This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As the U.S. and Israel war on Iran enters its 13th day, the war is escalating on a number of fronts. Iran has accused the U.S. and Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals. Attacks have reportedly forced 12 Iranian hospitals to halt services. Earlier today, Israel announced it had hit a nuclear site outside of Tehran that Iran has long claimed was used for civilian purposes.
Meanwhile, a preliminary Pentagon report confirms the U.S. was responsible for last week’s missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed 168 children and 14 teachers. The Pentagon said outdated data from the Defense Intelligence Agency likely led to the strike. The Pentagon is also investigating whether the mistake was connected to the military’s use of artificial intelligence. The Washington Post recently revealed the military is relying heavily on a system created by Palantir designed to help with real-time targeting and target prioritization. The system, known as Maven, using the AI tool Claude made by Anthropic.
On Wednesday, President Trump was asked about the school strike.
REPORTER: A new report says that the military investigation has found that the United States struck the school in Iran. As commander-in-chief, do you take responsibility for that?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That is what? What did you —
REPORTER: As commander-in-chief, do you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: For what?
REPORTER: For the strike on the school in Iran. A new report says the military investigation has found it was the United States that struck the school.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Later on Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Kentucky in the district of Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie, a vocal Trump critic. Trump claimed the U.S. has already won the war in Iran.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we’ve won. Let me say, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the bet — in the first hour, it was over.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite Trump’s victory claim, Iran has attacked three more ships in the Gulf, including two tankers off the coast of Iraq. Iran has also targeted fuel tanks at a facility in Bahrain. The attacks sent the cost of oil back over $100 a barrel, up over 30% since the war began.
We’re joined now by Narges Bajoghli, associate professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS. She’s the co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. Professor Bajoghli is also the author of Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic.
Thanks so much, Professor, for coming back on to Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off by talking about your latest New York Magazine piece, in which you talk about the new divisions among Iranians that no longer fall along the old political lines of monarchist versus leftist?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yeah, so, what has been happening among Iranians, whether within Iran or in the diaspora, has been an extreme form of polarization that has been occurring over the past, I would say, year and a half to two years. Much of this has to do and came under the umbrella of the maximum-pressure sanctions and policy that the Trump administration first imposed on Iran in his first presidency. That was not just a package of severe economic sanctions, but also millions of dollars poured into media infrastructures, media warfare and psychological operations.
Part of what that was — part of what that money went towards was funding huge amounts of social media and satellite television stations, some of which are very pro-monarchy, one of which is Iran International, which beams into Iran and has a very robust social media apparatus. The best way to describe Iran International is kind of like Fox News in the United States, where the same ways in which Fox sort of — Fox News has helped to really polarize this country in ways that are quite significant, Iran International has done the same. And over the past couple of years, it has been pushing a very pro-monarchy line, and it has really done a lot to erase a lot of the diversity within the Iranian political imagination and sort of Iranian political society. Today, what we have is now a very fragmented and very divided political sphere in which the only options are you are either pro-regime or you are pro-Pahlavi and want the Israeli and American invasion of Iran in order to liberate the country.
AMY GOODMAN: And when you say “pro-Pahlavi,” explain. Explain first who the shah was, who the U.S. installed after they overthrew the democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was elected in 1953. And take us through that right to his son.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Sure. So, when Mohammad Mosaddegh was deposed in 1953, it was the first covert operation of the newly established CIA, and they worked alongside British intelligence in order to do that coup. They reinstated the shah, and he became increasingly autocratic in the 16 years that he continued to rule the country. He had very close relationships with the Americans and the Israelis. And this resentment began to brew in Iranian society, and the narrative began to form that the shah was a puppet of the United States. And many people were very opposed to the sort of very autocratic way in which he was ruling inside of Iran.
That led to the 1979 Revolution. And the ’79 Revolution, at its heart, was a claim and a desire for independence and sovereignty from great powers. What ended up happening in the power plays after the revolution gave rise to the Iran — to the Islamic Republic, and it’s sort of then fast-forwarded until today. You have a lot of different people within Iranian society, as well as in the diaspora, who either fought during the revolution and desired something different than the Islamic Republic, or who throughout the years have been really trying to transform this system within the country.
Reza Pahlavi is the son of the former shah of Iran, who was deposed in 1979. He’s been living in exile since 1979. And throughout these 47 years that he’s been in exile, he hasn’t really built anything. We can’t point to any businesses he’s had or any organizations he’s really helped lead and even sort of broad-based coalition building of the diaspora or opposition groups. He’s always been there in the background as the son of the former king, but he really began to come into the foreground of what is happening in the diaspora really over the past couple of years. And in many ways, he’s been pushed into that by very pro-Israel elements in the United States and within Israel itself. What we see sort of play out is not just pushing him forward, but also a concerted effort to heavily silence anyone who does not agree with him or who offers alternative viewpoints of what should be the path forward for Iranian politics and Iranian society.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the SAVAK, the role that they played, the shah’s secret police, terrorizing the population?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yes. So, the SAVAK was a secret police during the shah’s time in Iran. It was helped — formulated by CIA and the Mossad. And it was really sort of one of those massive organizations that Iranians really despise, and it was one of the sort of key elements that helped lead to a lot of the resentments that then led to the ’79 Revolution.
AMY GOODMAN: I was just looking at a tweet of Tariq Ali, who wrote, “His secret police, SAVAK, was one of the most innovative at the time. Backed fully by the CIA they tried out new forms of torture and boasted about their man-sized toaster. Political prisoners were put in this toaster, one at a time and it was switched on so that human [fronts] and backs could be ‘toasted’ at one go.” Professor Bajoghli?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: Yes, the SAVAK was a very vicious secret police and, again, heavily trained by the CIA, had very close relationships with the Mossad. And so, you know, this entire apparatus and sort of this way of understanding Iranian politics as either being — you know, it either has to be completely pro-Western, and not even just pro-Western, but sort of under the yoke of America and what America wants in the region. I mean, at the time, before the revolution, Iran was seen as being the policeman of the Persian Gulf region. It was one of the United States’s biggest allies, especially during the Cold War, because of Iran’s long borders with the Soviet Union at the time.
And so, in that way, the SAVAK and the entire apparatus of the monarchy at the time suppressed all kinds of domestic dissent heavily, especially the leftists, but all across the political spectrum. The only ones that they did not suppress, mostly because they could not, was the religious establishments in the country. And so, one of the reasons you also have the emergence of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the ’79 Revolution is because one of the only sort of social groups that could continue to organize in the 1960s and 1970s were those who were tied to religious organizations in the country, because all other forms of dissent had been pushed out.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to President Trump speaking yesterday.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We did a little excursion. We had to take this little — a couple of weeks’, few weeks’ excursion. But it’s been incredible. Our military is unbelievable, the job they’re doing. I would say, to put it mildly, way ahead of schedule. We’ve knocked out their navy, their military in all forms. We’ve knocked out just about everything there is, including their leadership, twice. We knocked it out twice, their leadership. Now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them. … Do you have any questions, Peter?
PETER DOOCY: Yes. You just said it is a little excursion, and you said it is a war. So, which one is it?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, it’s both. It’s both. It’s a — an excursion that will keep us out of a war. And the war is going to be — and for them, it’s a war. For us, it’s turned out to be easier than we thought.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Narges Bajoghli, your response to President Trump calling the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran “a little excursion”? This coming out at the same time that the Pentagon’s own preliminary report, in one case, the bombing of the girls’ school in southern Iran, that it — they’re saying that it was a U.S. Tomahawk missile, right? A hundred sixty-eight children killed and 14 teachers. As an Iranian, Iranian American now, your thoughts?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: I mean, this entire war, from the strike on that girls’ school to the strike that happened last weekend of the oil depots around Tehran, which caused a massive poisoning event of black rain and acid rain falling across a city of over 9 million people, Trump talking about the desire to alter Iran’s map, this is all being read inside of Iran as a war on the Iranian people and on the Iranian nation.
The Islamic Republic has not crumbled, even though they took out the supreme leader. And just yesterday, Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence has concluded that the Islamic Republic is not even close to buckling under this kind of pressure. So, this is being read inside Iran as a war on the nation and on the civilian population because of the way that it is being carried out, and it is increasing, then, the sense of nationalism.
On the other hand, the United States is receiving — you know, Iran cannot militarily go head to head with the United States. Instead, what Iran does, and has been doing, is asymmetrical warfare. And in that regard, the U.S. military is and the U.S. architecture across the Gulf countries is receiving a major blow, and this is something that is causing a lot of political damage across the Gulf region for the Americans. So this is not something that, just because President Trump says he wants to switch it off, can actually function in that way. This is going to have very long-reaching repercussions.
AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, an Iranian military spokesperson warned the price of oil could reach $200 a barrel.
EBRAHIM ZOLFAQARI: [translated] We will not be able to keep oil and energy prices artificially low through economic life support. As we have already warned, if the war spreads across the region, expect oil to reach $200 per barrel. Oil prices will follow the level of security in the region, and the source of that insecurity is you. … Our hands are full of stronger and more powerful blows. As we continue the previous enemy-crushing operations, we will avenge the pure blood of our martyred leader, our beloved nation, the innocent women and children and the innocent angels of Minab who were killed.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s an Iranian government spokesperson. Professor Bajoghli, your response?
NARGES BAJOGHLI: So, Iran has been under pretty significant sanctions for many decades now, and maximum-pressure sanctions for about eight to nine years now. It has been pushed out of the global economy. So, one of the things that Iran is doing in this war is hitting at the global economy that it, itself, has been isolated against. And it knows that the only way to actually change the terms of debates when it comes to Iran and to have — to not go back to a status quo ante, meaning to not go back to where things were before this war started, where, again, there was a ceasefire, but Israel and America are able to violate that ceasefire —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
NARGES BAJOGHLI: And so, they will continue to target the oil markets in order to pressure the Americans and others to back away from this war.
AMY GOODMAN: Narges Bajoghli, we want to thank you so much for being with us, associate professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. We thank you so much for being with us.
When we come back, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard about the assassination of the Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed, the U.S. war on Iran and more.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian Youth Choir performing in New York City.
