Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

But in any case...

What can you tell me about that era, that era before 2003, when Iran's nuclear program kind of became a, started becoming a big period of attention? What did you learn in your research about that era, you know, under Rafsanjani, I guess, and other stalwarts of the Islamic revolution who launched this program? Sure.

So first of all, 1990s was a very important decade for Iran.

because the country emerges from the war relatively weakened by the war, it cannot rearm itself because of the U.S. arms embargo on the country.

One of the things he learned was don't fight the United States directly because that could threaten the regime.

He was president of Iran when Khomeini, the original leader, Ayatollah, original supreme leader, when he made the decision to end the Iran-Iraq war, something he said he would not do, and the reason he did it is because They then had a prime minister named Mousavi and Rafsanjani, who was a senior figure.

They came to Homani and they said, look, we can't fight directly the U.S. That would threaten the survival of the regime.

And Khamenei was present then.

And then you have another situation.

And these are, in a way, the kind of two main characters of your essay, which is the emergence of Hashemi Rafsanjani, as his main adversary in the plans around around.

Now, I want to sort of ask you a larger question.

If memory serves me right, I thought we did an episode about Rafsanjani.

Maybe not.

Maybe we didn't.

I think we did an episode about Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani came up.

That's what it is.

The country was under war, and it was difficult for anyone to dare to...

There was some attempt, even in 86, by Rafsanjani to have a detente with the United States.

You better than you possibly know about McFarlane traveling to Iran and the whole thing about Iran Contras and Reagan government reaching a hand of friendship with Iran, sending a bunch of olive and And said to Iran that we want to make peace.

And then inside Iran, someone from Montazeri office, one of the important clergy, he basically disclosed that.

That's one point.

And you can see from liberals are doing whatever they can.

Last week, for example, Hossein Marashi, the godfather of the main neoliberal party in Iran, Kargo Zaransal Zandeghi, who was also brother-in-law of Hashemi Rafsanjani, the pillar of Iran's revolution, he said even Chinese don't want to work with Iran and Chinese have stipulated preconditions for buying Iran oil, including opening straight of Hormuz oil.

and then de-escalating tension with the regional countries, with the Persian Gulf countries, etc.

How did this factualism actually begin? And I told you, Ali, earlier that I was privileged to watch a documentary in private by a journalist in Iran called Siavash Sarmadhi, which explained how this split began.

And it came about through the two personalities and two focuses of two men, Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, right? Do you want to explain that a little bit or...

do you wanna explain like what happened? I mean, the quick background on these two men is after Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Iran passed away, there was a discussion within the Council of Guardian or Assembly of Experts to choose a successor.

And there was an idea that they would do like a council of experts, right? Like multiple personalities, including these two men.

And it is Rafsanjani, who pushed for Ali Khamenei to become the successor and that it would be a single man holding that position, correct? Which is kind of ironic because their worldviews and their views of what was good for Iran turned out to be very, very different.

That's right.

So very interesting because today, or at least in the Western media representation, we always had Khamenei as the top dictator who ran everything.

So, but then in mid 80s, there is like Fischer and there is another faction, which is very quiet.

They didn't say thank you because that wasn't the way the Iranian Revolutionary Guard operates.

They just took it back to Tehran to show the authorities there, the Ayatollah, Rafsanjani, who was the Speaker of the Majlis, who was one of the most powerful figures in Iran.

And within two months of this intelligence being brought to the attention of the Iranians, something like 8,000 Iranian communists were arrested and rounded up, of whom it's not clear quite how many, but perhaps half were executed in the end.

I mean, it's an appalling bloodbath, and that is the moment when the Ayatollah's regime was solidified.

It seems that the

Islamic Republic lacks a revolutionary Islamic theory of political economy, which has allowed neoliberalism to take hold starting, of course, in the 1990s under Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Why is there a lack of coherent political economic theory here in the Islamic Republic?

One of the reasons is again this colonial mentality that some of our economists have and they think that liberal economics or neoliberal economics is the... scientific method of doing economics anywhere in the world.

I don't want to be super conspiratorial, but you know, we've been, you've been talking about this.

We've been watching this, this big split in between the IRGC stuff and the, um, and the political class, right? So you have Pezeshkian, now, um, Khatami, and Rafsanjani, all of them very publicly saying, "Well, dude, this is killing us.

We, we need to find an honorable off-ramp here." These, all three have used the word honorable.

Mm-hmm.

They, they take it back.

But that, the, the day they fly back, they contact, they get hold of, um, Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, and say, "We got a problem here." And the aftermath is brutal and spectacular.

And bloody.

And incredibly bloody.