How America Went Blind in Iran | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

**Dee Takos** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Eyes On Geopolitics. I'm here with Jack Murphy and Jonathan Hackett. I would say the two big brains of the group.
Ivy League grads are almost Ivy League grad for Jon. He's getting there. Today's show is going to be a little bit different than a normal show. Usually, obviously, we do like what's going on current events-wise.
Week fucking 18 of the Iran War. I mean, this does have to do with Iran, obviously. This is more like, I guess you can kind of characterize as like one of the bigger intelligence stories of the last four decades and how the US has kind of like tried to understand like what's going on in Iran, especially after what happened in 1979 with the revolution and like, you know, our embassies being, our embassy was a hostage place, a hostage, you know, a home for hostages, essentially. And like we lost all of our intelligence, at least human intelligence inside of Iran after 1979 And just leading up to what we're at, where we're at today, like who we leaned on for intelligence help throughout the last four decades. I mean, really, it's a longer story too, because we talk about like 1953 and stuff like that. Like it's so much, like there's so much there. And I'm open to talking about that. But my thought process was basically starting it off right after 1979, after the revolution. And basically us trying to have, having to build back our intelligence apparatus or the picture inside of Iran. So, I brought our Iranian expert, who's Jon Hackett, and Jack's here. Jack's here just because he's cute. I need sex appeal on the episode.

**Jonathan Hackett** (1:52)
I get it.

**Dee Takos** (1:53)
Yeah. So like Jon, where do you want to start? You want to talk a little bit about what happened in 1953 and stuff like that, just to set the stage for what eventually happened with the revolution?

**Jonathan Hackett** (2:04)
Yeah. So I can go back a little bit earlier than that, because it's kind of relevant to like why did 1953 happen at all. So in 1906, you had something called the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. There was this group called the Qajars, which had been ruling Iran for about two centuries. That was the monarchy for a while. They were this originally Turkic backed group, Turkish group, although they're not Turks per se, like Turkey Turks. They're a different kind of Turks that were ruling the country for a while. And the Persian people are Persian, they're not Turk. And there was a lot of friction between that monarchy and the Persian people that this Qajar Turk monarchy was ruling over. So there's a lot of friction there. And leading up to that point, you had a lot of British and Russian interests in what is now Iran. The Brits were interested in the south, and the Russians were interested in the north. This will come into play later in World War II. Also, especially why some Kurds are pro-regime and some are anti-regime and some are anti-other Kurds that had a lot to do with how the Russians and the British separated Iran and also separated what is now Iraq and Turkey as far as spheres of influence. If you remember the Sykes-Picot agreement, people have heard of this. May 16, 1916, the French, the British, and the Russians agreed to split up the Middle East into spheres of influence. That's how we got the borders of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and so on. This is obviously before the creation of Israel, although it did set things in motion for what would today become Israel in 1948, May 1948 A lot of these kind of things, like these little balls, were getting put in motion and started to move around around this time, like after 1900-ish to 1906
Skipping a ton of history, 1906, the Iranian people said, we do not want this monarchy anymore being as oppressive as it's being. This is the Qajar monarchy. And so they actually had something called the Constitutional Revolution, where they actually created what's now called a Majlis, which is a council. It looks a lot like a parliament.
That did not exist before. They basically drew it up from scratch and they said, this is what we want for our parliament. We want representation from all of our provinces.
We want all these people representing in parliament. The Qajar monarchy became very weak because the Russian and British influence was poorly managed just like it was in a lot of imperial situations throughout South Asia and West Asia at the time.
They basically got what they wanted. The Iranians got an elected parliament for the first time in 2,000 years of history of monarchy.