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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
With VRBoCare, help is always ready before,
- [00:05]
News Reporter
during and after your stay.
- [00:07]
Roham Alvandi
We've planned for the plot twists, so
- [00:09]
Martin DeCaro
support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind. History as it happens. March 24, 2026 Khamenei's revolution. Iran, because of the great leadership of
- [00:27]
News Reporter
the Shah, is an island of stol.
- [00:32]
Roham Alvandi
Khomeini returns to a country teetering on the brink of civil war, beginning of
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News Reporter
even more radical social and political changes than have already taken place.
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Roham Alvandi
The imposition of Islamic law here has started with an order to women to cover their heads in government offices.
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News Reporter
But instead of chasing all the Americans out of the compound, the Iranians imprison them in a building somewhere. On these grounds, they have been hostages ever since. And the grave consequences which will result if harm comes to any of the hostages.
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Roham Alvandi
It was in the early hours of
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News Reporter
this morning that Iraqi tanks ground across
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Roham Alvandi
the border into Iran.
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News Reporter
You still have serious internal problems with what you call counter revolutionaries. Amnesty International says that you've killed, almost executed almost 4,000 of those people. And we hear other reports of jailings and torture. Where the powerful Guardian Council has announced they have found no major voting fraud and the results of the disputed presidential election will stand.
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Martin DeCaro
The Ayatollah, who ruled with an iron fist for 37 years, is dead, assassinated by Israel in the opening strike of a war to defeat or destroy Iran. Ali Khamenei was a mysterious figure, forged by revolution and fired by anti Western hostility. He tormented Iran's people and exported violence across the greater Middle East. Who was this man and what is his legacy? That is next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Roham Alvandi
He could have been the leader who led Iran away from the dark legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. But he did exactly the opposite.
- [02:10]
Martin DeCaro
Events are spiraling so quickly out of control in the Persian Gulf. There are wars and rampages happening across the region, from Gaza to the west bank to Tehran, that it is difficult to step back and try to put it all into some kind of historical perspective. 47 years after the creation of the Islamic Republic and the humiliating hostage crisis that buried Jimmy Carter's presidency, the United States and Israel are now trying to reverse the tide of history by attacking Iran and killing its leader. They hope to replace the clerical regime with something else.
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Roham Alvandi
Iranian state media has confirmed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has been killed in his compound. According to Iranian media, an airstrike killed
- [02:51]
News Reporter
at least 85 people and injured many
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Roham Alvandi
more at the girls school Passing through
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Ad Voice
the Strait of Hormuz is only possible with Iranian permission.
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Roham Alvandi
The waterway is critical to the shipment
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Ad Voice
of the world's oil supply.
- [03:03]
Martin DeCaro
This will likely end in failure, if it hasn't failed already. But rather than predict the future, let's reflect on the history that's already been made here. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is gone, as the New York Times obituary put it. As the second leader of the Islamic Republic, he cemented and expanded its hardlined Islamist and anti Western policies, shaping his nation's Islamic revolution far more than its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who held power for just a decade, most of it during a devastating war with Iraq. At home, Ayatollah Khamenei ruled with an iron fist, blocking attempts at moderate reforms, labeling public demands for change as Western orchestrated sedition and squelching dissent with arrests and executions. He vastly expanded a loyal military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Gar Corps, whose intelligence wing served as a powerful tool of
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Roham Alvandi
repression 67 cities across Iran where protests have been taking place, including the capital, Tehran. One man described treating his own gunshot wounds because he was too afraid to seek medical help.
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Martin DeCaro
Yet despite his many decades in power, Americans knew little about Khamenei. It's not like he gave any interviews to the Western press. And in recent years he became even more reclusive at the top of Iran's byzantine governing system. The story of his life is also the story of the death of U S Iran relations and a half century of hostility. From opposing the Shah in the early 1960s to emerging as Khomeini's unlikely successor in 1989, Khamenei blocked Iran's path to progressive reform at home while turning his country into an international pariah. There were very few moments of light
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Roham Alvandi
and recall that at the time, skeptics argued that Iran would cheat and that we could not verify their compliance and the interim agreement would fail. Instead, it has succeeded exactly as intended. Iran has met all of its obligations. It eliminated its stockpile of dangerous nuclear material. Inspections of Iran's program increased, and we continued negotiations to see if we could achieve a more comprehensive. Today, after many months of tough, principled diplomacy, we have achieved the framework for that deal.
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Martin DeCaro
Roham Alvandi is Associate professor of International History and Director of the Iranian History Initiative at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger and the the United States and Iran in the Cold War, and he is an expert on Iran's modern history and the history of US Foreign relations. Our conversation next. Tired of interruptions? Want to skip ads? Tap? Subscribe now in the show Notes. You'll enjoy early access ad free listening and all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens.com the Global Gaming League
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is presented by Atlas Earth, the fun cashback app. Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my How We do it gaming team take on Gilly the King and Wallow267's million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming league video game show. Plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com in partnership with Level Up Expo.
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Martin DeCaro
Roham Alvandi joining us from London. Welcome.
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Roham Alvandi
Always a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk about my favorite subject. So even in these terrible circumstances.
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Martin DeCaro
So the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We're talking about one of the longest ruling autocrats in modern history. He spanned six American presidential administrations.
- [06:49]
Roham Alvandi
He seems to have been a permanent fixture in the lives of most Iranians. Ali Khomeini was a young cleric in the 1950s and 60s who was a student of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. He got involved in the opposition movement against the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s, really became sort of enamored with the idea of political Islam. He read and translated the works of Sayyid Qutb, the famous ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And he was a kind of fairly second tier figure in the, in the revolutionary movement. But after the victory of the revolution and the toppling of the Shah in 1979, he slowly made his way closer and closer to the center of power.
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News Reporter
Since there have been no opposition political figures to whom the masses could turn, they looked instead to their holy men for political leadership. He tells them the Shah should be arrested, tried for crimes against the state and ousted and that a Muslim state should be established.
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Roham Alvandi
He became the Friday Prayer leader in Tehran, which was quite an important position after the revolution. He became deputy defence minister briefly during the Iran Iraq War and then finally in 1981, he was elected president of the Islamic Republic. That was at that point, you know, in the early 80s, the presidency was largely a kind of ceremonial position. It didn't carry a lot of power. All the power really was in the hands of ayatollah Khomeini most of the day to day, running of the state was in the hands of the prime minister at the time. Finally, in 1989, after Khomeini died, he was essentially maneuvered into the position of supreme leader to succeed Khomeini, largely because he wasn't a terribly powerful or influential figure. And so other, you know, centers of power within the system, particularly Rafsanjani, President Rafsanjani, thought that they could essentially control him, you know, put him in this position and that he would then be a sort of pliable supreme leader. But, you know, as happens when you give someone total power, they grow into it. And he slowly, throughout the 90s, acquired more and more and more and more power hand in hand with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. You know, he was Supreme Leader from 1989 and all the way until this year until his death. And he has basically overseen a whole process of closing off any possibility of reform in Iran, eliminating any chance that Iran could try to go in a more liberal or democratic direction through elections, through sort of peaceful reform. What he's going to be remembered for more than anything is the man who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity as far as putting Iran on a trajectory to some kind of more democratic future.
- [09:58]
Martin DeCaro
Sure, Americans are more familiar with his legacy in the foreign policy realm, the so called axis of resistance, which has, well, not entirely collapsed, but been dealt some serious blows recently. Of interest to 90 million Iranians is the domestic situation that has unfolded over the past several decades. You know, as I mentioned, this man who ruled for so long from 1989 with an iron fist, he became a dictator. He never gave an interview over all those years. This man who ruled from 1989 to 2026, gone in a blink of an eye. So here's an opportunity to try to weigh his historical legacy over the decades, if such a task is achievable in a relatively short podcast. Roham Alvande.
- [10:44]
Roham Alvandi
Well, the Islamic Republic is a very complicated political system. It has elected institutions and it has unelected institutions. So it's got a sort of elected republic component and it's got this unelected Islamic component. And essentially what's happened over the years is that the elected component has been totally subsumed by the unelected Islamic component which Khamenei represented. And every effort by sort of moderates in Iran or reformists in Iran to use the elected institutions to change direction was essentially thwarted by Khamenei. In the early years, he was something like an umpire within the system, you know, and there was some actual contest for power. But as time went on, the scope of competition narrowed and narrowed and narrowed to the point where there was really no meaningful choice for Iranians in any of these kind of elections that took place either for parliament or for the presidency. And the domestic and the international were entwined because it was the reformist actors in Iran. It was the sort of more moderate figures inside Iran who were the advocates of detente with the west, rapprochement with the United States, Iran's reintegration into the global economy. The more those figures domestically were sidelined and marginalized, not surprisingly, the more Iran took a hard line position in terms of foreign policy and a more sort of hawkishly anti American and as anti Israeli kind of position.
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Martin DeCaro
You know, that's interesting because yes, elements in the government were implacably hostile, at least rhetorically, to the United States and Israel. But Iranian society not entirely, but mostly is pro Western.
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Roham Alvandi
Yeah, that's right.
- [12:36]
Martin DeCaro
Unlike a lot of the Sunni Arab populations who were extremely angry with the west while their governments were pro west.
- [12:45]
Roham Alvandi
There was a huge kind of sea change in Iranian opinion, I would say, after the Iran Iraq war. So the war that lasted from 1980 to 1988 between Iran and Iraq really exhausted all of that sort of revolutionary fervor that had been unleashed in 1979. I think people realized the cost that they were paying for trying to pursue some kind of revolutionary foreign policy that was about pushing America out of the Middle east and defeating Zionism and all that sort of thing. Iraq, Iran has suffered more than Iraq. About 150 Iraqi missiles have hit Iranian cities, nearly three times the number Iran has fired back.
- [13:29]
News Reporter
Sheltering from the missile blitz has become
- [13:31]
Martin DeCaro
part of daily life in Tehran.
- [13:33]
Roham Alvandi
The missiles being used by Iran. By the time you got to the 90s, Iranians, what they were really craving was normality, an opening to the world, just a very basic freedom and engagement and stability, you know, within their country. And so that led, I think, many people within the system, those who maybe in the 1980s had been implacable revolutionaries, to really have a rethink and mellow out basically politically. And they were the people that essentially became the reformers, you know. But if you look at those people like Mohamed Khatami who was elected president, those same people in the 1980s were, you know, pretty hot headed, anti imperialist kind of revolutionaries. But, you know, eight years of war is a university for these people. You know, it really teaches them that there's nothing to be gained from a policy of confrontation with the world, you know, and a constant state of emergency.
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News Reporter
Sure.
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Martin DeCaro
Economic interests demanded change, too. I mean, even as you say, even among the clerics, there are differences of opinion. And I do. I do want to talk about Khamenei's formative years in the 1960s, but just one other remark here that you can address about this period, the late 80s going into the 90s, hadn't he or hadn't Khomeini before dying, hadn't he eliminated a lot of the resistance among the clerics to a more moderate course in the 1980s?
- [15:01]
Roham Alvandi
Essentially, what Khomeini did is step by step, he eliminated all of the various rival factions that had been part of the revolutionary movement against the Shah, beginning with any sort of Iranian liberal or constitutionalist movement. Then the Iranian left annihilated. And then the last to sort of be sidelined were people who were clerics or even, you know, loyal figures of Khomeini who dissented from some of his policies. I mean, most famously, he sidelined Ayatollah Montazeri, who was his actual designated successor. But when Montessori criticized the mass executions that were taking place in Iran in the late 1980s, he was removed from that position and sidelined by Khomeini.
- [15:49]
Martin DeCaro
A revolution that eats its own, huh?
- [15:51]
Roham Alvandi
Absolutely. I mean, mercifully, Khomeini was not. Was an old man. By the time he came to power, Iran only had to sort of endure a decade of his rule. I mean, if he'd been younger and his rule had continued, I mean, God knows where Iran would have found itself. But, you know, that was a pretty. If you talk to most Iranians, I mean, the 1980s are a pretty dark decade for Iran. War, you have political oppression, sanctions. After the Tehran hostage crisis. I mean, it's a really. It was an awful time for Iran. And so Khomeini's death and the end of the Iran Iraq War created an opportunity for a change of direction in the 1990s. And really, Iran is completely transformed, you know, in the 1990s. It's probably the best era in the last 46 years for Iran.
- [16:40]
Martin DeCaro
Okay, well, if my meandering interview style will eventually get to the 1990s in three or four hours. Just kidding. So Khamenei, he was a religious student when he first became involved in political matters. Doesn't necessarily mean he wanted to run the government one day. But they were involved in politics in the early 1960s. Right. This is where he meets Khomeini, who had become the Leader of the revolution and Khamenei is arrested in June of 1963. He was arrested multiple times. He was apparently tortured. What was going on there? How did these events shape his worldview? What was he actually standing for in these days that got him into so much trouble?
- [17:23]
Roham Alvandi
You have to remember that the Shah was a sort of modernizing autocrat. He was trying to essentially transform Iran's traditional rural economy into a modern industrial economy, which meant carrying out land reform in Iran, which meant basically a process of urbanization, investment in new industries. And all of this, of course, was done with the active encouragement of the United States, particularly the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy thought that the way to combat the threat of communism in the Third World was to encourage reform and modernization, particularly land reform. The clergy in Iran, the clerics, particularly Ayatollah Khomeini, were virulently opposed to these modernization efforts. They totally opposed the concept of land reform because they were against the idea of seizing lands and redistributing them. They thought that this violated the Sharia, Islamic law. Also happened that they themselves were quite large landowners, so they had a lot to lose. Secondly, another element of the Shah's modernization was emancipation of women, universal suffrage in Iran, and encouraging women to come into the workforce. And, you know, religious conservatives were very much opposed to this idea, particularly Khomeini. Ali Khamenei's introduction into politics really was in the context of the opposition by Khomeini and religious conservatives to what the Shah called his white revolution of reforms starting in 1963. They saw these reforms as basically something that was a kind of Westernization imposed on Iran by a pro American Shah who was trying to sort of transform an Islamic society into a sort of Western secular one. And they were determined to fight that tooth and nail.
- [19:27]
Martin DeCaro
So there was an anti Western, anti US element to this from the very beginning?
- [19:32]
Roham Alvandi
Absolutely. Certainly for Khomeini and his supporters, anti Americanism was really there right from the beginning.
- [19:40]
Martin DeCaro
And the Shah was a US client. So I mean, it's not like they had no point there.
- [19:44]
Roham Alvandi
But the Shah had come to the throne in 1941 when his father had abdicated under pressure from Britain and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Really until 1953 or so, he had been a fairly popular ruler who was more of a sort of constitutional monarch. But what happens is that in 1953 when the Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalizes the British owned Iranian oil industry, Britain and the United States intervene in Iran to topple Mosaddegh's government in a coup, a covert intelligence operation in Tehran.
- [20:24]
News Reporter
It looked as if Mosaddegh would soon be named president. And on his orders, troops occupied the Shah's palaces and surrounded parliament. And then the people themselves took a hand. 300 killed and hundreds wounded is a conservative estimate. The rioters freed those taken prisoner earlier and and stormed the house of Mossaddegh. Foreign Minister Fatimi gets through first. Reports that he was torn to pieces have not been confirmed. Meanwhile, the mob flocked the streets demanding the return of the Shah.
- [20:57]
Roham Alvandi
And they transformed the Shah essentially from a relatively popular young monarch who did not really interfere too much in sort of the politics of the day, into an autocrat who gradually gathers more and more and more power in his own hands. And so whatever the Shah did after that, you know, even if he was doing something that was progressive, even if he was doing something that many in Iran might have supported because it was being carried out by a government and a ruler whose legitimacy had been fundamentally undermined by this coup in 1953 by a ruler who was seen as, rightly or wrongly, an instrument of American power. You know, it was kind of doomed to failure because it had no legitimacy, you know.
- [21:44]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I was wondering what the Ayatollahs or the clerics in those days. The Ayatollah is the highest ranking. What they thought of Mossadegh, because I don't think he is celebrated by the elites in Iran today, the ruling class, because he was a lowercase D democrat.
- [21:59]
Roham Alvandi
That's right.
- [22:00]
Martin DeCaro
And in 1953, as you mentioned, the CIA, working with his opponents, Mossadegh's opponents in Iran toppled his democratically elected government. This was not a mass popular election with universal suffrage. He was elected right by the Majlis, the Parliament. But still Mossadegh was a liberal nationalist, moving Iran in a different direction. That's not really the direction that Khomeini and his followers wanted.
- [22:26]
Roham Alvandi
Absolutely. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, he. Mossadegh was a liberal Democrat and a secular figure. You can think of him as Iran's version of maybe Nehru in India or Sun Yat Sen in China. He was of that sort of generation of liberal modern reformer. He had two goals, essentially. One was to liberate Iran from British influence, which meant taking Iran's most important industry, its oil industry, out of the hands of the British, nationalizing it and taking it into Iranian hands. But he also had another goal, which was to defend the Iranian constitution and to ensure the Shah should reign but not rule. He was a great advocate of the powers of parliament. I think both of these things brought him into conflict with the powers that be in Iran or all those political forces that were invested in the old order, including many segments of the clergy who felt really threatened by Mossadegh, who saw the Shah and the monarchy as the defender of the faith. So many elements of the clergy opposed Mossadegh. Even those more populous clerics who had supported him, like Ayatollah Kashani, eventually turned against him and supported the monarchy. So he's definitely not a popular figure, certainly for the present government in Iran, because he's seen as far too liberal and far too secular, you know, for their liking. The kind of narrative of Mossadegh that you would get today from the government in Iran would be that, oh, well, you know, he was well meaning, but ultimately he failed, didn't he? Because he wasn't sufficiently rooted in Iran's Islamic society. You know, that's. That's the way they sort of see him. But, you know, for decades after the coup, Mossadegh, who lived until 1967 in exile, internal exile in Iran, you know, he was the kind of symbol of Iranian nationalism and Iran's kind of democratic
- [24:30]
Martin DeCaro
aspirations and the coup and Western interference in internal Iranian politics was very much on the minds of everyone in 1979. So in the interest of time, we'll move from the 1960s to 78. 79. As we're trying to trace Ali Khamenei's formative years here, I mentioned how Ali Khamenei was arrested for the first time in 1963. So was Khomeini, who was the indispensable figure in the Iranian revolution. Khamenei was placed in internal exile where he remained until 1978. So, Roham, I often say that, you know, the Russian Revolution would not have happened without Lenin. Stalin, who became the dominant figure, was not an important figure during the Russian Revolution relative to some of the others. Meaning it would have happened had Stalin never been alive. Can we say the same thing about these two here? Obviously, Khomeini is the indispensable leader of the revolution, but he does appoint Jem and A to an important post in early 1979, making him for the first time a key figure in a future government. Right.
- [25:42]
Roham Alvandi
You have to remember that, you know, when these revolutionaries came to power in 1979, it was not the case that they had sort of total power in their hands. It was a fairly chaotic situation. They were deathly afraid that there might be a repeat of what had happened. In 1953 that, you know, the Shah's army, which was still largely intact, would carry out maybe some kind of coup. And in fact, there was an attempted coup, the nausea coup plot in 1980. You had the hostage crisis. Then you had the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980. So they were in a process of essentially trying to consolidate power. In that process, Khomeini had certain key lieutenants who were mostly his foremost clerical students. They were the people that he sort of trusted the most. And these three or four people, one of them was Ali Khamenei, one of them was Ali Akbar Afsanjani. Another was Muhammad Behesht, who was assassinated. These people would become the dominant figures in the Islamic Republic for the next almost two decades because of their closeness to Khomeini. And Khomeini came to represent really the conservative faction amongst those very, very close advisors of Khomeini. Whereas Rafsanjani represented more of the sort of pragmatic faction. Khamenei came to represent a much more conservative, hawkish view. Really, for the next two decades, there was a sort of rivalry between these two men and others in the political system. But really, Rafsanjani had the upper hand. For most of the 1980s. He was the dominant figure. He was the figure at the center of the Iran Contra scandal when the Reagan administration was covertly providing arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages.
- [27:33]
News Reporter
A charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Those charges are utterly false.
- [27:43]
Roham Alvandi
Rafsanjani was the key figure in bringing the Iran Iraq war to an end in 1988. Khamenei was still very much sort of on the margins. Although he did have important political positions, he didn't have nearly the same amount of influence as Rafsanjani did.
- [28:00]
Martin DeCaro
Khamenei becomes president in 1981 after somebody was assassinated. But as you say, that was not as important a role as Rafsanjani. These figures were appointed by Khomeini to a revolutionary council a month before the revolution in January 1979. And, you know, for the sake of the listener, it'd be great if one of these guys was named Smith or Johnson. So the 1980s unfold a very radical and difficult time for the country of Iran because of war and other things. You mentioned the Iran Contra scandal, those great days when Israel would sell weapons to Iran. Imagine that.
- [28:40]
Roham Alvandi
That's right. Yes, that's right.
- [28:42]
Martin DeCaro
So when the 1980s come to an end and Khomeini dies in 1989. Khamenei was not an ayatollah. How did he become the supreme leader?
- [28:51]
Roham Alvandi
Rafsanjani orchestrates a rewriting of the Iranian constitution to make the presidency which Khamenei had held and which had been really a kind of ceremonial office. He rewrites the constitution to make the presidency an executive institution with quite a lot of power and authority for himself. And then he maneuvers Khomeini into this position of supreme leader, thinking that, well, Khomeini is a fairly mid ranking cleric with no great authority. He certainly doesn't have the kind of charisma that Khomeini had and he'll be someone that he can sort of control. And the expectation was essentially that this arrangement with Rafsanjani in the presidency, with all the power, and with Khamenei becoming Supreme leader and being something of a kind of symbolic leader of the Islamic Republic, you know, Iran would enter into its kind of the thermidor of the Iranian revolution. You know, that Iran would enter into a period of moderation, of detente with the West. You know, that all of that sort of revolutionary fervor had been spent during the Iran Iraq War. And that's what appeared to be happening in the 1990s. You know, the economy that had suffered terribly in the Iran Iraq War was rebuilt. Iran began to open up to the world, normalize its relations with its Arab neighbors. There was even talk of a detente between the United States and Iran during the Clinton presidency. So that was a kind of era when Iran was on a trajectory towards a very different future than the one it has today.
- [30:32]
Martin DeCaro
So it sounds like you're saying that Rafsanjani was more influential at this critical moment than Khamenei was as he becomes supreme leader. So after the Cold War ends and the United States leads a coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, it appears Iraq has been weakened and sidelined. And now there are new opportunities opening up, maybe for even a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. George Bush again, we're still before Clinton here. George Bush calls peace conference in Madrid.
- [31:04]
Roham Alvandi
Yes.
- [31:05]
Martin DeCaro
And there were elements within the US Government who said, we must invite Iran. But others said, no, that's a terrorist supporting country. The scholar John Ghazvinian also argues that in addition to Iran's history of hostility with the United States post 1979, that Israel also at this moment seized on an opportunity to convince the United States, talking about the Israeli government and its lobby in the US to convince the US Government that Iran is now the new problem. So, long story short, in the end, Iran is not invited to the Madrid peace talks. And from the perspective of the Iranians, as you said, Roham, they're trying to open up, even have a rapprochement with the United States, and they're rejected.
- [31:49]
News Reporter
The alternative to peace in the Middle east is a future of violence and waste and tragedy. In any future war lurks the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. As we learned in the Gulf War, modern arsenals make it it possible to attack urban areas, to put the lives of innocent men, women and children at risk.
- [32:12]
Roham Alvandi
In the 1990s, we had the Oslo peace process. There was a moment there where if the pragmatic reformist forces in Iran had triumphed and if this peace process in the Middle east had worked, you know, we would have been in a very different place than we are now. But. But there were also many, many forces in Iran and in Israel that were totally opposed to this kind of outcome. Of course, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, dramatically upended the prospect for any kind of real peace settlement.
- [32:51]
Martin DeCaro
What did Khamenei think of the Oslo process? I mentioned how Iran was excluded from the Madrid talks, but did Khamenei support it?
- [32:59]
Roham Alvandi
The position, I think, of the pragmatists in Iran was that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, Iran shouldn't be more Catholic than the Pope. Essentially, if the secular Palestinian factions are willing to reach a peace agreement with Israel, then that should be enough for Iran. Essentially, they really saw people like Rafsanjani, for example, really saw Israel and Israel's influence over American foreign policy as a huge obstacle to opening relations between the United States and Iran. But where they were held back was by conservatives and hardliners in Iran, including people like Ali Khamenei, who were implacably opposed to the idea of compromising on this issue of Israel, Palestine, which really goes to the very heart of the kind of ideology of the Iranian revolution.
- [33:53]
News Reporter
Sure.
- [33:53]
Martin DeCaro
Why was it so opposed to Israel?
- [33:55]
Roham Alvandi
I think you have to understand the worldview of Khomeini and Khomeini and the sort of true believers of the Iranian revolution who see Israel and the Zionist project as some kind of outpost of Western colonialism and imperialism, essentially. So it's a view that's very much influenced by the currents of political Islam in the Arab world. You know, it's no accident that Khomeini was the one who translated Sayyid Qutb's works into Persian, you know, from Arabic. They really feel that, I think, for Many of them that compromising on the issue of anti Americanism and anti Zionism would essentially mean giving up on the core values of the revolution. It would be an abandonment of everything, you know, that they believe in. Rafsanjani tried very hard to push back against that point of view. I mean, don't get me wrong, Rafsanjani was no dove. During his presidency, he also signed off on assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe. They killed the former Iranian Prime Minister, Shahpur Bakhtiar, who was in Paris, the Shah's last prime minister, follower of Mossadegh. So he was no dove, but he was a. He was a realist, a pragmatist who was willing to take the risk of compromising on this kind of revolutionary ideology in order to get economic gains from a good relationship with the United States.
- [35:30]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, the economy needed it. And what a missed opportunity here in the mid-1990s where you had elements in both the US government and the Iranian government willing to work together on a number of things and go, including, of all things, an Israeli Palestinian peace deal. But you had more hardline elements on each side, in addition to Israel pushing the US to see Iran as the number one enemy. Now, these more, I don't know. I said they were radical. Maybe the right way of calling it is conservative. Conservative hardliners in Iran for them, they
- [36:03]
Roham Alvandi
look at what happened in 1989, and they worry that the same thing will happen to them. You know, they look at how the Soviet Union unraveled. They look at what happened to the communist governments in Eastern Europe, and they worry that these reformists and pragmatists in Iran will be the Gorbachevs who bring down the Islamic Republic. On the other hand, they look at China and what happened at Tiananmen Square and how the Communist Party in China dealt with that uprising. And they say, well, look, they held a hard line and they survived 1989, and look what happened to the Soviet Union. So these are the kind of lessons that these conservatives and hardliners in Iran draw. That, you know, giving an inch, making any kind of compromise is a recipe for disaster.
- [36:49]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation continues. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads.
- [37:09]
Ad Voice
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- [37:39]
Martin DeCaro
While Ronald Reagan once said the Iranian Revolution is a fact of history, but between American and Iranian basic national interests, there need be no permanent conflict.
- [37:49]
News Reporter
Since 1983, various countries have made overtures to stimulate direct contact between the United States and Iran. European near east and Far east countries have attempted to serve as intermediaries. Despite a US Willingness to proceed, none of these overtures bore fruit. With this history in mind, we were receptive last year when we were alerted to the possibility of establishing a direct dialogue with Iranian officials. Now, let me repeat. America's long standing goals in the region have been to help preserve Iran's independence from Soviet domination, to bring an honorable end to the bloody Iran Iraq war, to halt the export of subversion and terrorism in the region. A major impediment to those goals has been an absence of dialogue, a cutoff in communication between us.
- [38:41]
Martin DeCaro
The Iranian revolution is a fact of history. However, within Iran, maybe within Khamenei's head, there is a sense of insecurity. It's been a horrible decade from 1979 to 1989, and they're not sure this is going to survive. So about Ali Khamenei, this man who is just assassinated By Israel After 37 years in power, he takes power in the late 1980s. He probably begins to change government to his liking at some point in the 90s and early 2000s. What's his vision for Iran? You know, every leader comes into power, maybe they have a vision for where they want to take the country. They have a certain set of motivations and ideas. We've covered that already. He was a religious scholar. And then they have aims of where they see the country going. But it doesn't seem like Haminet really wanted to go anywhere. He was a real hardline conservative, meaning against change.
- [39:36]
Roham Alvandi
He probably saw his own role certainly in the early years as acting as a kind of brake on all of these other political actors in Iran who did have these kind of visions that you're talking about, you know, and who wanted to take Iran in sort of dramatically different directions. And I, and I think he saw his role essentially as being the guardian of the revolution itself and protecting the revolution against any kind of deviation, but also against the danger of internal collapse. I think where that changed quite dramatically, though was after September 11, particularly after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A great deal of hubris began to sort of creep into Khamenei's thinking. There was a sense amongst the higher echelons of the Islamic Republic, amongst commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, Khamenei himself, you know, that the United States was somehow now in retreat. It had suffered this devastating blow, that it had entered into this foolish war in Iraq with this quagmire, and that this was an opportunity essentially to turn the tables on the United States in the Middle East. Incredible hubris. And then, of course, this was only fueled by the Arab Spring, the collapse of pro American Arab rulers, most importantly Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. And this again, fueled this sense that, well, you know, our time has come, and that there will be pro Iranian regimes ruling from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut. Khamenei saw himself not just as the guardian of the revolution in Iran, but as the sort of vanguard of what they began to call the Axis of Resistance, you know, against the United States of Israel.
- [41:30]
Martin DeCaro
A mostly Shia dominated axis. Correct. And to turn Iran into a regional power. But it wasn't through direct conflict. Khamenei chose to do this through proxies. Hezbollah was an indigenous Lebanese militia that was formed to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But from the very beginning, the group that became Hezbollah had Iranian backing. Why did he choose to do this through proxies?
- [41:57]
Roham Alvandi
If you think about what are the engines driving this history in the Middle east, the American invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring. I mean, neither of these things have anything to do with Iran, really. I mean, Iran is not. It's not a rise in Iranian power that's driving any of these things. What's happening is that the United States is essentially creating political vacuums in the region. You know, there's political vacuum in Iraq, and Iran is kind of opportunistically filling these vacuums, filling these voids. And how is it doing that? By sponsoring proxies, you know, in these countries, by arming and funding militias to exert its influence, particularly in Iraq, but also the Houthis in Yemen and Bashar Assad's beleaguered regime in. In Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon. The thinking behind this strategy is that this is relatively low cost. It doesn't involve, you know, massive amounts of Iranian casualties, although there were some, but not huge scale. And it's always at sort of arm's length. You know, the battlefields are not in Iran itself. The fighting is going on somewhere else,
- [43:07]
Martin DeCaro
but it's turning Iran into an international pariah.
- [43:10]
Roham Alvandi
Well, until the Arab Spring, it was probably working to some extent.
- [43:15]
Martin DeCaro
Well, some would have argued that it was working until October 7, 2023, and then it collapsed. But go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt.
- [43:22]
Roham Alvandi
You know, after the Iraq War, the American invasion of Iraq was seen as so illegitimate and so unpopular that the Iranians could get a lot of mileage out of the idea of leading the resistance to American and Israeli aggression in the region. And if you remember, you know, in those days, for example, during the Ahmadinejad presidency in Iran, when these conservatives came back to power in Iran, they were relatively popular throughout the Arab world, you know, in the Arab street. But what really changes the dynamic is the Arab Spring, because after the Arab Spring, the Islamic Republic is seen by many of its neighbors as essentially opposing the cause of freedom in the Arab world and supporting undemocratic and rather brutal forces, particularly Bashar Assad's murderous regime in
- [44:16]
Martin DeCaro
Syria and the 2009 Green Revolution. After an election that appeared to be rigged or wasn't entirely fair reading to prepare for our conversation, I learned that prior to 2009, the regiment among Iranians wasn't nearly as unpopular as it is today. And 2009 marked a real turning point there because of the repression, the violent repression of the protests in 2009. But I just want to say about 911 and then the Iraq war, even I could understand that by toppling the Sunni secular counterbalance to Tehran, Tehran would gain a lot of influence in Iraq. And that didn't seem to occur to George Bush, Dick Cheney. Maybe it did, and they simply ignored it. That they could manage a new problem that was created by getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but I don't know. So, yes, I think you're right. The United States created a power vacuum that Iran stepped into.
- [45:15]
Roham Alvandi
Absolutely.
- [45:15]
Martin DeCaro
Maybe that came back to hurt Iran in the long run. There's overextension on all sides. But about 911 to a larger point here, Rohan. On the one hand, we're dealing with an implacably hostile, anti Western, anti Israel, repressive, authoritarian police state in Iran. But at the same time, there were moments, missed opportunities where he talked about the 1990s and how the reformers were sidelined. Ultimately, even after 9 11, the United States and Iran very quietly agreed to work together. Iran agreed to close its borders so the Taliban could not escape westward into Iran during the military military operation in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. But then somebody put in a speech by George W. Bush that Iran is part of an axis of evil.
- [46:05]
News Reporter
Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports, terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.
- [46:13]
Martin DeCaro
We're right back to where we started again.
- [46:16]
Roham Alvandi
Just like there are pragmatists and hardliners in Tehran, I'm afraid there are also pragmatists and hardliners in Washington D.C. and where we have these brief sort of windows of opportunity where pragmatic, realist kind of thinkers are in power. In both capitals, we managed to make some sort of progress. And when we have extremists and radicals in power in Washington and Tehran, they seem to somehow feed off each other. You know, they. They actually, in really bizarre ways, feed each other's narratives of animosity and enmity. There was an opportunity after 9 11, I think, when President Khatami was in office in Iran, there was a real opportunity for the United States and Iran to cooperate, particularly when it came to Iraq. But, you know, that was really squandered by the Bush administration with its axis of evil rhetoric. And that was, I think, very much under the influence of Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and others in that administration who couldn't stomach the idea of cooperating with the Islamic Republic in any way, shape or form.
- [47:25]
Martin DeCaro
Well, because history does matter. I mean, Iran was behind the Marine barracks bombing. And I'm not saying people should get over something like that, but a lot of American policymakers have not forgotten that. And it influences their current decision making. There's that old saying, there are no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. Yeah. So to some, it might seem bizarre to even suggest that the United States and Iran could have worked together on a counter terrorism strategy after 9 11. Iran. That's the messy world of international relations.
- [47:59]
Roham Alvandi
Unfortunately, it's very hard to get all the kind of stars aligned in a situation where any kind of sensible policy could follow that would benefit both countries. You know, you put your finger on it with 2009. Really, I think that was really the turning point.
- [48:15]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, let's talk about that now. Green revolution. How does that change Khamenei's approach to his own people?
- [48:22]
Roham Alvandi
Prior to 2009, a lot of things were possible. I don't think Iranians were sort of thrilled with the Islamic Republic or enamored of the situation they found themselves in, but they were willing to tolerate their situation if there was some sort of of peaceful path towards a better future for them. They were willing to even participate in elections to, you know, work within the red lines set by the Islamic Republic if they were convinced that it did actually matter who they voted for and that that would actually have sort of tangible differences for their lives. And it did. You know, it really did mattered in terms of Iran's relations with the West. It mattered in terms of sanctions. It mattered in terms of, of the state of the economy. It even mattered in terms of the degree of cultural freedom inside Iran. You know, so they were willing to accept and participate in this very imperfect and limited form of elections. And because the alternative was so unpalatable to them. The alternative was chaos and destruction. You know, what we're seeing today in Iran, what happened in 2009 is that that alternative was removed. That possibility of any kind of democratic or peaceful path to reform was closed by Khamenei because of a sense of panic that set in in 2009 when the regime saw millions of Iranians on the streets of Tehran angry that their votes had not been counted in the 2009 presidential election. They really were terrified that this was the end of the regime, but this was their 1989 moment. They instituted a security state that has never gone away since and has actually become worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
- [50:14]
Martin DeCaro
Because there was a series of uprisings over the years, culminating in this most recent one that was met with probably what was the harshest repression of all.
- [50:24]
Roham Alvandi
That's right. That's right. The Islamic Republic since 2009 has been digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole, essentially. Occasionally when the hole is really, really deep, they will, for a period, allow one of these kind of pragmatic figures to come to the fore, which was the case with Rouhani. Hassan Rouhani, who served as president after Ahmadinejad. He did a fairly good job of trying to get things back to some semblance of where they were before 2009. You know, he negotiated the nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015. After two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not, a comprehensive long term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He got the Iranian economy more or less stable after a disastrous kind of period. He managed to get inflation down and he managed to get GDP growth back up. So there was some hope that, okay, maybe Iran can turn things around. It wasn't a coincidence that that coincided with the Obama presidency and you had a president in the United States willing to take a very pragmatic approach to Iran and who understood that fundamentally there is no military solution to the problem with Iran and that the way to deal with it is through negotiations. And you did that, I think, very effectively on a multilateral basis.
- [51:55]
Martin DeCaro
So just reading from an obituary here, this echo one of your earlier points. Instead of reforming, Ali Khamenei shifted the balance of power by gradually centralizing authority. Consequently, elected bodies like the government and parliament, even those with high popular mandates, lost much of their decision making influence as the core of power moved toward a limited, unelected inner circle. You also mentioned, Roham, how the IRGC became more powerful not only in the military and intelligence realm, but also in the economic realm, control of the Iranian economy. This leads to a lot of corruption, of course. So it sounds like Khamenei really was the one, if not involved in the day to day. Well, maybe I should just ask you, I mean, how involved was he in the day to day particulars of government? Because he's been called a dictator. But sometimes dictators don't have the strongest work ethics, if you know what I mean. Or they promote competition among the different factions beneath them. Go ahead.
- [52:54]
Roham Alvandi
What you're describing was probably the case in the early years of Khamenei's. I sort of described him as an umpire of the system, you know, the ultimate arbitrator of all these different centers of power. But I think really as time went on, particularly after 2009, he concentrated more and more and more power in his own hands and inside his own office. What the Iranians call the Bayt, the House of the Leader became this kind of sprawling apparatus that really had its fingers in every part of the country and was very, very intimately connected to the Revolutionary Guards to the degree that, you know, the actual government, you know, the president and the cabinet and the various ministries in Iran found themselves increasingly sidelined and having to sort of take their orders either from the Supreme Leader's office or from the Revolutionary Guards. And occasionally this friction would burst out into the open. I mean, I remember when Ahmadinejad was president, he went on strike for about a week and refused to show up at meetings because he was so angry that he had no authority and even his own intelligence ministry was no longer reporting to him. And so, you know, what happened is that Khamenei, he essentially was somebody who did not have either the imagination or the inclination or the risk tolerance to be able to take this regime and this revolution towards some kind of legitimate, enduring system. Instead, given his age, he saw himself as somebody who would die defending the revolution that he had helped come to victory. And I don't think he wanted it to be his legacy that he was the one that Oversaw, you know, the end of that revolution. I think he wanted to be remembered as the one who defended that revolution. And in a really bizarre way, I think by assassinating him in a way, Trump has given him a gift in that he was going to probably die in the coming years anyway.
- [54:53]
Martin DeCaro
Cancer. Right.
- [54:54]
Roham Alvandi
And he was ill instead. Now he can go down in history, certainly for his supporters, as, you know, someone who martyred. Who was martyred in the cause of
- [55:03]
Martin DeCaro
the revolution about nuclear weapons, which is a big part of the current war. Khamenei, despite his hardline views, was a restraint on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. He did allow his diplomats to engage with the Obama administration and they came up with the JCPOA. What was it, 2014, 2015. Somewhere there. Yeah, 2015. Why did Khamenei believe the nuclear threshold was a better place to be than going all the way to the bomb? He even issued a fatwa, which is a major deal against nuclear weapons. He said it was un Islamic. Can you address that? Part of his legacy? And then we'll wrap up.
- [55:44]
Roham Alvandi
The nuclear program historically predates the revolution. Predates the revolution, yeah. I mean, you have to remember this was the Shah's nuclear program. Instead of using Iran's oil and gas for domestic consumption, it should be exported to earn revenue for Iran. And for domestic consumption, they should build a nuclear industry to generate, you know, electricity. This was the logic behind it. There was another kind of hidden motive, which was really pride. It was about pride, the club of countries that have access to this technology that produce nuclear energy and that if they wanted to, could use this technology to build nuclear weapons. That's a pretty small elite club of countries you're talking about. Countries like, I don't know, Canada and Germany and Japan and, you know, so this became an issue of pride. But what happened is that. But as the threat from the United States became more and more real, I think that the calculations as to, well, it might not be a bad idea for us to have a kind of bomb in the basement, that it might not be a bad idea to at least develop a dual use capacity so that if we had to kind of rush to build a bomb, we could do it. I think that idea began to creep in. And so. So Khamenei, I think, and the guards and so on, tried to maintain this kind of ambiguity around it, at the same time quietly developing the capabilities in case it was ever needed one day down the road, but at the same time, obviously trying to avoid an American or Israeli attack on Iran, you know, to destroy its nuclear facilities. I think the point about the nuclear program is that it was essentially contained by the JCPOA in 2015. It was under pretty tight inspection by the IAEA. Iran's stockpile of fissile material was very carefully monitored and controlled. There was no imminent danger Iran was going to test a nuclear device or anything like that. You know, and I. And I think that problem could have been managed pretty effectively in that way. Given what we now know about the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran, it's difficult for me to believe that the Israelis were not fully informed of absolutely every aspect of Iran's nuclear program, which must have been their number one priority for intelligence collection in Iran. So I don't think the nuclear program really was the real issue driving this war that we're now seeing between the United States, Israel and Iran.
- [58:20]
Martin DeCaro
That may have been Khamenei's sole positive legacy. And now that's up in smoke, literally and figuratively. So final thing here, his rule was a disaster.
- [58:31]
Roham Alvandi
I think there's no doubt about that. It was an absolute disaster for Iran. He could have been the leader who led Iran away from the dark legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini, and he could have been the one who allowed Iran to go down the path of reform and detente with the West. But he did exactly the opposite. He thwarted every effort to do that, and he did not even hold back from killing thousands of Iranians on the streets of Iran's cities in January. And I think that will be his abiding legacy as the man who tried to stand in the way of the tide of history, refused to face the reality that the Islamic Republic just has no more legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people. Iranians are craving, you know, some kind of change in Iran. It's just tragic to me that change may come at a tremendous cost to them.
- [59:34]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. And with no real friends either. As bad as the Shah was, the Shah had friends and there was. Well, he was considered the island of stability by the US until he wasn't.
- [59:44]
Roham Alvandi
But I think it's night and day, you know. I mean, the Shah was an autocrat, there's no doubt about that, you know, but the Shah's view of the world and of Iran was fundamentally based on some form of nationalism. I mean, the Shah, one of my colleagues, Abbas Milani, always says that the Shah loved Iran, but he loved Iran very badly. And I think that's probably true. He had great aspirations for Iran, and he wanted Iran to be modern and engaged with the world. But I think his problem was to some extent, like Khomeini, he just didn't trust Iranians enough to be able to be the masters of their own destiny and always thought that he knew better. Ultimately, when Iranians told the Shah that they didn't want him anymore and they wanted him to go, you know, he left. He surrendered power and he left the country. Khamenei and this regime, you know, are not going anywhere. They have nowhere to go. You know, I think they will absolutely fight tooth and nail to the last Iranian, you know, to hold onto power.
- [60:44]
News Reporter
It was the second time in his 37 years on the Peacock throne that the Shah was forced to flee Iran. The first time in August 1953 when he was ousted in a brief parliamentary takeover. The CIA put him back in power six days later. But many observers believe today's departure will spell the end of the 59 year old monarch's rule. As he and his wife, the Empress Farah, left Tehran, the Shah carried a small container of Iranian soil.
- [61:12]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll stay in the Middle east where several wars are raging at once. The Israeli military is once more inside Lebanon trying to create a positive outcome for Israeli security. A decades long pattern that has consistently failed. We'll return to 1982 when Israel effected regime change in Lebanon. It it did not work out. That is next. As we report History as it Happens, make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today
- [62:47]
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