Expert analysis on Iran
I’ve had several Iranian colleagues throughout my faculty career. Unsurprisingly, none were anti-American.
Here’s an interview with Juan Cole and Mojtaba Mahdavi, two Middle East experts, on the current events in Iran. They discuss the politics in Iran and among the Iranian diaspora. Both Cole and Mahdavi point to the Netanyahu ambition of hegemony in the Middle East as a major driver of current events.
I encourage you to listen to the whole thing, but as a teaser, Prof. Cole compares the likelihood that the late Shah’s son will come to power after the current war to the rumors that the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia had somehow escaped Bolshevik Russia and would reclaim the throne there.
Mahdavi and Cole cut through the bothsidesisms of the MSM and the propaganda of the US and Israeli administrations to articulate the nuance and diversity of Iranian public opinion, the impact of Islamophobia as a driver of war propaganda and Western orientalist discourse and the retreat into colonialism and mercantilist capitalism. Not to mention the utility of the war to promote AI and war technologies and distraction from Israeli atrocities in Gaza and annexations in the West Bank.
Current events in Iran: just the facts
Gregor Semieniuk and Isabella Weber, who coined the term “sellers inflation,” take a look at what lies on the horizon as a result of Israel’s drive for hegemony. “The world energy shock is coming.” The US and Israel’s illegal attack on Iran will provoke a global economic catastrophe.
Knock on effects include:
– Excessive inflation: corporate price hikes become even easier when inputs are not just more expensive but in short supply.
– redistribution from labour to capital and ultimately to the richest of the rich
– windfall profits
– shortages and consumers being priced out of markets altogether.
IOW Trump and his Epstein Elites (his donors) don’t just make out like bandits. They are bandits.