WTF is Going Down with the Iranian Protests? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

reasons as their number one reason. It's more about economic control and wealth generation for their for their inner circle. If the Iotola left, I feel very little with change.

cut off countrywide. There's been like a lot of reports, varying reports of like how many people have been killed by the regime and stuff like that.

I've seen reports size a thousand plus. I don't think people know, but I think there's a new scrubbing mechanism that uses AI to go through social media to try to identify more accurate numbers. But either way, it's really bad and for the protesters, I should say, and for the regime, which is a good thing of course, And I think Jonathan will get into all of the mechanisms

that the regime has to stay in place. It's basically their main effort at all times, right, and they're just as concerned about their population, if not more so than even external threats. The other big factor I would throw

out there for discussion with the group is, and this is now reported, so this is the public is that the administration is reviewing potential military options to enhance the protests in Iran. I would assume, although I don't know that there's already a pretty massive covert program going on. If not, there should be. I don't think that's the debate.

I think the debates is whether they would use overt military efforts like strikes potentially on IRGC facilities or something that's directly associated with the security forces that are oppressing the people. I heard, and I think this is someone in reporting that the debates between the White House and the State Department. So the State Department's kind of of the mind that this won't help the protesters. It'll just potentially, you know, give the regime an out to say this

is all US based, it's not real, et cetera. Hard to say that when it's extensive as it is, but they'll use it and potentially try to get people a rally around the flag, so to speak. And then I'm told that the White House has been very uh pleased with their use of military force in the second term to date and that they are war incline to use it. So there you go. Throw it back to you guys

to hit those points. I think jonathan'ld be great to really talk about what the regime does to keep itself in power, because he's he's written some excellent books on the topic, and I think, as you said, the perfect timing, and he's a Murray.

number is. And that's similar in most conflicts and protests, So we probably will never really know exactly how many died in this protest or were arrested. Similar happened in the past. There's been about ten different protests that have names that are very significant in Iran in the last forty plus years, and this always is an issue of knowing how widespread is it, who actually is dying, who's

doing the killing. Interestingly, in this particular protest, because they shut the internet off around seventy two hours ago, the only media that's being released is being released by IRIIB, which is it's the Islamic Republic if Iran Broadcasting, which is a state owned and state controlled, IERGC controlled news outlet. That's the outlet that's actually releasing images of morgues and warehouses and hospitals full of bodies, which is very interesting

to consider. Why would the regime be doing that. And I think it's more about messaging to Iranians than it is about messaging to the world. And what they're probably trying to do is intimidate the people that are once their internet actually gained some access, the first images they're going to see are images of their dead people. And I think that's probably the goal of what that is right there. And that's again, the Internet has been a weapon that the regime has been using recently. They use

it in June against their own people. They actually shut the internet off when Israel and the US were striking your on. That wasn't the outside shutting them off. That was the regime shutting the people off from knowing what was going on. Because fear is their weapon. I think it was rage against the machine that said like fear is your only God on the radio, and I mean

it's really true. You can weaponize this feeling, which will maybe prevent some people from actually taking to the streets, because what the regime does not want is more people on the streets. Even if those people don't have weapons, they have voices, and they have the ability, they have spending power, and in an economy that's damaged. Like the current Iranian economy, spending power is everything. And that's a

huge point about who is actually protesting right now. If you look at, for example, in twenty twenty one during the water shortage protests, or twenty nineteen which they called Bloody Abon, which is when fuel prices had tripled, and I could name a bunch of other ones, there was

usually a single segment of society protesting. You know, for example, during the masa Amini protest, it was a lot about human rights, women's rights, So there's a certain segment of society it's going to stand out there and protest right now. The significant news item is that it's not just one group. It's the Bazari merchants, which were actually the people that fueled the base for the regime to take power in nineteen seventy nine in the first place, and that core

element of their constituency is protesting against them. This is a huge change and has never happened since nineteen seventy nine. So that's a very interesting development.

China came in and actually as a partnership built Iran's internet infrastructure, which is what the regime is throttling right now. So they're able to filter almost ninety eight percent of Internet traffic using this mechanism. But the regime has had a problem not just with mesh networks like you're talking about,

but also with dishes on roofs. And if you see pictures of Tehran or any other major city, you just see roofs covered in satellite dishes because the everyday people they want to be able to reach out to the outside world, and they're using these these parabolic antennas to do that. There are other ways as well, because even with the throttled Internet you can still get around it. There's two applications. One is called Freegate and one is

called Siphon, and both of these are used to get around the Chinese Great Firewall and Iran's what it's called National Internet Network, which is called the niin. Both of these basically act as open web proxies that have these huge rotating server lists. They don't always work. Let's say it's like a ninety eight percent failure rate, but if you can get a two percent success rate on that

penetrating the filtered network, that's success, right. So if you couple that with a mesh network like starlink, you could have some success. The problem with starlink is it costs money. You're talking about a regime where the economy is completely controlled by the IRGC and the people are protesting because they have no money.

this right now how we can do that. But so you do think, Jonathan, there's a way around this attempt of the regime to basically put the country in the dark.

the south. If you're close enough to the Emirates, or you're close enough to Iraq, you can use Cork, you can use a tess a lot. These are the two other Internet service providers that are in Iraq and the Emirates that actually you can reach them because of a line of sight, so you could actually still transmit outside the country totally absent of the government's control of the Internet.

Can you amplify those You can do that with repeters. Yeah, so, especially in a country like Iran that has a lot of high dramatic terrain, perfect situation for reputers across the top of the ridge lines to just pass that signal from a major city to the border area.

six Whoever, hopefully.

And sorry, I know you probably have some questions, but I just wanted to know this because I'm going to be talking happing about this today, Like what is the mechanism other than what we all know why our GC besiege et cetera. Could force like the mechanism internal that keeps the regime in place, both by you know, the kind of intelligence and the action arm of that element. And are they any good because we've obviously saw direct strikes by Israel on individuals that they had you know

they were hosting and clearly they've been infiltrated. What's your thought on that and can you kind of give the listeners an idea just how they keep themselves in power with such a opposition.

controls into these specialized and tes. That's at one layer, and then below that are things like banks, state pension funds, you know, overseas investment funds. So you think about like in the United States we have private equity and hedge funds and things like that. The regime has something very similar to that that are owned in the person of the Ayatola, and one of them is called Setad se Tad, which is interesting to look into if you have time.

There was a time article, i think in the nineties about Ayatola Kamani about how he's potentially one of the richest human beings on earth, more than j Bezos because of his control over these bonyards. And it's we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. And there was actually a statement by the Minister of Finance in the regimes inner circle a few years ago where he admitted that twenty percent of the black market in Iran is controlled by

the IERGC. So if the government is saying twenty percent is controlled by the IRGC, you can only imagine what

the real number is, right, And if they're controlling the black market and they're also controlling the regular commercial market, it it's not about necessarily our conventional ideas about securitization of a state, which is what's causing repression. Instead it's economic

control of the state. So the reason fuel prices are high, the reason the tomn is devalued, the real is devalued, the reason there's little water access, this is because the regime is controlling the economy rather than allowing actual government functions to move normally as they should. I could go into it very deeply, but I'll leave it there.

got pipes clogged up, you've got poorly managed dams. Because there's a lot of corruption in the government obviously, right, so like the people that are supposed to be like technocrats that you'd want running these things are not running them. Instead, it's higher GC affiliated individuals who are either brainwashed or sympathetic to the regime as their number one qualification to be running a dam, right, So that's that's a big problem. Also,

I think it's I camember how many decades. This is the worst drought Iran has had in decades, right, So they're already at a low water table. They're having issues with how the crops are being like how the efficiency of the actual movement of water to grow crops is happening. You have to remember it's a very mountainous country. Like where we mentioned there's there's very little kind of lowland flat land with water access, so it requires extra infrastructure

to actually move water from mountain to mountain. There's one navigable river in the entire country at the Karoon River where actual ships can move on the rest of it are not navigable by large ships, So there's already like a environmentally low water level there. Combine that with corruption and with a drought, now you've got a recipe for water disaster, which is like one small component of the current protests.

going to leave the IRGC is presumptive power that will fill the vacuum. Is there any chance that it could be a formation of a government more friendly to the United States, the West and being part of the you know, community and nations. Is there any leader that actually has the clout to stand up and do that, or are we basically going to move from a theocracy into a military dictatorship.

like the whole problem framing concept in military planning. If we don't frame the correct the problem correctly, we're gonna be pursuing the wrong problem in the wrong solution the entire time. The thing is with the regime. When we say who's in charge, we're usually wrong. You know, when we killed Salami, for example, the commander of the military, you know, we thought that would decapitate the IURGC. It didn't because he's not in charge. The people who are

actually in charge are not big names. They're not on the on the news all the time. It's a small group of they call them sapahis or guardians that are in the background, that are controlling a lot of the stuff. Not for ideological reasons as their number one reason. It's more about economic control and wealth generation for their for their inner circle. So if the Iotola left, I feel very little would change. And I'll go back to the

three outcomes. One is that he leaves and or dies, The second one is that the monarch returns, and the third one is that the IERGC takes over. These are very three, you know, common potential outcomes. The most likely thing that will probably happen, and I'm not a future you know predictor of the crystal ball. Probably what would happen is the IRGC would take over. That third option is most likely. The reason for that is because the monarchy is not universally liked, even by people who want

freedom in the country. Because a monarchy doesn't really equal freedom, It just equals another way of consolidating power, which is what the revolution was about in the first place. A lot of the outside Iran support for inside Iran protests talk about the monarchy, and that does not correlate to what people want inside the country. And it's the people inside the country that ultimately have to live every day

with what the next government is. Right, So that's always a question of what do the people outside want versus what the people inside want, And we have to rectify those two desires in kind of trying to predict what

might happen next and what the consequences are. And if the US or Israel is perceived widely by people in Iran that they were behind a regime change and the monarch came back, I feel like we'd probably run into a very similar problem that we had with the original Shah before he left, where there was this widespread kind of consternation about who's actually running things in the country, even if the monarch was purely running it himself without

foreign influence. If people doubted enough, you're going to lose

that kind of support for that leadership.

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They did this previously in I think it was twenty nineteen or twenty seventeen. It was twenty seventeen. During one of those protests, they had five thousand Lebanese Hezbula fighters patrolling the streets in Tehran. And I think you'll see something like that continuing, where rather than making a logical choice about what to do next, they're going to just continue throwing these foreign assets at it to try to tamp down.

that too. So people that are our age or even younger grew up in that environment, like in calif Warn you, for example Los Angeles a lot of pro Shaw stuff, because that's those were the people that left the regime or left the country and came to the United States. You know, that's what we have. Doesn't mean it's it's false support, but it may be overemphasized or over over.

It's it's not representing the actual sentiment, especially like I said, inside Iran, like because those are the people that will have to be dealing with the new government if there is one every day, and is that the government that they wanted in the first place? You know, And actually Iran people think about Iran, they think like, oh, it's this centralized authoritarian system, whether it's a monarch or it's a ayatola. But Iran actually has had democracy twice in

its h you know century recent century of history. Nineteen oh six they had a constitutional revolution. In the nineteen fifty three they had Muhammed Mossadeg who was deposed by the CIA. Both of those times that people actually picked their government, and both times it was a democracy. So

there is a big desire for that in Iran. The problem is, and I don't know if this is over to the Venezuela discussion, there's oil in Iran, and foreign interest in oil are always looking they and it's easier to manage a single authoritarian than it is to manage a democracy if you want the oil out of that country, right, and that's just rational, you know international relations concept. You

want to have the simplest access to that resource. So whether it's the United States, Britain, Russia, or China, all of them have something in common, and that is they want the oil in Iran. And if that means that they need to keep it dictator or a monarch in power, they'll they'll do it because that means they get what they want.

over during like the junta and stuff like that. There are those like he kind of gets they kind of get stuck in time a little bit, right and remember like the good old days before, without thinking what the actual people on the ground of whether it's Cuba, Greece, Iran, or take your pick, really want for themselves. Yeah, if you have anything else in Iran or jay if you have any questions on it Iran, I just let.

take over. And it's really tough to say because obviously when you're doing clandestine work, it's hard to manage that because it's clandestine, so you can't actually, you know, answer every question about what your move might do, what the effect might be. I think it will be interesting because if you look at who was assassinated in June, there is certainly a select deck of individuals who were killed and then a select deck of peers who were not killed.

And of course, you know, doing some inferential analysis, you could question about why did they survive?

actually call it VAJA. So IRGC Intelligence Organization took over domestic intelligence activities from this other entity in two thousand and nine after the Green Revolution that Johan Bashi sobs and when they did that, they set up across every province an outpost. So there's IERGC Intelligence Organization all over the country, and there's also some other elements. There's there's actually quite a few other other named elements that are

supporting them on all these provinces. So kutz Force is still doing what Kudz Force does because it's a foreign entity, like they're supposed to only do stuff outside the country, whereas IRGC Intelligence Organization is the one that's most concerning domestically and also regionally. So there's there we call it IRGCIO. The IO is all over the place in like Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Syria, like the ring around Iran basically as could force as

much further out. You know, they're in Latin America, they're in Africa, they're sometimes in the United States. Not doing very well with their operations they try, you know, so they're they're pretty widespread, whereas it's the the io that's inside Iran that's that's causing a lot of this background collection that's resulting in a lot of what they do

is they'll they'll they'll disappear people to scare others. So you saw during the masa Amini protests what they would do is they would actually use Instagram to geolocate where the people were, and they'd go to their house and basically throw them off their rooftop to kill them that way, and then say that someone committed suicide, you know, and like they would use this as a way to instill fear and kind of like make people think twice about

stepping outside. But they've turned the Internet off, so they can't use that tool very well. Right, Yeah, So going back to what I was mentioning earlier, that's why they're probably releasing these images of people and you know, the dead essentially is to try to achieve that same outcome.

Halliburton executive. And I joked with you guys before the show started about how insane that would be if we

did that in two thousand and two, in two thousand and three when we went into our Iraq. And now it just seems to be normal, Like this is like just normal operating procedure. And I kind of went through down a rabbit hole in terms of like what what's the deal with Venezuelan oil and how it's like heavy crude and it needs like serious refinement, and that like Venezuela really isn't the infrastructure really isn't there. It needs like five to ten years of like modernization for them

to like make it cost effective. You know, they get like they get some precursor that goes into the oil to like you know thin it out from Russia, Like they don't really have a great infrastructure there. Also, the other part about the heavy crew thing is like heavy crew needs to be at eighty dollars a barrel for

it to make sense economically for Venezuela. Also, the whole thing about them having three hundred plus billion of reserves was a number that Hugo Chabas came up with back in the early two thousands to like say, hey, you're a real deal player here, and that's the number that we've taken for the last twenty five years. Is being true, some people are saying that it could be a third of that.

because we have all this oil. You know, most of the oil execs at that round table, at least maybe they were offline, off the record, we're talking like this doesn't really make sense for us economically, and most of them are actually more into it for getting their ten billion dollars for Like the judgment that was against that was like levied against Venezuela when they pulled out when they like nationalized the oil industry there. So it's just I don't know what the fuck we're doing there, is

basically my point. So John, what do you got?

about Iran's oil as one thing, China has all these small teapot refineries is what they're called. They're basically kind of like backyard oil refineries that are designed specifically to work with this kind of crude exactly. And what has been going on a lot of Venezuela and oil is that it's been doing ship to ship transfers over to China and being refined by these very small time almost

like entrepreneurial oil refineries. Right. Well, the problem that the US now controlling that you have to think about what effect will this have on Chinese oil use? How will this affect China Iran oil use because Iran is a number one provider of oil to China currently. Well, if there's a regime change in Iran and the US now controls Iran and Venezuela, oil production. What does that mean for China? Because if China's oil is coming from these two countries and the US now controls it, the only

other option is Russia. So this is just I mean, I don't want to speculate on what could all these like third order effects, but that's a very interesting thing to think about internationally, about what will happen just because of the change of control over the oil now with the crude oil, the US is actually the only country that's able to truly commercialize what's currently in Venezuela, and that's why Chevron stayed there for so long. The problem

is the infrastructure, of course, is breaking down. It's been breaking down for a long time. It was nationalized previously, so there's a lot of you know, detritus in these in these processing pieces of a equipment. But if the oil price, like you said, it needs to be eighty dollars for it to be profitable, and right now it's in the fifties. Again, internationally, how is that going to

affect opek? How is that going to affect Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who we want to have on our side, because if we if we push them out of this game, guess who they might start selling oil to China? Right, So like there's a lot of third order questions that pop out of this single act of taking over this oil damn.

it's pretty uh unbelievable. Yeah, just this whole rabbit hole I went into about like going it like, you know, I still have trying to wrap my head around why the fuck we did it, right, because like we play the we play the role is like, uh, you know, freedom and democracy coming to you soon, but we're still we're dealing with Maduro's number two and number three command right, Like the Rodriguez siblings you know who are seeing Yeah yeah, and who have been in the government for twenty plus years.

They were part of Hugo you know, they came up with Hugo Chavas. So it's really interesting, like you know, how the veil has kind of been lifted a little bit. And I don't know if this is like what US foreign policy has been all about for the last fifty years, but kind of really seems like that's what it's been about for the last fifty years, is in just imperialism. Frankly, sorry to talk like a pink okami.

or unipolar, I guess is the term to use. But there are no constraints, there are no repercussions, which no matter actually who is in office, because if you look during the Obama administration, you know, the Predator drone was used exponentially more than it was during the Bush administration, Right, That's one example. And the things we were doing in Syria, like you would never imagine we'd be doing that in

Syria if the Soviet Union was still around. Right, So, because there are no checks on that, regardless of who is in power in the United States, the US as a country internationally is going to act in an unconstrained way until there is a constraint placed on it.

I'm an energy expert.

of info on that.

a gang, street gang. They are basically affected because they're extraordinarily and violent and they have no restraints when ordered, So that would make it very challenging, you know, to reinsure Maria Machado, of course, I think that's a fair point, but essentially locks down everything and anyone at the direction of the Minister of Interior. It was one of the apparently the most powerful leader that's there. It's not under our system, of course, but under their system. It's it's

about the regime security. So that individual is has a lot of clout, much more so than the acting president.

we want them to do. Another another, you know, in the Western hemisphere, Greenland, you know, there's talk about, you know, invading Greenland or paying citizens of Greenland one hundred thousand dollars to like become American citizens, which like, why the fuck would you do that? Because one hundred grand would just go to your medical bills if he became an American.

easiest place to strike it. So that's definitely true. It's also you know, we're seeing Arctic ice cap melt, so the access to hydrocarbons and rare earth minerals are more prevalent. And then if you look at the globe and just flip it like this, once that's the case, the world gets a lot smaller. So obviously it's strategically important. So is everything that touches the Arctic. That said, the aforementioned treaties allow us to do everything that we're saying that

we need to do that we're not doing right now. Like, if it's that big of a security issue and Russia and China are just circling Greenland, which they're not, then why aren't we there? Like why did we degrae our reduce our presence to like one hundred folks in one base. So the question is, if it's that important to why

aren't we doing something about now? Why aren't American companies in there full full throttle looking how to exploit this? So that's that is one issue on whether this is really about the things that we are saying it is. And then the second issue is just the damage this is doing to the United States reputation to even talk about it. Under the UN Charter, you cannot obviously use threat against another nation. You can't even threaten it. So

we're already past that. We're threatening because they won't take it off the table, which is a threat to use military force against the NATO partner. So we're clearly in the wrong internationally on this. It is I mean, you're you're seeing reports that NATO, I mean European countries are going to start sending forces there, and you know why

they're doing it. They're going to say, well, you said that it's under threat, So now the UK, Germany and France are going to send forces potentially of course uh Deadmark as well, uh t Greenland right now to bolster or this perceived threat of Chinese and Russian invasions. And that's going to course just escalate it because it's going to irritate the White House and we'll see where it goes from here. But the other part of this, and

I'd love to erit. You guys, think about this. This is clearly against the treaties that the US signed, which is against US law. So how the military would even entertain or prepare for an invasion is a question I would have because it's clearly an unlawful order to invade a NATO treatied ally per the US law that established our presence in NATO, unless we withdraw, which I think takes senate action, not just unilateral executive action. So I'll stop there, tacity.

Danes overseas. And I can't imagine how it must be for those teams on the ground working together, watching this happening and looking at each other, you know, because it could potentially be that the next morning you wake up and suddenly we're enemies in the same camp. It's just crazy.

And a lot of these countries sat in Afghanistan, even a rock which I don't even know what I had to do with nine to eleven for decades, and the Danes specifically per capita, I think was one of the highest casualty rates per capita of any of US.

I think military alliance in history. I think one could argue and it benefited us, right, So if if we rupture NATO, you know, I think there's I don't know if they're accurate, but like you're seeing some statements out of European leaders that they're already looking at how to shut down US basis.

we'll see if that happens. But even if it happened in Italy or Germany or wherever take your pick, wherever there's US bases, that's a real like you'd never heard something like that from it The Europeans always take things into consideration and they huddle and they talk about stuff and they come out with a really cool statement. But

like that's like real PC. But frankly, I kind of like to see them have a little bit of teeth and like bite back against this administration because this administration seems to not give a fuck about Europe.

just don't see it happening. So I wish we would have to talk about it because it sounds like just a ridiculous idea. I think the Senate would step in and cut off all funding for it, I really do. I looked at comments from senators. The only one I saw that was really significant was talking about, well, I was talking about buying it, right, take the force off the table, even though it's not technically off the table,

and then look at the buying part. Well, to buy it, he would have to you know, it's still part of Denmark, so they would have to agree, and then Greenland has to agree. And Greenland gets a lot of support from Denmark. Right, they have a total basically socialist system, all their healthcare, all their education, way more than they contribute. Unless the United States wants to give more to the people in green One, then they give to the people in Montana.

lift that it's never and there's no interest. Nobody else in the Senate has talked about this until now, so the idea that they want to purchase and that you know, I'm obviously an old school Reagan type republic, but the current thinking of MAGA is the opposite of this, right, It's more on the isolation a side. It's not in the neocolonial let's take over, you know, territory from allies. So I just don't see how this is.

not in our national security interest. Even the discussion is seriously fraying our alliances. And I don't know if it's recovery. I mean, think of I guess I'd ask anybody that's listening, think if you are a European leader right now, like, what would you be doing.

but some. I try to call it objectively, but this is objectively a terrible idea, even a talk, and I don't think we're gonna do it, which makes the talk even worse.

card carrying members of the administration going out there.

a lot of intelligence reports. Also, I translated a bunch of stuff out of VARSI that was from the regime itself that's been leaked to the public, and a lot of new analysis using those two sources that people never get to see. So it's almost a third of the book is just references because I put a ton of

actual analytical horsepower behind it. My idea was to kind of create like an open source product that you would hope to see on the other side of the green door, you know, but with materials available to the public.

is great. Make Jason YouTube awesome. We'll obviously keep an eye on it, Iran and what happens, we'll keep you guys posted. Thanks Thanks a lot, guys, Thanks Thanks Chance.

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