Chris Hedges: The Trump administration and
Iran have agreed to a ceasefire and two weeks of negotiations, which began in
Islamabad following six weeks of warfare. The basis of the negotiations will be
a 10-point proposal put forward by Iran, not Trump’s vaunted 15-point plan,
that include a call for cessation of all hostilities in the region, including
in Lebanon where Israel has been carrying out punishing airstrikes, reparations
paid to Iran, the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets, a
withdrawal of U.S. military bases in the region, the lifting of all sanctions
on Iran, and a permanent and formalized end to hostilities. The agreement calls
for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the
world’s daily oil and gas shipments are transited.
Iran, however, has so far refused to open the Strait,
insisting that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon must first end and the billions in
frozen assets must be repatriated to Iran.
While Iran has clearly suffered devastating blows to
its infrastructure, manufacturing, and military assets, including naval and air
assets, while it has seen senior leaders, including the Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, assassinated, none of the objectives set out by Israel in the US have
been met. The Iranian regime remains in power. It controls the Strait. It
retains significant missile and drone stockpiles, and it still possesses
enriched uranium.
Iran is the clear winner of Operation Epic Fury. The
US is indisputably in a weaker position than when the war began. Trump has, at
the same time, caused incalculable damage to America’s moral reputation by
taking part in an unprovoked attack on Iran and openly advocating war crimes,
including a call to obliterate Iranian civilization and take out civilian
infrastructure, including power plants. He squandered an estimated $39 billion
on the war, costs that will be felt at home, especially with rising prices. The
global economy remains in crisis, and even if hostilities do not resume, it
will take months to recover.
Iran, most importantly, is now the indisputable master of
the Strait, charging tankers $2 million to transit through the Strait. It has a
stranglehold on the global economy. The new Iranian leadership, centered around
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is more defiant and intransigent than
the old leadership killed by Israel and the U.S. in targeted assassinations.
This is bad news for the U.S. and especially Israel.
US and Israeli strikes killed more than 1,700 Iranian
civilians, including 254 children. Three million Iranians have been displaced
from their homes, along with one million Lebanese. Add to these numbers the two
million Palestinians displaced by the genocide in Gaza. Six million people
rendered homeless.
Joining me to discuss the war on Iran is Alistair Crooke,
a former British diplomat, who served for many years in the Middle East working
as a security advisor to the EU Special Envoy to the Middle East, as well as
helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and other Palestinian resistance groups. He was instrumental in
establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author
of “Resistance, the Essence of the Islamist Revolution”, which analyzes the
ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.
I’ll just begin, Alistair, with a very broad question.
Where are we at this moment?
Alastair Crooke: It’s a very broad question. It’s
a very good question because this is not really clear at the moment. First of
all, although we call it a ceasefire, it is not really a ceasefire, in the
sense that a ceasefire normally has some prior understandings that underpin a
ceasefire. We do have a halt of, if you like, military activities across, or
supposed to be across, all fronts. Although in the introduction you pointed out
that Israel was attacking Lebanon causing many deaths and casualties in the
process in a deliberate act to exclude Lebanon from the whole process.
What’s happening at the moment is that there are two
delegations in Islamabad. They are not meeting directly; they are meeting
indirectly. They are quite big delegations because there are delegations of
experts that are involved in this process. It is hinged on the 10-point plan or
framework that Iran insisted there should be. The precondition for the meeting
to take place was that the United States should agree that this was an
acceptable basis for discussion. The Americans agreed to that.
Now, where we are at the moment is, as I understand it
from Islamabad, is that nothing really very much is happening. There are the
general discussions, but the Iranians believe that the United States have not
fulfilled some of the undertakings they gave to Pakistan. Particularly, there
seems to be hitches on the release of the frozen assets. And there are other
elements that are taking place that are not very clear at the moment. I think
it would be better to describe this, particularly from an Iranian point of
view, this was an effort, if you like, to have at least a halt in the military
side of the war to explore whether there was any room for maneuver,
politically.
I mean we call that in the Middle East a Hudna rather than a ceasefire. It’s a temporary truce,
if you like, really to explore if there is political will to move forward. And
as I understand it, at this moment, that is not clear. So, it’s not clear
whether the negotiations will continue past today or whether they will end
today.
I don’t think that there is any great expectation of an
agreement, certainly from the Iranian side. And I think that we may find that
we finish the day with nothing really solid emerging from this. And the
continual prospect that there will be military action initiated by Israel
either again in Lebanon, where Israel is insistent that it should not be
included in this process and that this is quite separate and that they’re in
discussion with the Lebanese government in order to have the demilitarization,
the disarmament, of Hezbollah, and that’s a separate issue and can’t be
included.
The Iranian position is very simple. It’s going to be
either a ceasefire for all or a ceasefire for nobody. If the Israelis insist
that Lebanon is outside of these agreements and outside of these discussions,
then in that case Israel can be outside of these discussions and Iran will
continue the war on Israel.
So, I think it’s unclear how far we are going to get, but
the expectations, as I hear or judge from there, are not very optimistic that
something will emerge. And it’s not surprising. I mean, I don’t think it’s
surprising. I’m sure it isn’t surprising to you because there are enormous
contradictions in this whole process.
They are the differences in the interests
of the United States and of Iran and what Iran’s objectives are, which are very
poorly understood, I believe, in the United States and poorly understood more
generally in the West, how serious they are, the objectives for this war.
I mean, in a nutshell, the objectives of Iran are to blow
up the existing paradigm. That is a revolutionary objective, to blow it up
completely in order that they can escape, if you like, from the cage in which
they’ve been held for 48 years, surrounded by US military forces, besieged by
tariffs, by restrictions, UN resolutions, political isolation, economic,
cultural, if you like, boycott.
So, this is what they are trying to break out
from. It’s not the same cage that the Hamas and the Palestinians are in in
Gaza, which has got a literal fence and drones and monitoring of it, but Iran
is intent on breaking the paradigm. And the key to breaking that paradigm, of
course, is the Hormuz and their control of the Hormuz, which is the centerpiece
of their strategic objectives.
Chris Hedges: Do they have the capacity, in
your view, to break that paradigm?
Alastair Crooke: Yes, I think they have moved
in that direction. I noticed what you said in the introduction about the
devastation that had been visited on Iran, and I know this will seem
counterintuitive to many of your listeners, but in fact Iran has emerged from
this one month of war or so in a much stronger position than it did from the
‘12-Day War’ in June. It is in a much stronger position.
There is a lot of propaganda on all sides in this war,
but there are some things that one can say very clearly that Iran has affected
enormous damage on American bases in the Gulf area. It has destroyed all the
radar abilities. I think altogether something like seven radars have been
destroyed in the first phase of the war. They have not only destroyed that,
they have complete control over the Hormuz and they have still, at this time -
of course, Iran doesn’t have an air force and therefore cannot have air dominance,
but instead of which they have created missile dominance over the airspace of
the whole region, including Israel.
The damage to their missile capabilities
has been grossly overstated by the old tactic of just counting, this goes back
to Vietnam, counting air strikes. And one of the things that has been most
notable in this period is before the war, Iran bought from China a huge number
of decoys -decoy planes, decoy missiles - and one of the things, not only are
they very effective in their appearance, but I didn’t know until recently, is
they have a heat source in them. So, they are hot. And so of course that shows
up on the American sensors and the Israeli sensors as a real target, a real
plane, a real missile when it’s really only a decoy.
The missile systems are buried deep in mountains. A main
missile is 800 meters under a granite mountain. It has a whole railway system
in the mountain and that carries the missiles from the cities, from the
magazine, along a railway track to an entrance. A door opens, the missile is
fired from the railway line, and then the door shuts. And, although it’s been bombed innumerable times, part of
that 16,000 strikes we have made on Iran, it still functions. Half an hour
after the airstrike, the missile comes out and continues. The mountain is
getting slightly damaged and black, but nothing is affecting the missile
cities.
Their command system is functioning, thanks to the mosaic
decentralization of command, disbursement of command. It’s created almost a
sort of mechanical structure that snaps into action as soon as Iran is attacked
or as soon as there is an attempt at a decapitation strike. I mean they started
instituting this after what they saw in 2003 with the American attack on
Baghdad that they had to find a way of countering this and countering the air
attacks that took place in Baghdad.
So, I mean, it’s impossible to give precise figures, but
I believe that the number of deaths in Tehran are probably less than in the
‘12-Day War’. They did this simply by - they learned from the ‘12-Day War’
-empty every public building completely. So, universities, everything, are
completely empty. All the government offices are empty. And so, Israel has been
destroying those, counting those up as a huge damage caused to Iran.
And the most significant thing, I would say, is the
financial aspect of it. In the first month of this war, Iran has earned double
from its oil sales and tankers, double what it has earned in any month for
several years past. It’s earned double. If you take just one case about a week
ago last Sunday, there were five tankers loading in Kharg with 7.7 million
barrels of oil. That, on one day, earned Iran 850 million dollars in the sales.
Then, of course, they are earning from 2 million from every tanker and vessel
that passes through Hormuz as part of the toll that they are insisting that
ships have to pay.
So, the economic situation is, one can calculate from
these figures, not just me but others have done that, that on this basis, Iran
could earn a little short of a trillion dollars a year through the control of
the Hormuz. But it doesn’t stop there. And I will explain why, because it’s
also about supply lines. It controls supply lines - helium, sulfuric acid, all
of these essential elements to our supply lines for manufacturing technical
items and also for manufacturing chips and things. The chip factory in Taiwan
is almost at a standstill now because they need helium and they need liquified
gas in order to make chips. So, supply lines, food, fertilizer. This is it.
If you compare it to what happened with China when Trump
imposed a huge tariff on China, 155%, I think, at one point it was. And the
presidency said, “Well, okay, but I’m putting some restrictions actually on
rare earths and other commodities. And so that’s going to be what you’re going
to have to do without.” And of course it changed. And so, really that the
Chinese tactic is also part of the Hormuz structure. It’s not just the sale of
oil, not just the tolls, but it is about supply lines, and it is also something
much more complicated, which is the insistence that the cargos be paid in Yuan.
And this is a part of, if you like, the attempt to
deculture the whole of the GCC area, which has always been the central hub of
dollar hegemony. This is the center of the petrodollar, and it was encouraged
from ‘73 when it started to keep the oil price up because all of the proceeds
go to Wall Street. Wall Street then leverages it in the financial world. And
so, you have in the Gulf States a highly financialized type of economy with all
of the data centers and others there.
And Iran is telling the Gulf states, “If
you want to enjoy a relationship with Iran, you have to get rid of Microsoft,
Amazon. You have to get rid of these. What do you need? This huge 30 billion
data center in the UAE. You have to get rid of this.” This is, if you like,
part of, I wouldn’t call it a cultural revolution because it’s a financial
cultural revolution that the Iranians are seeking to establish. That’s what I
mean by breaking the paradigm.
I’m sorry it’s a complicated explanation, but
it’s bigger than just can ships go up or down. It’s a much bigger, more
ambitious plan than is properly appreciated.
Chris Hedges: Some people have described this
as the equivalent of our Suez Crisis. That was 1956 when the British and the French,
Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. They tried to take it back. It
was a fiasco. They had to retreat, well, along with the Israelis. Would you
agree?
Alastair Crooke: Yes, I would say it’s the
same because there’s really, if anyone knows the geography of Hormuz, I mean
the literal what it looks like, the landscape of Hormuz, it’s very evident that
there is no way that the Americans, as things stand, this has been planned for
a long time by the Iranians.
The whole of that Hormuz sea-line is bordered by
caves. It’s cliffs, and in those cliffs are anti-ship missiles. Under Hormuz,
they have submersible drones.
We haven’t seen them used yet, but these
submersible drones have tunnels under the Hormuz’s waterway so that the drones
can come out under sea, not visible, can’t be seen by anyone. They have lithium
batteries that can last for four days. They have the ability to loiter, and they
have AI capacity to then choose and select targets. Then they have surface
drones, very highspeed drones with explosives.
And what is unnoticed, but is crucial to this, is they
have these mini submarines, two-man submarines, small submarines, but they can
operate in the shallow waters of the Hormuz Strait and the Hormuz Waterway. And
they are equipped with anti-ship missiles and also with these drones too. It
would be a suicide to try and put a landing craft down the Straits.
The Straits
themselves are under fire control because on the other side of Hormuz that is a
sort of bend around the peninsula and then behind that are mountains and they
are riddled with caves and emplacements of artillery. So, the whole of the
Hormuz Straits, you don’t need to have drones or missiles, they control it by
artillery fire. It’s within range. And that exists right up to Kharg Island.
So, any ship trying to go up this waterway will be sunk or damaged and told to
leave.
And if you land forces on the Iranian side, how do you
get them there? How do you sustain them? How do you resupply them? How do you
exfiltrate them? You’re going to land them on Iran. It’s desolate, that part of
Iran. There are no forests. There are in other parts of Iran, but this is just
desolate. And Kharg Island is a very small place. I’ve been to Kharg Island. It
is just a small, flat area where the terminal for the pipelines from inside
Iran come and load tankers.
If you take it, what is that going to do? And anyway,
even if you stop the Iranian oil from flowing to Kharg, then all Iran has to do
is to close Hormuz for three, four weeks and the pain in terms of oil price,
inflation, markets, valuations, will be felt very quickly. So, it’s going to be
very hard to see. This is one of the aspects of these negotiations is the
United States has very few cards to play and has one huge disadvantage, which
is that ultimately, as we saw in terms of Lebanon, the key player in this is
not in Islamabad and that is Israel.
And Israel, overall, has been very clear.
We follow the Israeli press very closely, the Hebrew press. And their aim in
the attack on Lebanon was first of all, to force more time from Trump in order
to continue the attack on Hezbollah. Just to be clear, if a few Hezbollah have
been killed in this, there been hundreds and altogether many more hundreds of
casualties of ordinary Lebanese civilians who have got nothing to do with
Hezbollah.
They’re trying to keep it apart by coming to an
arrangement with the Prime Minister of Lebanon. That this is a separate issue.
We’re going to negotiate the disarmament of Hezbollah with them. Therefore,
it’s not part of the issue. And as I say, the Iranian position is very, the
equation is very clear. The equation is: it’s a ceasefire on all fronts or it’s
a ceasefire on none. And that’s what they will be saying to the American
delegation in Islamabad.
Chris Hedges: Doesn’t Israel seek through
Lebanon? Trump initially agreed that a ceasefire in Lebanon was part of the
deal, then he had a phone call with Netanyahu and immediately backtracked. I
also want to note that when Israel carried out this massive attack, I think
over 10 minutes, there was no warning. I think the numbers of civilian dead are
up to 2,000. I mean to describe it as a terror attack is probably not far. But
it seems that this is Israel’s, and you’re right, Israel is not in Islamabad,
but it was also not a party to the ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan. Is
this Israel’s tool to essentially sabotage any kind of agreement?
Alastair Crooke: Yes, it’s very clear that, and
from the Hebrew press it’s expressed. For example, Alon Ben David said, “Of
course, you know, the attempt now to insist on the disarmament of Hezbollah is
likely to provoke a civil war in Lebanon.” But then adds afterwards, “But
that’s been the aim all along.” And similarly, I noticed that, I think it was
yesterday, the deadline for the disarmament of Hamas has ended. So, if Israel
decides to leave Lebanon quiet for the moment, it’s just as likely that we’re
going to see a massive military operation in Gaza and in the West Bank again.
The objective is quite clear when you read the Hebrew
press. And these are serious political correspondents. We’ve been following
them for years. We know the ones who are close to the leadership and the ones
who are in the opposition. And the ones that are close to the leadership are
very clear, “We want the war to continue.” And in public opinion, that is also
the case. 93 % of the Jewish residents in Israel want the war to continue.
So, this is what is being pursued, how to put the
pressure on Trump to continue the war because they want Iran destroyed, not
just into some sort of agreement on nuclear issues or something. They want it
destroyed. They want to set up a whole series of ethno-sectarian mini-states on
it - Baluchi State, Kurdish State, Azeri State, whatever - set them at odds
with one another and have a completely weakened Iran.
So, Iran is not going to
go back into that paradigm. Why should it under any circumstances? They can see
that and now they are in the process of trying to make a strategic push, a
shift to change that paradigm and to get out of this and to have sanctions
lifted.
One of the points of the Hormuz exercise is because
people are paying tolls and those tolls are, if you like, breaking the
sanctions siege on Iran. And that’s the only way you get your tankers out. And
increasingly, states are coming and agreeing and trying to make arrangements
with Iran, particularly Asian states. Of course, India and Pakistan, but also
South Korea, Japan, they’re all making arrangements to pay the toll and to be
able to access energy through Hormuz.
So, I mean it is breaking, in a small way, but breaking
the sanctions. But they want sanctions lifted completely. And they are using
the Yuan, the imposition of the Yuan, and also the attempt to tell all of the
Gulf States that they have now to abandon their close economic ties with the
United States if they want to have a relationship with Iran. And it’s not just
the American bases, but it’s also the Microsoft, the Amazon, that part of the
structure that has created an environment, an economic culture of the whole
Gulf which is inimical to Iran.
Chris Hedges: I know this is a difficult
question, but how do you read the Trump administration? Do you think that they
are aware of how cornered they are?
Alastair Crooke: No. I don’t think so. I
think this has been a complete misreading, first of all, of the
nature of Iran. I think they thought that Iran was a house of cards and was
going to collapse. We saw that very clearly from the New York Times account of
the 11th of February meeting, which incidentally is only half the story because
we were following in the Hebrew press on the 29th of December when Netanyahu
came and had the summit at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, it was there that he laid
down very clearly to Trump first and he said, “Forget the nuclear issue. You’re
not to pursue that. You have to concentrate on the one issue, we have to end
the missiles, end them because the Iranians are not just replacing them, they
are creating an entirely new umbrella, a new paradigm.
And if it isn’t done,
they will be inviable. We won’t be able to attack them again in the future. So,
you have to put that as your first priority and not the nuclear issue.” “And if
you try to get out of this by doing the nuclear issue,” Netanyahu told him,
quote from many sources in the Hebrew press, “We won’t give you a kosher
certificate for that. We’re not going to accept another sort of JCPOA type
solution. So, and if you don’t have that, you won’t have the support of the
right in the United States. So, you have to do this and there has to be this
attack on Iran.”
And according to all of the newspapers, that was agreed in
principle on the 29th of January, well before the 11th of February meeting that
the New York Times has described. And again, during that it is clear Trump was
convinced this was going to be a very short war, days at most, you know, one
weekend, started on Saturday and by the time markets open on Monday, the
Supreme Leader would be dead and the whole thing would be moving toward a
regime change in Iran And it very clearly hasn’t happened that. In fact,
something quite different is happening. It’s very hard to describe this
correctly. This isn’t wishful thinking on my part, but it’s quite clear to me
that there is a spirit of the Iranian revolution in its new form has come back,
particularly amongst the young.
You can see it when Trump threatened to end the Iranian
civilization, everyone streamed out onto the bridges, onto the nuclear power
station and said, “Okay, here we are. If you’re going to kill us, you kill us.”
I mean, this reflects a deep readiness to accept sacrifice, personal sacrifice,
in the interests of your community, in the interests of Iran as Iran, a
civilization, a symbol of civilization.
So, there is a powerful thing,
particularly amongst the young people now. They are much more fired up after
the killing of the Supreme Leader and much more fired up. Young women, boys,
men, it is something that is quite important and in my belief is having an
effect not just in the region, which it is, the success of Iran in this period,
but in Russia and I’m told in China too. The Chinese thought Iran would manage, but they’ve been
quite surprised at the success that Iran has had and its planning, its
thinking, and the asymmetric war that they’ve been planning for two decades.
So, it’s having an effect in China and in Russia too.
Chris Hedges: Just as a footnote, we should
add that the Persian civilization is 7,000 years old. It’s lasted a lot longer
than the American experiment. But does the Trump administration, at this point
in Islamabad, realize that they don’t have many options left? That Iran is
basically holding all the cards? Or do you think that they are foolish enough
to get sucked back into a resumption of the war?
Alastair Crooke: I think, first of all, the
most important element in this, of course, is Israel because it is quite likely
that Israel will pursue the war. Whether it will do it first of all by Lebanon
or whether it will do it in Gaza or it will do it directly, but as far as
they’re concerned, the war is unfinished business.
Now, this is a paradox, a real paradox, because at the
same time that I’m saying 93 % pursue and support war on Iran and the
destruction of Iran in the polls. It’s even higher on the right, this is an
average, the 93%. At same time I’m saying that there are signs of great
distress inside Israel too. The chief of staff of the army has said, “IDF is on
the point of collapsing.” He went to the last security cabinet meeting and he
said, “I’ve got 10 red lights for you gentlemen because we cannot survive with
this. We are losing heavily, many men in Lebanon.” They had, in that very short
period they were there, nearly 100 Merkava were destroyed.
Chris Hedges: This is the Israeli battle tank
you’re referring to.
Alastair Crooke: Yes, sorry, the main battle
tank and many of them with their crew. Some crew got up, many did not. They’re
losing troops when they tried to invade and form a buffer line in Lebanon. They
were routed.
There is a new Hezbollah. It has gone dark. You don’t see
it. The Israelis complain they’re like ghosts. They appear and they vanish and
you don’t see them again. They’ve evolved. They’ve changed it and they fire
their missiles straight across to Tel Aviv. So, there’s a big fight in Israel
because the defense minister wants a buffer line. They want to level all the
houses for 7-8 km in the south of Lebanon, just destroy them like Gaza, and
have that as a buffer line.
And the defense staff say to him, “This is stupid.
What are you doing this for because Hezbollah has most of its missile capacity
north of the Litani?” The Litani is a river that divides Lebanon about just less
than halfway to the North and they have them north of it. The South has always
been seen as more of Shia preserve.
And this is where the crisis is. On the one hand, the
population wants the war to go on. On the other hand, the military side in
Israel are saying very clearly, “We have achieved none of our objectives in
Iran. We haven’t seen the state collapse. It wasn’t a house of cards. We don’t
believe there can be a color revolution in Iran. We haven’t ended the nuclear
process. We haven’t got the enriched uranium back. We haven’t caused any real
damage. They still are able to fire missiles at us regularly and with very
damaging effects.
So, we have failed in Iran. And we have failed clearly. We
all thought that Hezbollah had been completely decapacitated by the killing of
its leadership and Hassan Nasrallah. And now we find that, actually, they’ve
emerged even more effectively than they were. Very effective, new leaders and
new structures. And in Gaza, who’s running Gaza? It’s Hamas still running Gaza,
and they are re-equipping and they are re-preparing for another conflict with
Iran. So, all of this has failed and there’s going to be no grand victory.”
So, there is this great confrontation, and it could be
that it is Israel that calls for a ceasefire first, just as they did in the ‘12
Day War, after four days started asking for it. So, it’s possible because of
the strains and the strains on ordinary people. Yes, they support the
destruction of Iran wholeheartedly, yet they are not ready to go on going down
to the shelters and spend every night for 10 hours in a shelter, day after day
after day, and so the strains on the civil population are great.
So, I can’t give you a very simple answer as to what’s
going to happen from all of this, but don’t forget there are elections coming
up. And Netanyahu still has a court case which is about to resume, I think,
tomorrow, and he has to win these elections to avoid the outcome of the court
case, which might mean imprisonment. And so, he’s desperate to keep the war in
Iran going, to keep the fantasy now or the imaginary victory of a war in Iran.
And partly that was what he was doing in Lebanon. He is saying, “Look, okay, we
haven’t won against Hezbollah, but look, we can really hit them. And we hit
them.”
So, it’s very complicated, the situation in Israel, as a
consequence, and very complicated in the United States. I mean, I’m speaking to
you from Europe and you’re in the United States, but you will well understand.
I mean, the problem is that Trump needs to clear the decks if he can before the
summer because the midterm elections are coming.
The economic situation could
turn very nasty. As I say, within even three weeks, the supply line shortages
may show up. The price of oil is still high, the price of gasoline is high and
so an economic crisis in the debt markets or elsewhere, because we know very
clearly that there’s been a huge move out of the dollar, people seeking other
forms of secure assets at this uncertain time. Certainly, we see that in the
Gulf. I mean, much of the money has been moving out of the Gulf but not back
into the dollar, it’s been moving into Yuan and going to China. And Russia has
been pursuing this and telling the Europeans, “If you want any Russian oil or
gas, you have to pay in Yuan.”
And now European banks are not giving Panda loans.
Deutsche Bank, a major bank, is now saying, “Well, we’re not giving dollar
loans. Now we are issuing bonds. Panda bonds in Yuan, either a digital Yuan or
classical Yuan.” And things are changing and the process geopolitically is
shifting. And Iran is gradually, in its small way, emphasizing and working on
these rifts in the geopolitical structures to gain leverage for their main
demand, which is, “We want the paradigm over. We’ve had 48 years of being in a cage
and we are breaking out.”
Chris Hedges: If the ceasefire talks break
down, how likely do you think it is that the United States will resume its
aerial campaign against Iran?
Alastair Crooke: From what I understand, the
Iranians don’t think that America is about to resume the war. America. They
think Israel is a different case. But they don’t think America is likely to
resume the war because they don’t really have any cards to play. Already, the
Iranians have pushed the naval assets 1,000 kilometers from the coastline by
firing drones as warning and pushing. So, the carriers have been pushed beyond
the range of their deck strike aircraft to be able to overfly Iran without
refueling, and you can’t refuel over your target. It’s not an advisable thing
to do. They pushed that up. They’ve destroyed most of the bases in the Gulf
states. Heavy damage. The radar systems have been destroyed. Some of the AWACS
have been disabled.
Apart from the ability to just simply blindly bombard
basically civil infrastructure - houses, residences, hospitals and things like
that - in Tehran and elsewhere, all, by the way, not necessarily by aircraft
flying over it because they largely don’t, these are standoff weapons, cruise
missiles, others that are used to do these attacks.
So, what’s really left to
the United States militarily to do that would be a game changer? What? Bomb
again Nantaz?
The only thing that is particularly worrying is in this
period, Nantaz, the nuclear facilities that was bombed in June by President
Trump, has been bombed again by Israel. But Israel has also put into a missile
very close to Bushehr. And just so your viewers are clear about it,
Bushehr is a working nuclear-powered power plant, which is a joint venture with
Russia. So, it’s half-staffed with Russians. About, I think, 135 of them have
now been withdrawn. But then there was another missile, which actually hit
Bushehr. Not much damage, a little damage. But what’s the signal coming from
Israel, from that, on the nuclear target? And I think the signal is not so much
to Iran, but to the United States.
Chris Hedges: And what are they saying to the
US?
Alastair Crooke: Keep the war up or else we
might decide that we are going to resort to practical nuclear weapons.
Chris Hedges: All right. Great. Thank you,
Alastair. And I want to thank Milena, Sophia, and Max, who produced the show.
You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
-The Hedges Report
Alastair Crooke is a former British MI6 intelligence
officer and diplomat who is currently the founder and director of the
Beirut-based Conflicts
Forum, which advocates for engaging with political Islam. With decades of
experience in the Middle East, he is a noted author and commentator on
geopolitics and has been involved in negotiating with groups such as Hamas and
Hezbollah.
