From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday,

March 2nd. Now we've got the New Yorkers, Iran and World Affairs expert, Robin Reich. She's the author of books, including the last great

revolution, turmoil, and transformation in Iran. Robin, we always learn when you come on with us. Welcome

back to WNYC. Hi, Brian. Such a difficult time right now. Yes. And I see your latest article is called

what Ayatollah Ali Hamine meant to Iran and what comes next.

Let's take each of those separately.

I see you had breakfast with Hamanay way back in 1987 before he came to power as the Supreme

Leader, and you found him naively arrogant about theocratic rule. You wrote naively arrogant about theocratic rule.

Why did you use those words? Well, I met him when he was president of Iran, a position he held

for eight years in the 1980s before the death of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

It was his only trip to the United States or, in fact, to the West.

He spoke at the United Nations, and I had a working breakfast with him.

I thought he, because of his lack of travel or education or contact with the West,

that he was kind of petulant and furious

about the past US interventions in Iran

and a little bit, quite a bit naive,

about how to deal, how to close the gap. And remember, this is at a time

that Iran was at war, an eight-year war with Iraq. And Iran was fighting back, but it was at the time

the U.S. was providing intelligence to Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, for him to use chemical weapons against Iranians.

So, you know, this was one of the, probably the toughest time in U.S.-Iran relations before the current war.

And it was really interesting to meet the first revolutionary leader to come out to the outside world after the 1979 revolution.

So it was a really interesting moment.

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