Jon Snow: Time to Rethink Iran

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[Music] I am more than mindful that I have chosen a subject to speak about which many people in this room are far more expert in talking about than I am but I speak today not as an academic and certainly not as someone of Tim's analytical caliber but as one who spent a lot of time in Iran down the years some of it but Tom Fenton even who's here in the front row CBS and I've met and talked with elements of its leadership interviewed successive presidents from ban Assad to Ahmadinejad who I've actually met nearly half a dozen times I've met many others from the formidable global Iranian diaspora from which Britain herself benefits are so considerably but the timing is he's not mine the timing is Suze because when she asked me what I wanted to talk about sort of three or four months ago maybe more maybe six months ago I said I'd like to talk about Iran and at that point things were pretty dead well they weren't they were extremely lively people were talking about bombing Iran and of course they're still talking about bombing around today it's a fashionable thing to do to talk about bombing Iran actually I think if anyone wants to bomb Iran they should bomb it with laptops because that's actually what people really yearn for connectivity but nevertheless we have these relatively abortive and hopeless nuclear talks which I think are more of a Sharad for the West than they are for Iran I don't think that the West is so desperate now to try and avoid some awful sure Mazal because heaven only knows that if somebody did bomb Iran the consequences are absolutely unfathomable but it's my argument today that we could not have constructed a worse relationship with another country than we've managed with Iran it has been a huge endeavor to get ourselves into the condition that we're now in in which a country that is a formidable regional power is now so a lien ated from everybody about and it's very easy to say they're all bonkers that the Supreme Leader's a difficult man that the leadership is divided that they're corrupt and that there the Messianic and the rest of it but I'm afraid to say at the end of the day you know it is a country which has not invaded another country in 300 years it's a country which interesting is not yet bombed London or indeed New York or Washington or the Pentagon or more or less anywhere else and there are plenty of countries that we could point to with whom we have most fraternal relationships which have had a hand in bombing places of interest to ourselves we have troops in the field in I think IIST make two countries covertly and to overtly in which were hobby fundamentalists are very actively in play in which Saudi money for example has played an active part in which you could even say Saudi inspiration has paid a formal part in bring them about and yet we are totally allied with the Saudi faction of life and we are virtually at war with Iran and I want to argue today that this is a ridiculous condition to have got ourselves into and that in many ways we've allowed us to ourselves to do it without really thinking seriously about it I mean I want to take you just very quickly through history because I think history recent history in Iran tells you a great deal about why we're in the mess we're in now 1978-79 I was sent to Ron only because somebody came into the news room and said is there anybody who's ever been to Iran and I put my hand up because I had been on the hippie trail in 1917 driven an Old Bedford van to Tehran why we'd gone there I don't really know except that we had a band and in those days that was what you did but in a way look you've got a taste of it and I got a taste of a pretty special place I mean I think one of the things of course is that Iran conjures the most extraordinary kind of reactions it is a place of unbelievable beauty it's a place with the most incredible our history culture depth I mean I'm afraid to say that they were working on alphabet when we were crawling on our stomachs in the caves and that is unfortunate in fact they were at it three or four thousand years BC and if not slightly more at any rate I was there for the revolution and the revolution was make no mistake about it a popular revolution on a massive scale it's still the biggest movement of people I've ever seen in one place millions of people on the street it was a passionate and it was an Islamic event and well there it is that's what it was we may not like it but that's what it was it was an Iranian Revolution and you have to determine how you're going to deal with this well many of us dealt with it by deciding we didn't like it and then we wouldn't have anything to do with it and I believe that from the outset that was not a very good idea but of course we were naive in those days we knew less about Islam and we knew less about sheer demand we knew less about how to relate to people who perhaps had religious passions actually on the day of the revolution frankly the streets were so jammed that I said to my crew you know what we're going to do we need to find out why this matters and you know why the reason why it matters it matters because the most important listening posts for Soviet atomic testing easy on the Caspian Sea and they've lost it we've lost it we don't have it anymore we will not be able to tell what the Russians are doing all the way through the showers rain we had this wonderful listening post and we were able to tell to the most minut detail what had been fired and how much nuclear material had been detonated and so I said let's go there let's find it and the funny thing is that when I drove through in 1970 I saw it and I knew what it was because we lived in Yorkshire my dad was a bishop up there and we used to go he was the Bishop of Whitby and we'd have to drive across the wall the Moors and there were these golf balls filing nails and they had golf balls on the bottom of the Caspian Sea at the bottom you drive from Tabriz all the way towards Afghanistan and there in the right-hand corner just before you turned left for Russia buying there they were and I remember they were there but I couldn't say exactly where they were I grew up and I said right we'll turn right at Tabriz and we arrived and found the golf balls and drove up there were two 16 year old Revolutionary Guards sitting with Kalashnikovs across their knees on tubular chairs and that they were worried to see us but they clearly had no familiarity with their weapons and did nothing to familiarize with them themselves with them when we arrived they had no idea where they were or what they were doing and we said they were somewhere rather important and they said well that's fine they had were not remotely interested they were quite happy to let us film in the rest of it of course me being slightly exuberant and naive I said let's go in and of course the cameraman being rather wise I said now I think this might be booby-trapped and so we solemnly threw stones through the open door of one of the golf balls to see whether it was indeed booby-trapped it wasn't and there were stuff pouring out of these machines paper though these were early big computers recording what was going on there and I began to see the scale of the interest that the West had had in what was going on just across the Caspian Sea in the Urals what a vital resource and when we went into the living quarters the pyjamas were still on the beds there was food on the breakfast food on the table they had fled not much more than a day before the Americans had clearly not known it was coming there had been an American unit within this testing zone and we recorded all the stuff went back to Tehran four o'clock in the morning my bedroom door I go to the door voice the outside hot air I thought that's British hollow I think that sounds that sounds slightly military and indeed he was he was the military attache at the British Embassy could I come in mr. slow I said yes yes yes come in if you must it's four o'clock but there it is he said we have information that you may have been to the early warning station and film some material that we believe might be little sensitive I said well I can't confirm that I'm afraid but you know if that's what you've been told you can live with it he said no I'm afraid you've got to listen to me if there are things there which if if transmitted they may not mean anything to you but the material on some of that paperwork etc is very very sensitive indeed so I said okay fine will you tell us what's what sensitive and we might agree to chop it out but we'd need a deal he said well what would the deal be I said well the other thing which makes this country very interesting is that it's the first to have the Fox bat fighter jet fighter you don't find a bomber thing which the Americans supplied the Shah in the closing days of his reign 16 of them they're somewhere in this country we'd like to see them oh is it my dear chap I can do that for you all you need is you go down to Shiraz second roundabout that you go and as you're going in turn right left at the traffic lights again the next one and carry on along that road and you'll find you arrive at the airfield and there's a whole lot of bunkers there they're all there to be seen you can see them from the road I said I'm most grateful here what you want us to cut out bong bong bong-bong-bong meant nothing to me at all but we did and we put a piece out there was no problem I didn't feel compromised and the next day we went to Shiraz and recorded footage of the Fox bats which was exclusive and fun but more seriously I realized of course we were dealing with something very formidable spying military resource and then of course the other thing that Tom will remember and anybody who was in Iran in those days when you took off from mehrabad Mehrabad Airport he would look down and there on the ground will be row upon row upon row of jumbo jets in military fatigues are they were troop carriers in this line in that line they would be a fuel carriers refuelers good god this is Iran I mean it's big country but what are they going to do with all this stuff and they clearly had become a kind of bunkering base for the world pass that you know what was going to be done with stuff an absolutely no idea but billions of dollars of material was sitting there on the airport an amazing dependency therefore on the west on America and of course a dependency which meant that it had become a kind of client state well I mean that it's important to pointed at at this point that American diplomatic relations with Iran had lasted just 25 years that is all the other had diplomatic relations with Iran extended back nearly 300 years 250 300 years a very very long time and there was great British expertise you know fluent Farsi speakers on some scale people who had lived and loved Iran and understood it and and were pretty good but they somehow fell into the slipstream of the way in which America felt about Iran and the the revolution was very much against America not particularly against us but against America and indeed all the Americans I don't know Tom you exclude I think you were thrown out most of the American correspondents were thrown out I thought all of them if you hid in a lift shaft in the ins content of the hotel that generally speaking they were all sent out and I was seconded to ABC American television from for six months because they were so worried about the situation and very quickly of course we reached the hostage crisis which of course was the most devastating humiliation that many powers have ever really experienced in diplomatic terms the idea that your entire diplomatic corps resident in the country 52 diplomats are held hostage your ambassador is holed up in the foreign ministry also held hostage was a completely humiliating experience and the fact that it wasn't resolved in a day it took 444 days was even more humiliating and the fact that you sent the cream of the marine force to come and rescue them and crashed yourselves in the desert by a completely manufactured own goal I went to desert one I was one of only two or three of us who actually got there and when you saw it it was a much worse disaster than the White House never let on I mean the refueling aircraft had come in a c-130 or whatever you call them had gone into reverse thrust and they hadn't realized that as you land on the desert floor you were going to blind yourselves completely with sand and of course there were no instruments on the ground to guide him in he crashed into the end helicopter the helicopters have broken military rules which Tim would have been pretty hot on they were parked too close to each other 1 quart 5 2 quart fast we caught fire incinerating the crews on board who were waiting to be refueled and only I think three or four helicopters escaped and they limped out of the country down to the hair carrier force the thing was an absolute nightmare and I think put the crust on the whole sense that America had that they were dealing with something very very evil and I believe that the overhang of that humiliation is informing us to this very day and and it's um it's a devastatingly destructive force and it's a completely understandable one of course it's understand all these families are still alive I mean the the people who were held hostage most of them are still alive the scars are there you know in in those 444 days yellow ribbons were driven were tied round trees in every neighborhood where a hostage came from it became a completely national American phenomenon and it's scarred it scarred the nation's mind well I don't want to go onto the history too long because I want to get straight into the into the now but what I would say is this that those of us who were on the ground could talk to the students still several days after this thing had happened we were able to talk to key Iranian officials we were able to talk to the Foreign Minister we were able to talk to Ayatollah Beheshti who was very much the kind of figurehead for these people and it was possible to get a deal there was no question but America would not talk the Algerians offered to be the go-between and they had a formula for getting them out so they won't talk to and 444 days later who got the hostages out the Algerians this is a great and dark chapter of our life with Iran and I afraid to say I think it is what has really informed where we are to Sarris vans Secretary of State agrees to talk to Sadek glob Sade the Foreign Minister and over the satellite early sort of invention at that point very difficult to get people to do that four o'clock in the morning Iranian time you know whatever it was in America and I remember ABC calling me up and saying John what do you think you could persuade said it GOP's a day to do an interview with Sarah spends and I said well I think that's could be very difficult very difficult I needed to justify my fee and I went down to the foreign ministry Sadek hello John snow here ABC Oh John come in look Cyrus Vance wants to talk to what when when how what time as well I'm afraid it's four o'clock women what four o'clock in the morning that's fantastic when well tomorrow morning terrific great well that's amazing you're well you wait till they're students here this one this is great I'm going to talk to Cyrus Vance at all of us this is ridiculous why doesn't Sarah's mats come here nobody came nobody came and this terrible standoff went on and on and on across has been duplicitous on all sides ever since and and the thing has been fermented in the rest of it since then who we are I think we've had carrier we've had McCain but very few people very few people of stature from the United States have been there here we've had Jack Straw go he tried pretty hard he went I think seven times altogether to Tehran but the interesting thing is there's only one world leader who's ever met the supreme leader and that is Erdogan from Turkey next door you know again I don't really think people have ever made any very great effort to try to get to the top there the biggest thing about this is esteem esteem nobody's been prepared to say look we don't like what you're doing we don't like you but we respect Iran we respect your history we respect your civilization we respect what you have given us and history is going to ask why the UK with it history with its knowledge with its understanding with its scholarship with its farsi studies in oxford cambridge and beyond why didn't we do better what did we get out of the united states that persuaded us that iran was a thoroughly nasty place and we would have nothing to do with it what what went wrong what went wrong why did we allow ourselves to be the stool pigeon of the understandable shock and horror and hatred that was blooming in america we should have said to ourselves hang on a minute iran is a very important country we need to find a way to communicate with these people and if you cut to the present day and you see the extended hand of friendship from barack obama in cairo if you're one like me a naive hack and you hear those words you think my god he understands the open hand of friendship and then you say two weeks later where's the wrist two months later where's the elbow two years later where's the shoulder what happened to the open hand of friendship what happens to it after the election should he win because i believe that if there were a parity of esteem it's going to be a very tricky thing to do but somebody somewhere has to make a breakthrough and it won't be ban ki-moon and it won't be even bless her a Baroness Ashton it has to be the Great Satan it actually has to be the United States it has to be somebody either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama one of them has to go one of them has to take their life in their hands and go and it wouldn't be too risky I can tell you this is a safe place to go famous last words that it is it is because that's not what it's like I mean there is the most appalling violation of human rights we had any day of the week that's that's that's on the table but there is no question in my mind that if you are prepared to accept what Iran is if you prepare to start from the bottom and say this is a great country then you can start to deal with what is not so great and what is not so great is that is a shambles at the top divided revolution regard too much money in their pockets too much stranglehold over the economy division between the supreme leader and the prime minister of the president too you know there that has all the problems we know about because we read about them every day of the week and they result of course in what you get in terms the nuclear and then we say we're going to only negotiate over one thing and that's going to be a ball and then were okay that's fine you they might be building it they might not be building it they might be building the capacity to build it or they might not be building the capacity to build it but we're not actually sure but they have got a nuclear power station which is so far taken 41 years to build which is the longest build any power station has ever taken in the history of humankind that's jolly alarming it never quite gets finished do they really need it for that and all the rest of it no you won't make there nobody there's nobody in this room who thinks that you would ever be able to create a relationship with a country like Iran through the question of whether it has or hasn't got a nuclear weapon now today I'm hiding behind a message in foreign affairs which I would not dare have have even raised as a question I should we allow Iran to have a bomb and it adds the article is called why Iran should have a bomb and it's by a fairly seasoned and reasonable American professor I couldn't go that far because I'm died another brain I don't have Tim's capacity for analysis but what I do know is that there is no way that Iran is ever going to do what anybody wants them to do if you simply talk in terms of a nuclear weapon this is a country that looks West it looks to us our culture infects everything they do they love our culture within the people and the people are the people we should be connecting with we should engage with Iran we should trade with Iran heaven knows I've been investigating the companies that have been going to the wall in the northwest of Britain because of the sanctions little companies that produced widgets that have nothing to do with bombs but are caught by the sanction this is mad this is mad we've lost our diplomatic representation we're now losing our manufacturing relationship and trade relationship Britain is bigger than this why do we need to do it we don't believe in sanctions anyway I mean everybody's proved that sanctions don't work I mean it's fun to have them for a bit because it makes people feel uncomfortable but in the end they don't do the job we have to engage I've talked too far too long already and we're mindful of that better to tell them I will speak for about five minutes later but I want also to address the very important issues which which informed people's views very strongly for very understandable reasons it's my argument that once you have a situation in which there is schism between a power like Iran and the United States then everything comes into play and I I find from having talked to senior Iranians that the reason they go a lot of a lot of the distance on a lot of the issues that they support is because they know it will upset the United States and they know it will upset us so they talk of the Holocaust and the most disreputable or repulsive and repugnant terms they talk of Israel in repugnant terms they talk of that they cozy up to Hamas they cozy up to Hezbollah they supply and all the rest of it and there they are in Syria too so but they are everywhere where we don't want them to be and why are they there in part because they've had to decide that they will now make life difficult for us and frankly I think most of us would do the same if we'd lost our connection then and we look west let's make pain for the West let's kick them about a bit well you know that has that will only be dealt with if we begin to engage so I want just to look at one fabulous piece of engagement which gives us real insight into what is possible over the last three or four years the British Museum has banished stage some of the most remarkable Persian based exhibitions that have ever been staged anywhere in the world some of the most remarkable exhibitions that have ever been staged dealing with such antiquity and most of the stuff that has come from Tehran has never ever been out in Iran before it's come from Persepolis in all sorts of places and over a period of three or four years and the relationship continues to this day pieces have been coming out scholars have been going in scholars have been coming out there has been a traffic there has been an activity there's been a conversation and there has been a very strange kind of cultural freedom and then it came to the crunch point when they said we would like the saris cylinder what is the cyrus cylinder it's that size it has hieroglyphics on it and those hieroglyphics are the original first-ever Testament of human rights and they reside in a glass case in the British Museum and a fact similarly is to be found in the hall outside the chamber of the United Nations it is the first statement of man's obligation to man of humankind's understanding of their obligations to the world in which we live it's a breathtaking tiny thing in which I think there's only about 150 people could even read it because it's in this strange what text is it you know I know but there it is so it has this this these hieroglyphics it's a marvelous little thing with setting that size and the British Foreign Office says this would be very foolhardy indeed do not send the heart the Cyrus cylinder you'll never get it back we did after all Nick it from Babylon in 1875 but you will never get it back and the trustees of the British Museum - they're huge and courageous credit said this cylinder goes and this is the algún model this is this is Persia's algún models the saris cylinder is flown in its own seat in a in a beautiful wrapping to Tehran a place is built built huge place to contain thousands of people and the cylinder sits in the middle and the people of Iran go round it in their hundreds of thousands perhaps a million and what's important about this this is a pre-islamic piece of culture and one of the things the Islamic Revolution has always refused to do is to acknowledge Persia's gorgeous sumptuous intellectual past and here suddenly was the vice president of Iran the then most likely candidate for the presidency they were all going round and milking it for all they were worth and what were they milking a thing which talked about human rights I mean that's Iran for you but that it was an amazing moment and then a terrible letter arrived dear Neil MacGregor we would like to keep the cylinder for another three months until the new year the Persian New Year and they had to decide well we don't have much option to him okay yes the day after the Persian New Year I was summoned to the British Museum with a camera I arrived in the Persian gallery and I saw a man in white gloves carrying the saris cylinder and putting it back into the box locking the door and there it was if you want something which tells you what is possible in terms of negotiation you may think what's a bloody piece of terracotta got to do with trying to mend relations with Iran it tells us everything because it was redolent with symbolism it was counter revolutionary it was all about human rights which they're not all these things were running in opposite directions and they did they got it they did it they got it so anyway there it is I want to tell you that that's a wonderful thing and that is a great pointer to what as possible heaven knows how it can be done but I do believe that that it must be done because if it is not done if we do not engage and if Britain doesn't begin to assert itself independently about what they really understand of Iran we're going to live in ever more dangerous times because we need Iran for our presence in Afghanistan for our residue in Iraq for our need in Syria for the Middle East this there is no solution to anything in that region without Iran we must rethink Iran I'm a journalist I'm not really allowed to have opinion so I have no opinion but the Tim garden Memorial Lecture has allowed me to have a view and my view is engage engage engage at every level and if you're a tourist go it's so safe go to Isfahan it's the Florence of the East thank you very much [Music]

Info

Channel: Chatham House

Views: 131,401

Rating: 4.6994758 out of 5

Keywords: Nuclear, Islamic Revolution, Broadcast Journalism, Monitoring, Mehrabad airport, Hostage Crisis, Desert 1, Cyrus Cylinder, yt:cc=on

Id: aTpLUSyUXcQ

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2012

Reddit Comments

Is he reporting from beyond the wall?

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/WingsThings 📅︎︎ Apr 10 2013 🗫︎ replies

You know nothin', Jon Snuuooh!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/MrXhin 📅︎︎ Apr 10 2013 🗫︎ replies

Winter is coming.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/gonzone 📅︎︎ Apr 10 2013 🗫︎ replies