The Long History of the US War on Iran w/ Spencer Ackerman

Paris Marx is joined by Spencer Ackerman to discuss the US and Israeli war on Iran, including the history that led to this moment and what we might see from here.

Spencer Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the forthcoming book The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. He also write the Forever Wars newsletter.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• You can now watch episodes of Tech Won’t Save Us on YouTube!
• Spencer has written about the regime change in Iran, and the targeting of data centers in the conflict.
• Further reading on Iran’s ‘infrastructure war’.
• Here is the latest on discussions between the USA and Iran as of Monday March 23rd.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

By another month of this war going by, we could see $150 a barrel oil. We're already looking at Brent Crude. I think it got last night when closing stopped up to like $115 to $119 a barrel. This is a massive, massive uh economic catastrophe that's going to be felt throughout not just the region, but the entire world. This is Iranian strategy.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Spencer Ackerman. Spencer does so many things. He's a contributor at Sateo, has written fantastic comics, is the author of Reign of Terror, How the 9-11 Era destabilized America, and produced Trump, and is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. He also writes a newsletter called Forever Wars that I would highly recommend subscribing to. Now, obviously, you will all be aware that the United States and Israel are at war with Iran. And that is not just, of course, having consequences for the countries around the region, but it's having repercussions around the world as we see the consequences of this war and the restrictions on, you know, an important fuel and important energy like oil, but also so many of the other products that are associated with that, right? And of course, all the other uh products and goods and food in our world that depends um on oil, on shipping, uh, and how those prices can affect absolutely everything. So as I was thinking about approaching this, you know, I wanted to wait a little bit to see how this war was going to evolve. Um, but when it became clear that this was something that was going to stick around for quite some time, I said, okay, you know, who am I going to speak to about this to get good insight into what is happening? And I figured Spencer was the perfect guest to have on because, you know, he pays a lot of attention to this, but has been reporting on these issues for a very long time now and can give us a lot of insight into how we got to this moment. And so in this conversation, Spencer gives us a really important history lesson in how the United States in Iran got to this point, um, you know, why war hasn't really happened in the past and how we got to this, got to that point at this moment, um, which I think is something really important to understand, right? Um, and so for the first kind of half or so of this conversation, um, you know, Spencer, I kind of leave it to him to do a lot of the talking and a lot of the explaining to give us that insight into how we got to this moment. Um, and then we kind of pivot a bit, right, to talk a bit more of the bigger issues of, you know, what we're seeing in Iran's response and, you know, what is interesting there, especially with their use of drones and certain types of missiles. Um, you know, one of the things that really stood out in the conversation to me was the innovation that we see on the side of Iran on these military technologies. Uh, you know, when Spencer is talking about the war on terror, he's talking about certain explosives that it's clear that Iran has made that unfortunately are very lethal, you know, have a very very lethal consequence. But of course, if you're thinking about a war against an adversary, that is unfortunately going to be some of the innovation that you're doing. But then to look more recently at, you know, the very low-cost drones that Iran has been using and how effective that has been at making it feel the pain and certainly making uh Israel and the United States and certainly Gulf countries um, you know, use very expensive missiles to try to take down these very inexpensive drones and what that means for the type of warfare that is happening here, right? You know, certainly we see a lot of military innovation in the United States, but it's often focused around very incredibly expensive systems, right? Whether it's missiles or like F-35 fighter jets or things like that. And then we look on the Iranian side and we see this different type of innovation, recognizing the constraints and you know, the limited amount of capital that they have to put into these things, where it's kind of like the inexpensive production, the inexpensive weapons in order to make uh an impact when it needs to do so. So I think that is really interesting. And then, of course, we sort of touch on the impact on data centers. Of course, Iran has struck several Amazon data centers in, I believe, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Um, we don't get into the broader consequences of that so much. And I think maybe that is a reason to do another episode on that, um, to get into the broader strategy of the Gulf and trying to become an AI superpower in its own right and what this might mean now for uh, you know, it's its desire to kind of pursue uh that kind of economic strategy. So, this is all to say, I think that this is a really interesting conversation, and especially this year as we have been focusing a bit more on geopolitics and the intersection between uh geopolitics and technology, that this really contributes to that focus that we have had on tech won't save us in 2026 and certainly in 2025 as well. Um, so I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. Hopefully you find it really insightful to hear the history that Spencer has to share with us on how we got to this moment, uh, because I think it's really important to understand uh, you know, both as we look at the uh war that's playing out between our eyes, but also understand, you know, culpability, how we got to this moment and, you know, what kind of path might be available uh to get out of it. So with that said, if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations to keep you informed about the world and certainly the tech industry, you can join supporters like Alana from Queens in New York and Donna from Halifax in Canada by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Just a heads up before we do get into this week's episode, Tech Won't Save Us is starting to do a video. So you can now watch video conversations, you know, video editions of our podcast on YouTube. I'm sure they'll be on Spotify and eventually at some point Apple once I figure out how that works and when they're rolling it out. Um, but you know, this is the way that podcasts seem to be going. Uh and so if you do want to watch me interview a guest, uh I I'm not much of a video podcast watcher myself, but apparently people do enjoy these things, uh, then you can certainly do that by going over to our YouTube page. Uh and there will be more and more of those coming uh in the future. Now on to this week's episode. Spencer, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Thank you so much for having me back on Paris.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Absolutely. Uh always excited to talk to you and get your insights on all these matters. And, you know, as soon as I saw the United States attacking Iran and kind of the bigger implications of, you know, what this war was turning out to be, I said, I know exactly who I need to talk to. And of course, you know, you'd already been writing about it and giving us a bunch of insightful, uh, insightful insights on it. Um, but yeah, so when the United States and Israel went into Iran and you know, really started going after the leadership, started attacking key sites in the country. Were you surprised that they finally went ahead with this attack? What was your reaction?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Disbelief, but not surprise, uh, if that makes sense. The groundwork for what I want to be clear uh is an unjustifiable war of aggression. It might be kind of quaint at this point, so long into the Gaza genocide, uh, to talk about international law, but by the terms of the post-1945 system, primarily shepherded by the United States, this is an undeniably illegal war, but again, kind of quaint at this point, um, to discuss international law, perhaps. Nevertheless, the groundwork for this war has existed for a very long time. Uh, most recently, in the 12-day war, as it's called, in 2025, and the prior Israeli bombing campaigns that destroyed a number of Iranian air defense systems. By destroying the air defense systems, you kind of give the game away that you expect to attack in in the future from the air and and from you know sea launched missiles like Tomahawk in the in the US magazine deck. Beyond that, the politics of this war, the political groundwork for it, uh has been laid certainly since 9-11, certainly since October 7th, you could really say since 1980, with uh the US rage at the hostage crisis, that from the Iranian perspective, they would say that this war uh began in 1953, when the United States, on behalf of the Anglo-Persian oil company and its own oil interests, uh removed the, at that point, most democratically elected prime minister in Iranian history, Mohammed Mossadegh, and in his place put the Shah of Iran, Reza Paulovi the Older, uh, who presided over a 25-year campaign of terror against the Iranian people, predicated on anti-communism in his geopolitical orientation, making him useful for the United States. Remember, Iran used to share a border with the Soviet Union, and as well on behalf of Western oil companies that extracted wealth from Iran and brought it over to us. So these dueling narratives very much inform the US and Iranian positions. And also, we should mention, you know, when the Islamic Republic came to power, it implicated Israeli interests just as acutely as it did American interests, as we're we're kind of seeing the fruit of what uh Ruholloh Khomeini, the founding uh supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called the Great and Little Satans. In in his telling, you know, this was what is happening now, uh, looks a lot like uh what Khomeini had kind of long heralded as Iran's eternal enemies, the the US and Israel together. After not, you know, I'm I'm you know primarily someone who focuses on the post-9-11 aspects of this.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

I I think I just want to jump in before you get to the the 9-11 part. And it it was fascinating to me, and because I do want to pick up on you know your work on 9-11 and what we saw in the discussions around Iran at that time, but it was fascinating to me. You know, you talk about going back to 1953, and it was not surprising, but it was still interesting to see that US officials, after you know, bombing Iran, started talking about how Iran has been aggressive toward the United States since 1979 for all these years. And it's like, uh, you guys are missing a key part of the history there, you know.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Yeah, like, you know, we had a lot of this discussion after October 7th. When do you start history? When do you start the narrative about what gave us this war? It's not surprising in particular to see the Trump administration and its allies say that, you know, this is unfinished business for 47 years because then they don't look like what they are, which is the aggressor, the ones who chose to start this war.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah, absolutely. And so so I want to pick back up on you know 9-11, the war on terror. Obviously, you know, the war on terror is something that you have done a lot of work on through your career. And people will remember if they were around at the time, as I'm sure many of the listeners were, but there were discussions about going into Iran in that moment. Certainly there were people who were, you know, pushing for it. Someone like John McCain, you know, comes to mind, who, you know, is certainly uh is seen in a different light today, I guess, since his since his death. But why didn't the United States attack Iran during the war on terror? What held it back in that moment that is not holding it back now?

SPEAKER_01 11:57

So uh this is gonna be a bit of a long history lesson, but I think it's it's it's important. After 9-11, the Iranians tried for a detente with the United States under George W. Bush. Uh, in particular, the Islamic Republic had uh acrimonious relations to uh the Taliban on its eastern border with Afghanistan, sent word through uh the Swiss, uh, which traditionally have been uh interlocutors between the US and and Iran since um since the rise of the Islamic Republic, that they would be interested in cooperating with the United States against the Taliban. That was a potentially seismic change. The US had a policy in the 1990s called dual containment, uh, the idea being that it would seek to inhibit the exercise of both Iranian and Iraqi power, uh, back when Iraq was still run by Saddam Hussein. And then, of course, in the 80s, the United States, both during the Iran-Iraq war, uh a devastating regional war, uh definitely a formative experience uh for the Islamic Republic that we in the United States don't really appreciate.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

And this comes like right after the 1979.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yeah, like immediately, very, very soon after the establishment of the of the Islamic Republic, Saddam Hussein invades Iran. This becomes battles fought on land, in air, with chemical weapons, at sea in the Persian Gulf. Uh, this was the first time, in my recollection, that um the Persian Gulf was mined. It was mined primarily not by the Iranians, but by the Iraqis. Anyway, a devastating, devastating war that the United States uh played both sides of. It armed Saddam Hussein and also uh during Iran Contra also conspired to uh basically trade uh arms for hostages kept by Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon. So uh the United States basically um tried to position itself to weaken both combatants in that war. But by 9-11, the Iranians are looking for some kind of change in posture toward the United States. Uh there was uh a reformist president at the time uh named Katami. He attempted to kind of see what Iran's relationships could be outside of the revolutionary framework of kind of official anti-Americanism. It was a pragmatic turn, and there were officials, uh, career diplomatic officials succunded to the White House at that point, known as the Leverets. They were a married couple, uh, who found this outreach to be really significant and pushed to kind of see where it could go. Um we'll never know where it could go because the higher levels of the Bush administration quashed that and within weeks put Iran in a famous speech. I'm not really sure given that we're uh we're 25 years after the speech, but for those who don't know, one of George W. Bush's most important speeches of his presidency was a declaration in the 2002 State of the Union uh that sort of showed where he wanted to take the war on terror, kind of beyond Al-Qaeda and beyond Afghanistan. And he coined a term called the axis of evil of Iraq, Iran, and kind of for good measure to show that he wasn't purely focused on uh the Middle East and on Islamic countries, North Korea. Now, what makes North Korea different from Iran and Iraq? Why did North Korea never get attacked, Iraq get occupied, and now we're we're in an open-ended war with Iran? North Korea had a nuclear weapon. North Korea went all out and developed a nuclear weapon, and that completely obviated any chance of the United States um attacking North Korea. We're gonna skip forward a little bit, but I'm gonna come back um just very briefly. After uh the US invades Iraq, uh Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, who had a rudimentary nuclear program, decided that it would be um in his interest to pivot his own relations with the United States by publicly abjuring a nuclear weapon, abandoning his nuclear program, and kind of um positioning himself toward a better relationship with the United States, while secretly his uh intelligence apparatus was torturing people on behalf of the US war on terror. Ten years after that, the US overthrew uh Qaddafi and he ends up uh being killed by his own people, um, and a whole lot of people uh in the region and beyond drew a very important lesson about nuclearization from that experience. End of digression. Being put on the axis of evil um was swiftly followed up uh in about a year with the US invasion of Iraq. So now from Iran's perspective, it has US forces not just positioned around the Gulf at important air and sea bases in the Gulf, but now it has its eastern and its western neighbor occupied by U.S. ground forces, um, additional naval power and air power assets, also in the region, looking like from Iran's perspective, uh, that it's in a really tight spot. That now potentially the US could train its guns on the Islamic Republic, as has kind of long been been hinted. Explicitly, the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, made a very pointed remark that Iran and Syria, Syria, an ally of Iran at that point, uh, had to be very careful about what it did next with US forces in Iraq that was understood in Iran um as a military threat. And then, as you may be aware, uh the US invasion of Iraq becomes an unmitigated disaster. US forces are uh bogged down uh by persistent, well-funded, well-equipped insurgencies of multiple characteristics um in Iran. There's a Sunni insurgency um out in the west, and there is a Shiite insurgency um in Baghdad and to the south. Rarely did these forces work together. Uh, this was a combination of occupation, uh, foreign war and proxy war and civil war. So the Iraq war, which I covered um from Iraq twice, an incredibly complicated, bloody uh and painful phenomenon that in um in smaller scale continues to this day in terms of its effects on the region. The Shiite insurgency, along with important Shiite politics in Iraq, quickly comes under the influence, sway. You can you can kind of chop this up uh a lot of different ways, depending on your perspective of the Iranians. Most importantly, uh, and this is really fundamental for understanding why the current generation of military officer and also of Iraq veteran uh infantrymen like Pete Hegzith, the current US Secretary of Defense, uh, are so seized with Iran. The Iranians brought in a kind of uh shape charged improvised explosive device uh known as an explosively formed penetrator EFP. This absolutely destroyed, I think it's something like 800 to a thousand uh US troops, which is a substantial number. Something like 4,500 US troops were killed uh in Iraq. So something like 20%-ish of those troop deaths uh were uh the result, and many, many more uh uh life-changing amputations uh were caused by the introduction of uh these shape charged IEDs, these explosively formed penetrators. Many people, and of course the insurgency in general, uh, with um we should not understand that as purely an Iranian cat spa or phenomenon. Uh that was also an indigenous Iraqi Shiite fight, but tendentious to deny uh that there was a great deal of uh aid and comfort um as well as strategic depth back in Iran to the Americans. And throughout uh the really agonizing phase, so like 2005 to 2008 of the uh US occupation of Iraq, there were frequent demands uh from both uh right-wing US legislators, particularly like tactical levels, uh, within the military uh to go against Iran itself, to expand the war uh either in Iran or against specific Iranian proxy forces, meaning the Islam, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the IRGC, um, which is uh an elite and ideologically very loyal military organization uh within Iran that became responsible after the US invasion of Iraq for essentially external uh regional security uh for Iran. No US policymaker, whether in the Bush administration or the Obama administration, wanted to go there. Iraq was a bloody enough enterprise, uh a country uh of about 24 25 million people and very difficult terrain. That's nothing compared to Iraq. Iran is a country of 90 million people, a very mountainous country, extreme uh terrain issues. There's deserts, there's mountains. Um, this is one of the reasons that um a 1980 effort uh to free the hostages known as Desert One uh failed really spectacularly in a way that also that was um an early mission of the Joint Special Operations Command, which reaches kind of operational maturity and political interest uh and political influence and prestige during the war on terror. That's that's indelible in the minds um institutionally of the Joint Special Operations Command. So neither Bush nor Obama, and also Iran has uh extensive coastline that Iraq doesn't have, meaning that naval assets are are both put into play and put at risk.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Yeah, it it seems pretty clear that it would be like so much more difficult to go into Iran, which you know obviously explains why they didn't try to do that at the time. And of course, you know, as you're saying, they were completely bogged down in these wars that they already had. And so finding like the manpower power and the extra resources to then go into a whole nother country that's so much larger, uh, you know, that's so entrenched, wasn't going to to work. So, so what is the change then from okay, you know, you're explaining to us why it didn't work to to go into Iran in that period? How does it shift then for Donald Trump and you know Benjamin Netanyahu certainly to decide that now is the time to go into Iran? And was there much thinking behind it, or does it appear to be like a brash move motivated in part by what they were able to achieve in Venezuela?

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yeah, so sorry that this is taking so long, but it it unfortunately to answer your question is gonna need to.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Totally. It's okay. It's fascinating history, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:49

So the impulse to say that uh the war in Iraq needed to be expanded to Iran to stop um the Iranian influence over the war also functions as an alibi. Uh it's a cope. Uh it basically says the war could have been won, but for uh the uh unwillingness on the part of Sybaritic and fearful politicians to expand its scope um against this entire new enemy. It serves as a way to avoid reckoning with the failure of the war, with the way that it was doomed to fail, and then accordingly learn any lessons about restraint or about how the US posture towards not just Iraq, but the entire Middle East uh needed to be uh reconceived. This was something that, however, cut against um you know a lot of various US interests. At the same time, the Israelis uh have had for many decades a strategic uh fixation on the Iranian missile threat. Uh that is to say, the the rather formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles that Iran that you know Iran is an advanced country. Even after, and we're gonna get there in a second, all of the uh extensive financial sanctions uh that were placed on the Iranians, particularly um starting in the late uh aughts and especially throughout the 2010s, Iran uh remained possessed of a whole lot of uh industrial capability, scientific and technical knowledge. And the creation of its missile arsenal was an absolute fixation of the Israelis because while Iranian missiles still can't hit the United States, uh the tyranny of distance there applies, Iran does not possess any intercontinental ballistic missiles. Nevertheless, it has a whole lot of uh medium and long-range ballistic missiles, very capable, as we've seen, of hitting Tel Aviv. At the same time, around 2003, an Iranian opposition group, one that functions quite like a cult and used to be on the US terrorism designation list, uh, revealed that Iran had a uranium enrichment program uh suggesting that it could possess nuclear weapons, that it was, it was, uh it had a nuclear weapons program. Since at least 2000, I think, six-seven, the uh US intelligence community has assessed that Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program, but retains the capabilities and dual-use technologies that could achieve nuclear breakout. So any talk uh during the late 2000s of some form of rapprochement with Iran is out the window. You've got Iran's involvement in uh the Iraq War from one, and now the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon. So this looks like uh a really, really uh powerful and concentrated problem um that the US, uh, particularly under Barack Obama, sets out to kind of address. And the way this gets addressed is through after the placement of an extraordinary amount of economic sanctions, um, what Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time and architect of them, called crippling sanctions. The idea was that you were going to inflict so much economic pain on Iran that it would decide it has to get rid of its nuclear program. What was kind of not really discussed uh at the time, uh I think our understanding in the West of sanctions has has not really caught up to the reality of them. But this the way sanctions, in particular at that point in time on Iran worked was as an indiscriminate economic weapon. It was basically weaponizing inflation. So basically things just became way too uh expensive for the average Iranian um who now was was very much worried about you know the price of food, the price of fuel. And you know, again, Iran has a uh you know one of the largest supplies of of of of energy on earth.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Just to add to that, too, because like um so people understand what this can be like, you know, the the kind of value of the currency continues to to plummet, and so you're you know, kind of paying like ridiculous amounts of money for for goods, but you also don't have access to like the international banking system. You know, when I visited Iran in 2013, it was like you just had to take out a ton of cash with you before going to the country and hope it was enough that you would need while you were there because you couldn't tap into like the international banks or credit card networks or anything like that because of the way these sanctions worked, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Now, just skipping ahead to the present day really quick, one of the things that the US is discovering to its detriment right now is that the 15, 16 year experience of those sanctions has now led Iran to basically keep to itself, I don't know exactly how it's done this, um, but nevertheless, it's not dependent anymore on accessing foreign capital through the banking system or moving uh money through the um international banking system. It's it's had to come up um with hedges for that, and now it's you know its industrial base uh looks pretty independent from it. Anyway, point being, um around this same time, Benjamin Netanyahu comes back to power in Israel, where for the exception of 18 months he's remained since. Netanyahu uh thinks that uh anything short of a decimation of Iran's nuclear threat is insufficient. Um the United States is not particularly worried about Iranian missiles, but the Israelis really pressed the point. And the US is also looking around this time for rationales to remain in the Middle East while it withdraws from Iraq. And one thing it finds as a point of agreement, not just between Washington and Tel Aviv, but also Washington and Abu Dhabi, Washington and Riyadh, to some degree Washington and Kuwait, um, is the threat uh as the region sees it from Iran. So now you have the US military's basis for being in the Middle East and creating a coalition that it is very proud of saying at the time, uh the Abraham Accords are a result of this, unite important Arab allies with Israel. And it calls that anti-Iranian alliance the seeds of peace. This is also a really important alliance from the Israeli perspective, both from the emergence of uh both, you know, the Mediterranean on its side and then the Gulf on the Gulfy side, um, as tech and uh surveillance hubs. So now there is what looks like an economic basis for a regional alignment against Iran and also a military basis where now uh American military power can be kind of hub-and-spoked out to both Israel um and the Gulf. And at the same time as this is happening, um, Iran has responded uh through the IRGC to the creation of a regional strategy that is variously called the Shiite Crescent or the Axis of Resistance. So basically, Iran, through uh its enhanced position in Iraq, uh basically uh Iran won the Iraq War, the US occupation of Iraq, um, into uh Syria, which at the time was controlled by Bashar Assad, its client, um, and through uh uh Hezbollah into Lebanon, Iranian power now arcs to the Mediterranean. That should be understood as the fruit of American strategic failure um during uh the war on terror. So now you have uh Iranian power flexed outward in a way that really alarms Israel in a way that really alarms the Arab allies of the United States. And uh this becomes pressure on the Obama administration against the Iran deal. Because to uh Barack Obama's uh perspective, the issue with Iran is the nuclear weapons issue. If it resolves the nuclear weapons issue, both the Obama administration and a very reform-minded Iranian coalition uh is thinking that could be the basis now for kind of ending this state of now really acute hostility with the United States. And and and Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi think this is a disaster that has to be prevented. Now, one of the things that then happens is the rise of ISIS, and ISIS kind of destabilizes this moment to a tremendous degree, but also ISIS does not just threaten the United States and what it's built in Iraq, it threatens Iran. The the ISIS believes Iran way more than Al-Qaeda um originally did are are essentially not uh Muslims and are an apostate regime uh that has to be destroyed. That leads to a situation where the Iranians are fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and the US is fighting ISIS in the air. Tacitly, the US provided air cover uh for Iranian forces uh and Iranian-backed forces in Iraq, and that's a major, major issue. But that, while that might have, you know, that might have been the case on the ground, it was never kind of allowed to bubble up uh to anything more than tactical um in terms of its politics. Then in 2015, the Iran deal is reached, Israel hates it, um, American allies of Israel in American politics hate it to include Chuck Schumer. Uh and the Gulfis hate it because now they think that this coalition that's come to protect them uh against Iran is going to ultimately shatter once the, you know, too, you know, once the big patron in the United States kind of starts to see perhaps it can work with Iran. The important thing to say about the Iran deal is that this was an incredibly technically complex deal that did not rely on raparish mant more broadly politically with Iran, but absolutely from a technical a technical perspective, blocked uh Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. So the thing that reasonable people might say, that's problematic for Iran to do, the deal stopped that. As a consequence of the deal, because this is how diplomacy works, Iran got sanctions relief from that. And the uh pro-Israel coalition there uh realized that that was a potent cudgel against both Obama and the deal. That now Iran was free to pursue its malign regional activities. Um, and they also tried to say that a real deal would include constraints on Iran's missile programs. That was never because that was never part of the deal. Um, and from Iran's perspective, if it doesn't have his missile programs, it doesn't have a deterrent against an Israel that certainly in the beginning um of the 2000 was very frequently uh threatening to bomb Iran itself. Trump comes to power uh with a very motivated uh base that's that's against the Iran deal uh for various reasons. Some of it just reduces to you know pure and reflexive hostility to anything Obama did, some of it reduces to Zionism, some of it reduces to uh the residual uh distaste of the you know the original 1980s era uh you know Hulkomania anti-Iranian hostility that that kind of lingers ambiently in the American right-wing imagination. Nevertheless, Trump violates the Iran deal. Uh now US-Iranian relations are restored to a point of extreme hostility. I should also say that Obama, as kind of a gimme to the Saudis and the Emiratis, allowed them to decimate Yemen, cause a famine there, cause a cholera outbreak there, cause one of the region's um really desi really just devastating wars once an Iranian ally, Ansar Allah, the Houthis, as we call them, uh, took power in a great deal of Yemen. Their things remained uh until 2020, when the architect of Iranian regional strategy, Qasim Soleimani of the IRGC, uh was visiting uh one of his key allies, uh Abu Mahdi al-Mahandis, uh, an Iraqi uh uh political and security figure, and Trump assassinated them both uh with a CIA missile fired from uh with a C with a missile fired from a CIA drone. That was a shocking move uh in the region that resulted in uh the first real exchange of fires of Iranian missiles against US bases in Iraq. Um the Iranians exercised extreme restraint. Trump back then was talking about, and I thought this really could be a kind of long-heralded war, the white whale of the war on terror, but Trump didn't really have uh the appetite, nor did the Iranians, uh, for anything more extensive than that.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Yeah, it seemed like for some time, as the United States would try to attack Iran, like Iran would, you know, continue to uh do a response, but one that would not really try to create something bigger out of it, right? To show they had to retaliate, but not to try to spur some bigger war.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

And and, you know, this is just a difficult question with deterrence theory in general. What can stop the adversary from attacking further, but also not draw you into a war you might not be prepared to fight? Biden comes to power suggesting that he'll return the US to the Iran deal, but also suggesting that he wants a stronger, tougher deal. In the back of his mind politically and those of all of his advisors, is the acrimonious relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden, who for his entire political career has called himself a proud Zionist, doesn't want that. And October 7th happens. Biden stands four square uh behind the Israelis, um, lets Israel materially supports Israel, not to mince words, materially supports Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. Iran seeks to impose costs on Israel for that. Um, it has uh long given aid uh to Hamas. Although, you know, Hamas's relationship with Iran is not Hezbollah's relationship with Iran is not Ansar Allah's relationship with Iran is not the Islamic resistance in Iraq's relationship um with Iran. In particular, they had real very serious and deep disagreements over Bashar Assad, and Hamas never came uh to Assad's help the way like uh Hezbollah mobilized um in into Syria. The Iranian strategy against Israel heralded uh the Iranian strategy against the United States, uh, which is that it was going to utilize the axis of resistance to attack Iran, primarily Hezbollah, um, and then answer Allah in Yemen, uh, in order to, and then also against US forces, I should, I should have said that more uh more clearly, in Iraq, uh in Jordan, in the region, to basically say, United States, we you and I are uh the patrons here. It's up to us to stop the clients. If we want your client in Israel to stop what it's doing in Gaza, we are going to impose costs on you that you find intolerable, so you will do that. Biden went a different way. Um, and as he did that, the Israelis understood not just from the free hand uh Biden gave Gaza, Biden gave Israel in Gaza, but the free hand that Biden gave Israel in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Yemen, um, to then spur the Israelis into a kind of recognition that they had a unique opportunity to roll back Iranian power in Lebanon, in they failed in Yemen, uh, but in Lebanon, certainly in Syria, and they succeeded at that tremendously. Uh, the 2024 campaign um against the axis of resistance gave the Israelis a sense, and this is indispensable for understanding what's just happened, uh, for understanding that perhaps Iran is in a weaker position than traditional um security presumptions had held, to the point where uh Israel um killed uh Ismail Haniya, the head of Hamas, the head of Hamas, in Tehran, um, which was just absolutely unthinkable before 2023. And so now the Iranians uh start to feel the hand of the, you know, certainly the little Satan, um, and then behind it the great Satan, uh, on its own on its own territory. And this is unacceptable for the Iranians. The Houthis become far more active. They shut down shipping, uh, closing the Babel Mandib uh entranceway between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, tremendously uh commercially crucial waterway. The United States responds not by saying, okay, we should restrain Israel from its genocide, but saying now we're at war with the Houthis and we're going to have a giant maritime campaign to open the Babel Mandib, it fails. The same guy who's running the war today, Admiral Brad Cooper of Central Command, previously ran this failed war against the Houthis in Yemen that failed on its own terms, that resulted in the most consistent, sustained uh naval combat the United States has engaged in since World War II. And the United States lost it. They lost that under Trump, but nevertheless, uh the seeds of the mistake were laid under Biden. It was not like Trump was going to resolve that. Um, and then in 2025, uh Israel, after exchange, you know, after missile exchanges and drone exchanges between the Israelis and the and the Iranians, uh, which were like saturation level from the Iranian perspective. I I forget, I think it was like 2,000 drones and ballistic missiles uh fired um at the Israelis, and uh even at once the US joins in in 2025 for the 12 day war, at the US megabase at Al Udid in uh Ghadr, uh which is an absolutely uh crucial uh location of US military power in in the Middle East. And so now, for the first time uh History of the US and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US and Iran have now, like formally, not through proxies, exchanged fire. And from the American perspective, live to tell the tale. The Iranian response was we can debate the use of the word restrained, but not looking to expand the war really kind of beyond that. And throughout there are messages diplomatically being exchanged through the Omanis, who do a lot of the diplomatic work in the region very quietly. And at the same time, Trump is also predicating a lot of what he's doing with the Iranians on the idea that Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner are going to negotiate a tougher deal than the Iranians were willing to give Barack Obama because he's Trump and he's strong. Now, interestingly enough, this is very forgotten at this point, but uh Whitkoff in, I want to say spring, in Whitkoff in spring of 2024, so before in 2025, before the uh the bombs start falling, agrees briefly before he has to walk this back that the Iranians can perform domestic uh uranium enrichment, which is one of the he he clearly fucked that up. He was like on the wrong page of uh where uh MAGA and broader conservative catechism is, which is that Iran has no right to enrich any nuclear fuel under you know the non-proliferation treaty, to which Iran is a member and nuclear Israel is not. Iran absolutely has that right. And the Iranians understandably saw that as a matter of sovereignty. That uh Trump is presenting them with a deal designed for them to say no. It says that Iran has to both uh restrain and you know get rid of its missile program, it can't do any Iranian, it can't do any uranium enrichment, it has to transform its regional strategies so that it no longer backs any groups that threaten Israel and so forth. This is a capitulation term, and the Iranians understandably uh rejected it, but also kept negotiations going to see where they could go, to the point where right before this bombing campaign, uh the Omani foreign minister has been trying to tell everyone he can. Um, and while you know you can feel all sorts of different ways of hesitating about Joe Kent, the guy who just quit at the head of the National Uh Counterterrorism Center, a very far-right individual who would uh probably enjoy throwing us both out of a helicopter. Um, nevertheless, he has said that uh the Iranians were in fact negotiating very seriously uh and were looking toward some form of resolution here. And then for reasons that are still gonna remain probably obscure uh for a while, but uh Marco Rubio has attributed uh, as has Lindsay Graham, uh to you know deep pressure uh from Israel, the United States and the Israelis came to the conclusion that Iran is weak and now would be the time to transform its relationship to the point where it could impose its will through war. Um, and that's where we are now. It's been a complete disaster uh for reasons we can get into next. I know I've taken up most of our time talking about the history that led to that point, but it's really important. You also mentioned Venezuela. The quick success Trump enjoyed in Venezuela has has made him and the administration feel invincible. And that is an absolutely crucial aspect of what's happened here. Basically, the Americans and the Israelis did not engage in this war because they felt something had changed in Iranian security posture that made Iran more hostile. They thought that they had an opportunity worth seizing to destroy the Islamic Republic or subordinate it. I think the US and the Israeli uh missions here are divergent, but they thought they could do this at a point where Iran was weak and not able to withstand uh the uh impressive uh amounts of military force, really punishing military, uh particularly air power, that both the US and Israel uh could could apply. And uh the experience of Venezuela, uh, where Trump kidnaps Maduro, does something absolutely shocking from the perspective of the extant international system, and then you know, doesn't overthrow the entire Venezuelan government but decapitates it and puts that uh basically under control of a proxy uh to the United States. Now, I should also say that uh we're probably at Act One of the Venezuela story, so we shouldn't presume that the way that Venezuela is in um you know mid-March 2026 is going to be how Venezuela stays. But nevertheless, that's very clearly um an experience that that shaped um as a kind of proof of concept uh for Trump what he's what he's done in Iran. Except in Iran it's failed. The Iranians uh have a far more durable regime, even after withstanding uh the protests of of late 2025, early 2026, uh the numbers are disputed, but thousands of Iranians uh were killed by uh by uh government militias, uh government security forces to uh retain control. Nevertheless, the experience of external assault has revealed a resilience of the Islamic Republic that it seems pretty clearly neither the US nor Israel counted on.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we have seen many examples of that over the past number of weeks since this war on Iran has begun from the US and Israel. And if we think of that response, you know, you've given us such a fantastic history of how we got to this point. But one of the things that we've clearly seen is Iran's ability in a way that it feels like the United States and Israel did not account for, you know, to actually make them feel the cost of starting this war. And one piece of that is of is, of course, the use of drones and the targeting of certainly, you know, Israeli and American infrastructure, but also the larger, you know, kind of Gulf region and infrastructure in in those countries as well. So, what have you made of the Iranian response and the way that they have been able to utilize their missiles and their drones in order to make uh you know their adversaries feel the pain?

SPEAKER_01 50:54

So, right there is the the heart of the question and accordingly the answer. In 2025, the Iranians attacked Israel with uh a massive amount of drones and missiles. It didn't do that this time around. Uh, it attacked one mega US base with one important volley that it heralded through diplomatic channels in advance, so it didn't cause that much damage. This is much different. Here, uh the Iranians, recognizing that that strategy failed to re-establish their military deterrent against the United States, um, have now expanded the war to basically uh making US interceptors, basically missiles to you know, block other missiles, um, in both uh the Israeli and American magazines, as we call you know, missile stocks. Uh, they have to defend much, much more territory. They have to now defend an arc that stretches all through the Persian slash Arabian Gulf, and the Israeli interceptors have to do the same thing around their major population centers. And instead of releasing this all at once, they've decided to take a more patient, persistent approach. We've heard the Pentagon repeatedly boast that they're doing this because they, you know, they don't have the size of a missile inventory, the magazine depth uh that they previously did. To some degree, that's gotta be true, just because of the expenditures of the missiles, but neither the US nor the Israelis seem to have like a really good idea of the size of those stocks. And in addition to the ballistic missiles that they've launched, both long and short range, because that remember, the kinds of missiles that hit Tel Aviv don't have to be the kinds of missiles that hit Doha, that hit uh Abu Dhabi, that hit all of the different ports, the hitting Jebel Ali. What the um the the Iranians have also supplemented that uh with the use of the Shahid 136 drone uh previously seen uh on the battlefield of Ukraine. This drone is a pr is is like a real case in point of uh an economic weapon, even before we get to the other economic weapons uh that the Iranians are are really using here to quite a great um degree of effect. Estimates vary for how much the Shahid 136 costs. Um standard uh understandings are like between 20 and $30,000. Uh my friend Ispandyar uh Batman Khelej, um, who's an uh an economist uh who looks at uh the region extensively, thinks it's actually closer to about something like four to seven thousand dollars. Interceptor missiles, a Patriot Pack 3, $3.7 million, an Arrow 3, $3 million, an SM2, $2.1 million, and then as you scale up uh to like a FAD battery, those interceptors just get more expensive. Um, so you are really looking at a capability that even an Iranian economy, battered by you know a decade and a half of sanctions, can produce at such cost in supplement to its missiles that can make the US coalition have to expend far more expensive, far more difficult to replenish stocks of interceptors faster than Iran can send its missiles and its drones. What are they hitting? It's not just that they're hitting this larger axe, you know, the this this larger geographic axis um across the Middle East. They are hitting some of the most important ports in the world. Uh Jebel Ali uh in the UAE, which you know, pass, I think it might be like among like the top five, you know, ports by by by cargo in the world. And uh remember that uh you know part of a key component of Emirati power around the world uh is its ports ownership through Dubai ports world of so much uh shipping and commercial infrastructure that's absolutely crucial. Hitting, you know, the this the kind of psychology of the Emiratis, that they were this kind of island of stability and oasis has now been shattered, especially catering as it does to the you know to the 1% and the point, you know, you know, sub-1% of the world. Uh it's it's clearly not been prepared um for the idea that it has to you know fight a war on its own territory. And uh, you know, now after uh Israel attacked the South Pars gas field, um, a crucial uh shared gas field between Qatar and Iran, um now this week we saw Iran, we're recording this on Friday the 19th. Now this week uh we saw uh Iran respond uh by attacking a really crucial uh gas refinery plant in the UAE. Um uh drones sent uh to Saudi uh oil infrastructure. And remember, uh one of the things that that really prompted uh the Saudis earlier in the decade to try and seek some kind of previously unimaginable rapprochement with Iran was the 2019 Iranian attack, probably Iran um attack on Saudi Aramco. Uh so once the the Saudis recognized uh that their oil infrastructure uh could seriously be put at risk, the sources of its wealth uh could be held at risk. Uh the Iranians uh took note of the change in Saudi behavior, but they're not just hitting the energy facilities. Um there have been exchanges of fire at desalination plants, targeting desalination plants. The Middle East does not have much fresh water. Uh destroying a desalination plant can be crippling to a country. I think there used to be, there was there was that one cable that WikiLeaks uh published a very long time ago uh where a US diplomat uh recorded that if the desalination plant around Riyadh uh came offline, the Saudis would have to abandon their capital. That's an extremely dangerous way uh that this war can can spiral out of control. But also, they haven't just hit uh the oil infrastructure, they've also been hitting the compute infrastructure. Uh they've been hitting the data centers in the UAE, something that um probably listeners to this podcast uh are familiar with the emerging cliche, conventional wisdom, whatever you want to call it, that compute is the new oil, that that technical computational infrastructure, crucial to the advance of the AI industry, not just the surveillance industry, but now it's it's its transformation over into an AI industry, is as important uh for that industry and all of the economic scaffolding layered atop it as oil is for the rest of the kind of economic fuel of the present day. Iran has now held both of those crucial resources at risk. And they did that before closing the Strait of Hormuz, which, from a strategic perspective, uh is the reason that the US, aside from all of the other attendant difficulties of a war with Iran, has not been willing to do what Trump did um on February 28th. Uh, because closing the Strait of Hormuz uh closes a massive amount, something like 20% of uh the world's oil uh transits through it, but also a third of its fertilizer, which is you know a petrochemical uh product, particularly something that uh the Qataris uh have a great deal um of a hand in refining. So we're looking not just at spiking, spiking oil prices. Uh, you know, I the day we're recording this, the Wall Street Journal reported from, I think it was a Saudi Aramco figure, that by another month of this war going by, we could see $150 a barrel oil. We're already looking at Brent Crude, I think it got last night when closing stopped, uh, up to like $115 to $119 a barrel. This is a massive, massive uh economic catastrophe that's going to be felt throughout not just the region, but the entire world. This is Iranian strategy. This is Iran, in addition to its military strategy, which it's now known as the Mosaic Strategy, which is how it dealt with the decapitation strikes, the assassinations of uh the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, by distributing essentially uh, you know, autonomous uh military command uh down to lower and lower levels of, in particular, the IRGC and its missile batteries, but now also the distribution of economic pain around the world uh to include now a modification of that, uh, where the Iranians said that the strait is closed, but at the same time, we're going to allow friendly vessels to pass through. That that is also reminiscent of what the Houthis uh took as their posture toward the Red Sea, that if you weren't, you know, US or Israeli or Allied uh flagships, you can go through uh without attack. Um now the Iranians are doing that. The reason why Iran is doing that is China, because China needs a massive amount, and and China not only needs a massive amount of its energy, it imports a massive amount of its energy from Saudi and from Iran. So they're now banking on the idea that uh as long as the major patron internationally, not patron's the wrong word, but you know, one of the other you know major nodes of world power uh can can you know not experience so much economic harm from this, that's you know, immediately a diplomatic force multiplier. And that's kind of where things stand right now. Um the US is trying to figure out if it can force the strait open. I want to just say really quickly, because this is probably a uh you know a bottom line that I should have said much earlier in this podcast, Trump has lost control of the war. Bibi has lost control of the war. The most important fact of the war right now, strategically, is the Strait of Hormuz. That's not been American or Israeli initiative, that's purely Iranian initiative. So, from just like a matter of you know, analyzing military progress in this campaign, the Iranians have the initiative. That's not something that the US ever wanted to say. It's something that uh Hegzith and Kane deny in every single one of their press conferences. They focus on the air superiority uh that they've obtained, uh, they focus on uh the reduced rate in missile fires, as if that tells you anything. It looks more like the Iranians are conserving their missile batteries to sustain this war. They've reckoned that at this point, in what is, you know, from their perspective, an existential conflict, from the Israeli perspective, an Iranian Islamic Republic existential conflict, they're gonna they're gonna draw this out. They know that Israel wants a much, much longer war than the United States does, and that the United States is going to be looking to find some kind of exit strategy, especially given uh the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the overwhelming economic pain that's going to be attributable to its decision to launch this war of aggression.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

Yeah, I think really well said. And there's a lot more that I could ask you with regard to what is going on here, the broader consequences, but I just wanted to end with this question. You know, you mentioned earlier when we were talking about the history here that the United States was looking for a reason to stay in the Middle East, right? Um, you know, and certainly saw Iran as part of the reason to do that, and has built up all of these military bases through the Middle East, has built these, you know, deep relationships with the Gulf states, certainly. Does this war with Iran and does the kind of wider consequences for the region threaten the United States' position within the Middle East, or at least within kind of the Gulf? And do you actually see a reasonable off-ramp in the near future for this, or does it look like it's going to continue for some time?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:30

So will it get American power out of the Middle East? I don't, I kind of don't think so. And the reason why I don't think so is because the experience of the Gulf states in being attacked directly by Iran uh with with with you know in such a sustained capacity and without the ability of the United States to fully prevent these attacks, you might think that would cause the Gulfies to re-establish, to kind of just re-examine their relationship with the United States. But instead, what you're actually hearing from them is that they want you know more sustained security guarantees. They're basically saying, like, what did we invest in? Uh, we need the United States to come to our rescue to protect us, uh, and and so forth. And I could see, you know, certainly if this war ends before the summer, it would probably have, you know, it would end with you know the Islamic Republic intact. And so those Gulf states uh would be looking towards a new relationship with the United States that can, you know, more clearly defend them. Um they would, you know, quite likely be looking, you know, as well for for some kind of way to you know to live with Iran under threat, but I don't think they would they would basically say, you know, US out of Al-Udid, you know, Bahrain kicking the Fifth Fleet out. I I don't really see that as likely. I think that's one of the dangers of this moment is that Trump and Netanyahu miscalculated to such an enormous degree that the pain that Iran is inflicting in response to their war could be such that it doesn't actually end the fundamental dynamics and the war has to end uh before any of those fundamentals are addressed.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:24

That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it it sets up kind of a scary path forward for us, right? It's hard to know exactly where this is gonna go. But as you were saying, the pain that a lot of people are gonna feel, of course, you know, certainly people with bombs dropping on them, which is the worst kind of pain, but you know, the broader conse or the broader economic consequences that the world is going to feel, and that certainly we talk about in in you know, in light of kind of gas prices and increased inflation and food prices in North America and Europe. But of course, the global south is going to get hit by this, you know, immensely harder because of the the limited ability for them to respond. It was really great to get your insights on all this Spencer to figure out what. What is going on here to understand the history of how we got to this moment? I really appreciate you taking the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

Thank you very much, Paris.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:09

Spencer Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror and of the forthcoming book, The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan, which comes out in spring of 2027. He also writes the Forever Wars newsletter. Tech won't save us has made a partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech won't save us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.