of supreme leader?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think the root cause of Iran's problem is the position of supreme leader, because it has concentrated about 75, 80% of the power in the hands of an unelected official that has nothing to do but harm Iran.
I am totally opposed to a mixing of religion and politics.
The clerics should get out of governing.
They can have their own political party.
They can have their own political groups.
But if they allow for free elections, and if they win those free elections and come to power, they have to agree that they would rule secularly without intervention of politics.
In Europe, we have Christian democratic parties.
They have the roots in Christianity in Italy, in Germany, in many other places.
But once they come to power, they set aside their religious roots and rule secularly.
That's what I am for.
And in fact, the root cause of Iran's problems is the supreme leader, an unelected lifetime leader who does whatever he wants.
If you look at the Iranian constitution, if you remove the post of supreme leader, the rest of the constitution is actually very, very democratic, because this was drafted originally right after 1979 revolution by liberal, progressive Iranians led by late Prime Minister Mehdi Barzagan, the first prime minister after the revolution.
And those guys were very, very free thinking, very rational people.
So if you remove the supreme leader from the Iranian constitution, the rest of the constitution is actually very progressive.
So of course, I support that.
Of course, in every article that I write in Farsi, I say that the root cause of our problems is the supreme leader and the fact that he's unaccountable to people and the fact that he tries to connect himself to God and says that he's carrying out God's order in Iran.
Well, and this seems obvious enough to any American, right?
That, you know, politicians are bad enough, but now your minister declares himself above the president and everything.
Oy vey.
You know, immediately, it's obvious that whatever is wrong with Iran, there may be a million things wrong with Iran.
Having a theocratic form of government has certainly got to be at the root of a lot of it.
But so what the neocons say is, all we got to do is support these protesters a little bit.
And guess what?
Everybody in Iran agrees with Mohammed Sahimi.
They all hate the supreme leader and the government will fall.
Now, maybe you don't want a revolution, but they say that's the best option we have coming and it'll be easy.
All we need to do is send in the MEK and maybe a couple of billion dollars, I don't know, and maybe support some moderate rebels and see what happens, right?
That's the plan.
I mean, that's what neocons want.
They think that if they spend, you know, some resources on this exiles group, right, MEK, which is, in my view, was a terrorist organization, it is still a terrorist organization, and the monarchies, they can achieve their goal.
But in fact, if you talk to Iranian people inside, and I'm in contact with my entire family, my wife's family, my friends, a lot of people, and a lot of people write to me through my Facebook page and after my article, they say that they don't trust any exiled person, anybody like MEK, the monarchies, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah, and so on.
And they don't trust the United States because they have seen what has happened in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Egypt, for example.
Even in Egypt, when they had Arab Spring, people chose Muslim Brotherhood, and as much as we may disagree with Muslim Brotherhood, they got elected.
But then there was a military coup, a lot of those Muslim Brotherhood members were killed, and the U.S. didn't move a finger, and in fact supported the coup in Egypt.
So what guarantees that if Iranian people go to the same route, the country will not have the same fate?
Iran is a large country, Iran is a multi-ethnic country, and they don't want Iran to be another Syria or another Libya or another Iraq.
In fact, the only country in that region that has remained safe from war and terrorism and so on is Iran, and Iranian people recognize that.
So as much as they may despise the supreme leader, and I think 80-85% of the Iranian people, we know this through all sorts of elections that we have in Iran, 80-85% of the people despise the hardliners.
The hardliners have a base of support of 10-15%, the rest of the people are opposed to it.
But at the same time, they ask the question, you know, if we go through a revolution, another revolution, or the type of regime change that happened in Libya, for example, nothing will remain from Iran to talk about.
I always write in my Farsi articles that look, first we have to preserve Iran, then we can talk about democracy and human rights.
So the only way to preserve Iran and talk about democracy and human rights and work for it is through peaceful struggle, without any outside intervention.
Because outside intervention, in that region at least, has shown to be totally destructive and has created no positive results.
Everything that it has created has been war, destruction, bloodshed, and countries that are actually no longer a country.
Look at Libya.
Libya is not a country anymore.
Libya has been divided between various factions.
Terrorist groups that didn't exist in Libya before 2011 now have their base there.
ISIS has transferred some of its fighters to Libya, and Libya became a center of distributing weapons to Syria, other parts of the Middle East, and all the Sahel countries in North Africa.
And the weapons that were in Libya actually were found in Mali, for example, in the war that we had a couple of years ago in Mali.
So Libya had this type of fate when outside intervention supposedly helped the Libyan people in their demonstration against the Libyan regime.
But what happened to the country was that the country was completely destroyed.
And Iranian people recognize that.
Iranian people recognize that, you know, they want to get rid of the supreme leader and the intervention of the clerics in the government, but they don't want to do it in a way that it will actually result in either a destroyed country or a disintegrated Iran that will not be like any Iran that we have known over the past 12,000 years.
Well, now, I think the War Party would point out a lot about the youth of the population and, you know, that times are changing.
It seems like, well, so I got a couple of counter things there.
I mean, first of all, yeah, there are, it is a whole new rising young generation of people becoming adults now.
And I don't know exactly what the percentages are.
But I remember reading years ago that it was the population was so heavily weighted toward the young in Iran anyway.
And it's more and more that way.
And yet so kind of a counterfactual to that would be what you said about all the pro-government rallies, which I know they were already going to hold those.
They were already scheduled because that's their celebration of quashing the Green Revolution, so-called of 2009.
But also, you know, in 2005, July 2005, George Bush came out and gave a little, not really a speech, but a press conference or something.
He said, yeah, you Iranians in your upcoming election, you better not elect the right winger or something like that.
So, of course, they did.
They elected.
That was how Ahmadinejad got the job in the first place there as president.
And so there's a lot of right wing reaction.
There's a lot of people out in the country.
Even during the Green Revolution, we saw there a lot of young people in Tehran wanted to change.
There are a lot of people out in other places who did not.
Yes, I mean, that press conference that George Bush had in 2005 was a factor in electing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Oh, no question about it.
I mean, it was so obvious at the time what that just blew up right in his face, unless that was the plan.
And maybe that that wasn't his plan.
But the people who told him to do it, that's what they wanted to see.
Yes, they wanted to see a hardline radical guy in charge of day to day affairs of Iran so that they can use it.
Yes.
The Green Revolution or the Green Movement, as we call it in Iran, was also a homegrown revolution.
There is no question, not revolution, a movement.
But there is no question that CIA and other intelligence agencies in the West tried to explode it.
But I am of the opinion that the Green Movement was homegrown and, you know, it was legitimate, particularly since its leader, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, that I like very much and I praise him, and he's under house arrest.
He was a revolutionary himself.
He participated in the Iranian Revolution.
He was prime minister for eight years.
He was foreign minister.
And during his premiership, even though Iran was involved in a long war with Iraq, people never suffered from economic hardship because he implemented policies that prevented any sort of corruption and exploitation of war.
And therefore, people never suffered under his premiership because of economic hardship.
So the Green Movement was homegrown, was legitimate.
And I supported it at that time very fiercely.
I wrote hundreds of articles and reports in Tehran Biwa at that time.
Well, wait, pardon me for interrupting, but just to finish your thought there, what you're saying is this guy, Mousavi, he was running for president.
He wasn't trying to overthrow the government and his people were upset that the election was rigged.
But that doesn't mean he was trying to abolish the state and recreate it.
It just meant that him and his people were complaining that he got screwed out of his office.
That's exactly his main message was, look, if you if you elect me and if I am elected, then I will open up the press.
I try to have free election so that there will be a national debate about how to revise the constitution.
He talked about revising the constitution and everybody understood that when he talked about revising constitution, what he meant, he wanted at the first stage to revise the constitution to to greatly reduce the power of supreme leader and put most of the power in the hands of the elected president.
Well, that is pretty revolutionary then, I guess.
It is revolutionary in the sense that, yes, you are going to change a lot of power structures in Iran, but he wanted to do it to peaceful means.
He wanted through the legal process, it sounds exactly to legal process.
He wanted to have to revise the constitution to a national referendum and limit the power of the supreme leader.
He always emphasized that, that we need to have a national debate.
Constitution is not a religious, you know, a religious book that we cannot change.
This is not God's work.
This is what we have written and therefore is subject to revisions, new interpretation and so on and so forth.
And that scared the hell out of the hardliners.
And therefore, the election was rigged so that he won't get elected.
People understood what Milhousi and Mousavi wanted to do it, and that's why they supported him.
And the Green Revolution or Green Movement continued for at least over a year, but it was eventually put down.
And Mousavi also recognized that foreign powers were trying to exploit a homegrown, legitimate movement in Iran for democracy and human rights.
So he asked people not to come out, you know, out to the street again to confront the hardliners because it would lead to bloodshed and the bloodshed would lead to intervention of, you know, foreign powers.
So that's what Milhousi and Mousavi wanted to do.
And I greatly respect him.
He has always been a very strictly clean politician.
He has never been accused of corruption.
He has always been very honest about what he wants to do.
And he has paid for the promises that he made to Iranian nation.
He has been under absolute house arrest for seven years simply because he promised to Iranian people when he ran in 2009 that if they support him, he will resist any pressure against him by the hardliners.
And he stood by his promise, and that's why he was put under house arrest.
All right.
So now back to the current situation.
What do you predict is going to happen here?
Because this is not exactly the Green Revolution.
These are different factions protesting for different things.
So I think with the demonstrations that we had today in Iran in many, many cities, I think this will die down over the next week or so because a large number of people in every city showed up.
Again, I emphasize that that doesn't mean that they support the hardliners or the supreme leader or anything, or that doesn't mean that they don't have any concerns or complaints about bad economic situation, but rather because I think they realize that outsiders are exploiting this for their own plans, and they want to continue the civil strife in Iran so that later on they can have excuses for intervention in Iran.
Nikki Haley has said that she wants to have a Security Council at the United Nations to have an emergency meeting.
Obviously, if this meeting takes place, she's going to talk about it in a language that is reminiscent of what we had in Libya, for example.
So with the demonstrations that we had today in many, many cities, I think this will gradually die out or die down.
But I must emphasize that both the reformists and the hardliners and other factions must recognize that unless they address legitimate grievances and complaints of people, both economically and politically, this is not going to go away.
Then there will be another excuse for people coming out on the street and demonstrating, and the longer this drags on, the more demand people will have and the larger the explosion can take place.
So these legitimate demands must be addressed through economically reform, through reducing the power of the supreme leader at this stage, and through curbing the activities of the Revolutionary Guard in economic affairs so that people can help the economy to grow, and through diplomacy outside Iran, particularly through the European Union, and staying within the nuclear agreement against all pressure by the hardliners, staying within the nuclear agreement so that they can expand commercial relationships with the European Union, and also use the European Union as a sort of shield against the pressure by the Trump administration.
Well, yeah, it's all the same people who are saying that, you know, they care so much about the Iranian people, the American War Party, that the same people want to bomb them and sanction them all the time, and the same ones who care about them the most and want to back them now.
And yet, you know, one of their complaints, as you were just saying, is the role of the state, and particularly the Revolutionary Guards, in the economy and in the black markets.
And all you've got to do is just check the archives of us talking years back, before the Iran deal, as they're ratcheting up all these crippling sanctions, that as they do this, they move more and more of the economy into the black market, which is, of course, controlled by the government and by their mobster friends.
And so they end up benefiting and leading, you know, contributing, I guess, to furthering the crisis that they're protesting against now.
Yes, and that's what people like me said at that time, that look, these economic sanctions that you impose on Iran, first and foremost, benefits the hardliners, not, you know, it's not going to help any ordinary Iranian, it's going to actually greatly hurt ordinary Iranian, but it's going to expand the economic powers of the hardliners, elements of the Revolutionary Guards, their lackeys, their puppets within the society, they will control the black market.
And they did, and they became fabulously rich.
And because of the nuclear agreement, some of those sanctions were removed.
And because of the election of Hassan Rouhani, he has tried to, you know, to control the black market, reduce the size of the black market, and open up the country.
And of course, this is not what the hardliners want.
All right, you guys, that is Mohamed Sahimi.
Again, he teaches chemical engineering at USC, and has for many years been a great commentator on Iranian affairs on their nuclear program and their internal politics.
He writes regularly for antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Mohamed dash Sahimi.
And thank you very much again for coming on the show.
Thank you, Scott, for having me on your program.
All right, you guys, and you know me.
I'm at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, foolserend.us for my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
