All right. So tonight on state of play on Mint Press news, we're going to be talking about Iran.

And I'm probably going to post this interview to my personal platform as well, because it's really, really an important topic right now.

If you don't live under Iraq and you're paying attention to news, the drums of war are beating for another potentially interventionalist

conflict in West Asia. Tonight we are joined by Dr. Asarad, a scholar of Middle East history. She

works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, and contemporary

Iran. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, the national interest, the independent, foreign policy, and more. She has appeared as a commentator on the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR. She completed a PhD in history from the University of California, Irvine in 2018, and is the author of State of Resistance,

politics, culture, and identity in modern Iran. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Okay, so we have been seeing this development over the past year since the onset of violence last October

and the subsequent genocide that's been happening in campaign of ethnic cleansing, not just in Gaza,

but also in West Bank. And now the dimensions of the conflict are expanding into southern Lebanon.

We've heard a lot of ideas, like a lot of talking

points, especially within the mainstream legacy media, about this access of resistance, that all

the terror that exists in the Middle East or West Asia, whatever you want to call it, is part of the

Iranian, what I call the octopus, where we have these tendrils of influence

throughout all these different countries. And there is an increasing narrative push that

the Iranian government is perhaps so evil we can't work with them. They're an existential threat

to Israel's survival, and therefore they need to be essentially bombed.

And this has been like a neo-conservative talking point for quite a long time.

Uh, in fact, in 2014, Dick Cheney, uh, was quoted in Salon magazine as saying his greatest

regret, uh, regret was not, um, invading Iran the same time that we invaded Iraq.

So I guess coming into this, people are just starting to learn about Iran, its foreign policy, its government.

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