Dimitri Lascaris reports from Lebanon and Iran on the US-Israeli military campaigns
Glenn Diesen interviews journalist Dimitri Lascaris, who is reporting from Beirut and southern Lebanon.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Dimitri Lascaris, a lawyer-turned-journalist who has reported from the ground in both Iran and Lebanon. Lascaris describes witnessing Israeli strikes on civilian targets in southern Lebanon — including a hospital parking lot, evacuated villages, and residential areas — with no apparent military justification. He argues that the United States is not a restraining force on Israel but rather uses Israel as a proxy to maintain dominance over a region American military planners have called "the greatest material prize in human history," and that reported tensions between Trump and Netanyahu are political theatre. Lascaris also discusses Iran's shift from commensurate to disproportionate retaliation, the strategic significance of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the near-impossibility of a diplomatic settlement that would require the US and Israel to accept Iran as the dominant regional power.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
On the ground in Lebanon: civilian strikes and the humanitarian situation
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Dimitri Lascaris, a lawyer turned journalist and one of the few Western journalists to actually report from the ground in Iran, including on the Strait of Hormuz. But now you are in Beirut in Lebanon, where the humanitarian situation is only getting worse, but also a place where we see quite interesting geopolitics playing out. Thank you for coming on the program. I thought perhaps a good place to start would be what you are seeing on the ground in Lebanon, because I hear and read a lot of articles from journalists, but they are usually in a neighbouring country or even further away. So what is it that you're observing over there?
Dimitri Lascaris: First of all, let me thank you for having me on your program, Glenn. I watch your program frequently and you do outstanding work. I learn a great deal from watching you and your guests discuss these issues. Thank you for inviting me.
What I've seen on the ground depends on where you are in the country. During the time I've been here on this trip — I've been here six times during the genocide in Gaza, seven times in total — I've always gone to the south on every one of those trips. On this trip, although I've been based in Beirut, I've been to the south Bekaa Valley. I was there yesterday. I've been to Tyre, which is about 20 kilometres from the border of occupied Palestine on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon. I was in Sidon twice and several other places.
During the time that I have actually been physically present in Beirut, I have not seen or witnessed or learned of a single attack. The only time in my presence here where there was an attack was when we were out in the field yesterday in the south Bekaa Valley. That is when Israel struck in Dahiyeh, the southern Beirut suburb which the corporate media loves to describe as a Hezbollah stronghold, and killed numerous civilians. That is the one strike of which I'm aware. As far as I can tell, there has not been any strike today at all in Beirut.
In these other parts of the country, I've seen carnage and terrorism, and that's the only way one can describe it. Yesterday, I witnessed an attack on a Lebanese village called Smour, just in the very southern tip of the Bekaa Valley. We were present for about an hour before that air strike occurred. We had a clear view of Smour — we were about a few kilometres away — and there was absolutely no military activity in the village, which has been evacuated. As far as we could tell, there was no military justification for the air strike.
I was in a village called Sakia several hours after the Israelis murdered a grandmother and her daughter and injured four members of the family, including two grandchildren. Also killed in a separate air strike in the same village were three Syrian workers. There too there was no conceivable military justification. I visited the Jabal Amel hospital in Tyre, where the Israelis destroyed the parking lot right across the street from the hospital, killing at least four civilians and injuring over a hundred, and putting large segments of the hospital out of action.
I could go on and on. What I'm seeing here outside of Beirut — and I'm just talking about the time that I've actually been physically present over the past five days — is a campaign of terror in the south. In Beirut itself, the Israelis have shown uncharacteristic restraint, I think because of the threats of Iranian retaliation.
Iran's deterrence extended to Lebanon and Hezbollah's place in Lebanese society
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, this is something I found quite extraordinary — Iran essentially extending its deterrence to Lebanon, not just in rhetoric, but the fact that they actually struck Israel. Despite Israel not hitting Iran directly, Iran argued that Lebanon is part of the ceasefire and essentially retaliated on their behalf. But the political situation within Lebanon is complicated, to say the least. The actual government is engaged in talks and a ceasefire with the Israelis while it's Hezbollah that is actually fighting. How do you understand Hezbollah's place within Lebanese society and politics? I think there's a lot of confusion around this — usually in the media they're just dismissed as a terrorist organisation and that's the end of it.
Dimitri Lascaris: Hezbollah was born as a reaction in the 1980s to Israeli occupation and aggression. It has remained fundamentally a resistance movement. It has not occupied, illegally or even legally, any land recognised as being part of Israel under international law. The civilian casualties it has inflicted on Israel are a tiny fraction of those that Israel has inflicted upon Lebanon during the time of Hezbollah's existence. As far as I can tell, Hezbollah is very restrained.
It has very significant support amongst the Lebanese population. It's hard to gauge the degree to which it has support in the Christian and Sunni communities. I think it's fair to say that the overwhelming majority of the Shia support it. Based on my interactions with Lebanese people, I would say quite a significant proportion of the Sunni and Christian communities also support Hezbollah, although there is less support in those communities.
What the Lebanese government did over the past 48 hours, I think, has really made a mockery of the sovereignty of the country. They entered into a so-called ceasefire agreement with Israel — a third ceasefire agreement with Israel since the genocide began in Gaza — that is supposed to cover Lebanon. That ceasefire agreement did not require Israel's troops to withdraw from Lebanon. It did not require Israel's troops to stop destroying civilian infrastructure in the parts of the south that they temporarily occupy. It actually called for the disarmament of Hezbollah without calling for the disarmament of Israel, which frankly I regard as the greatest obscenity of all.
How can you say — whether you're talking about Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Ansar Allah, any resistance group in this region — how can any reasonable person with a sense of fairness and decency say that these groups must be disarmed, divested of their light weapons, while Israel, which is carrying out these monstrosities, can remain armed to the teeth, including with nuclear weapons, while it is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? It is the only state in the region that is not a member of the NNPT. This is an absurdity. If people want to talk about disarming resistance groups, whether it be Hezbollah or any other group in the region, first they must ensure that Israel has been divested of its weapons and particularly its weapons of mass destruction.
The sustainability of Israel's military campaign
Glenn Diesen: How sustainable is this fight for the Israelis? On one hand, we keep seeing news stories which are supposed to build confidence in the IDF. On the other hand, we hear the heads of the IDF itself arguing that the Israeli army is extremely overstretched, and the issue of technology seems to come in as well — the introduction of drones into the battlefield is something the Israelis have a hard time adjusting to. There are a lot of reports coming out, confirmed even in the Israeli media, about the difficulties they're having. How do you see this campaign going? Israel obviously has much more firepower, but it's not going as expected, one gets the impression.
Dimitri Lascaris: I follow assiduously the commentary of the resistance groups in this region. Hezbollah is quite methodical in documenting its attacks on Israel. It provides regular video reports telling you exactly where the attack occurred, when it occurred, and by what means it was effected. It gives a daily report of its military operations providing all of those pieces of information with respect to each operation.
At a high level, a number of important things have emerged from these reports — some of which are corroborated, by the way, by the Israeli media. Hezbollah has taken out quite a few Israeli Iron Dome launchers, potentially in excess of 25 of them, many of these strikes documented with video evidence. It has taken out hundreds of armoured vehicles, most of which are Merkava tanks, again much of this documented with video evidence. It has inflicted very severe casualties, including on senior commanders within the Israeli military and commandos of its most elite brigades, many of which casualties have been acknowledged by the Israeli media.
The Israeli military leadership is talking about a potential collapse of the Israeli military, about up to 80,000 to 90,000 reservists refusing to show up for duty. There is a PTSD and a suicide crisis in the Israeli military. As I'm sure you know, Glenn, this military was not constructed for wars of attrition. It was constructed for short, very short-term, intense conflicts. We are now well beyond the boundaries of what this military force was constructed to do, and it has been conducting throughout this period a multi-front war. So I think the Israeli military is in very serious trouble.
The one thing I've learned — I've been to Palestine five times including in 2024, so I've had a lot of opportunity to interact with both Israelis and with people who are opposed to Israel in the broader region — is that I don't think the Israelis have nearly the tolerance for casualties and suffering that the indigenous peoples of this region have. It's really quite remarkable. Even though — and I don't dispute this for a second — Israel's casualties are substantially less than those of the resistance groups they oppose, I think they are reaching the limit of their tolerance for casualties in Israeli society and in the military, and we're seeing the impacts of that on the battlefield.
Western media silence and the political divide in the West
Glenn Diesen: I've heard that same comment — that their losses are lower but the ability to absorb those losses is a lot lower as well. How do you assess the Western support here? One should almost be careful to say "Western support" because one doesn't really hear much at all. There's a lot of gruesome attacks now, and usually the media, which would otherwise be quite emotional and whip up the humanitarian narrative when it's conducive, doesn't seem to have much interest at all in the massive destruction taking place in Lebanon. As you said, a lot of the attacks where you have been in Lebanon are without clear military goals — they set a clear objective of driving a lot of the population northward to clear these regions. There's massive use of military force against the civilian population for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. You would think that this would allow at least some principles to stand and organise the press around. How do you see this lack of interest in the media?
Dimitri Lascaris: I want to distinguish between the lack of interest amongst the media and political elites and the general sentiment in the West. The polling shows, I think beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Israel is deeply despised now across the world in the vast majority of countries. In the West itself, we see that the majority of citizens in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States even have an unfavourable view of Israel, and the negative sentiment towards Israel is growing. It will grow even more rapidly if this war on Iran results in the kind of economic carnage that many experts in the fields of economics and oil are predicting.
But we continue to suffer from a grotesque disparity in the West between what people want and what our media and political elites want. I am not an adherent of what I would call the Mearsheimer-Walt school of thinking when it comes to the United States government's relationship to Israel. I don't think Israel controls the United States government. I think the United States government controls Israel and that Israel does precisely what it wants it to do.
I go back all the way to the dire warning that Eisenhower issued to the American people in 1961 when he said that the military-industrial complex is subverting American democracy. That is exactly what has happened. The war machine has taken over the governments of the West, and they love this genocidal rampage. They love the wars that Israel is conducting. There is this huge divide between what the political and media elites want and what the people want, and that divide is growing. It's going to result, I think — especially if this war in Iran results in the kind of economic carnage that we're anticipating — in potentially huge levels of political instability in the West.
We are at a breaking point of political stability in the West in my view. As you've covered so well in your coverage of the Ukraine war, even there we're starting to see the limits of the patience of the people being tested, particularly in Germany. What is happening here in the region where I'm currently situated may be the final straw in Western elites' control of the narrative.
Glenn Diesen: I've made a lot of comments about this. I think it's not just about Starmer, Macron, or others being very unpopular — Starmer's last approval rating came in at 15%, which is horrible. But it's not just that one leader, because people are also getting the sentiment that once one is removed, they'll put a new frontman in and another one — a bit of a facelift — but it's not going to actually change the policies or the people in power. So I think this is quite dangerous. We're moving towards a political legitimacy crisis as the political and media elites are, as you said, distancing themselves more and more from the public.
On the declining popularity of Israel — saying it's in freefall wouldn't be an overstatement at this point — we did see some splits between the Americans and the Israelis. Iran extended its deterrent to Lebanon. The Israelis ignored it and Iran struck Israel with many ballistic missiles. Then Trump essentially stepped back and said he would talk to Netanyahu and there would be no retaliation against Iran. The Netanyahu government said they would do it anyway, which makes Trump look either very weak or dishonest — or both. The Israelis appear to be in a difficult spot: either they can alienate the Americans even further, who feed them the money and the weapons, or Netanyahu can walk back this war, but then that would be the end of his thirty-year-long dream of a war with Iran. How are you reading this? In the media at least, it looks like a tense situation between the Israelis and Americans.
The Trump–Netanyahu relationship and US strategy in the region
Dimitri Lascaris: Consistently with the comments I just made about the relationship between the United States government and Israel's government, I don't buy this narrative — which has been largely promoted by Barak Ravid at Axios — that there's tension between Trump and Netanyahu. Somebody I follow closely and admire, Caitlin Johnstone in Australia, helpfully compiled a list of the articles that Barak Ravid authored about the relationship between Joe Biden and Netanyahu when Biden was in office and the genocide was ongoing in Gaza. He repeatedly reported, citing unnamed officials, that Biden was very unhappy with Netanyahu and occasionally swore at him. We've been hearing this scam for many years. It wasn't just under Biden — I documented some of this myself going back to prior administrations.
What the United States government does is it uses Israel in order to impose its hegemony on this extraordinarily important region, and then tries to distance itself from the crimes of Israel by purporting to be upset, purporting to be trying to restrain the Israeli government. But all the while it continues to arm Israel. It continues to provide economic aid to Israel. It continues to provide legal protection to Israel and rhetorical support for Israel's crimes. And why? Because as American military planners recognised after the Second World War, this is a region of stupendous strategic value — that's what they called it. They also called it the greatest material prize in human history, because not only of its oil and gas resources, but other key commodities and its strategically important trade routes.
The Americans want to dominate this region, and they want that more than ever because of the rise of non-Western powers, principally China and Russia. They use Israel as a proxy, a means to do that. And then they seek to distance themselves from Israel's crimes by saying Israel is a sovereign state, we can't tell them what to do, we're not always happy with the way they act, but at the end of the day we have a historical obligation to defend the Jewish people. This is the story we've been fed. I don't buy it.
I think Trump is completely on board with what Netanyahu is doing. I see no evidence as of yet that the Trump administration is prepared to use the leverage it has over Israel in order to put an end to this barbarism. When he begins to openly threaten to deprive Israel of the aid it requires in order to carry out these crimes and get away with them, then perhaps I'll take seriously these reports of dissent between the White House and Tel Aviv. But there is absolutely no credible evidence that the United States government is threatening to withdraw the support upon which Israel relies in order to carry out these crimes.
I go back always to the polling data. The polling data in the United States shows that a majority of the population is opposed to the war in Iran. The polling data in Israel shows that a majority of the population wants the war in Iran to continue. So it suits both Netanyahu and Trump politically to posture in the way that they're posturing. Trump postures as the person trying to restrain Netanyahu, and Netanyahu postures as the person determined to pursue this war even if it means alienating Donald Trump. At the end of the day, their actions are what matter, and their actions are completely consistent with the thesis that they want to dominate this region and are prepared to commit virtually any crime in order to achieve that goal.
Glenn Diesen: Often one does get the impression there is some good cop, bad cop play by the United States. You could draw some parallels to Europe. The US keeps saying it will put pressure on Zelensky and the Europeans to essentially accept what was agreed in Anchorage. But what exactly is the pressure? This is a war being fought with American weapons. It is American war planners sitting in Germany. It's American intelligence agencies on the ground still in Ukraine directing attacks, picking the targets, assisting the direction of drones through NATO territories to strike Russia. It's quite convenient that once the war is going on and the Ukrainians and increasingly Europeans put themselves on the front line, the Americans get to play the mediator even though they are the main actor for the past twelve years in this war. It's quite extraordinary.
Dimitri Lascaris: I have to just interrupt to say I think you're completely right. This is nothing but kabuki theatre — we've seen it in the Ukraine war. Absolutely. It's a total fraud. The United States wants that war to continue, and all of these claims that Trump made about trying to bring an end to the Ukraine war was nothing but political posturing for domestic consumption. I think you're absolutely right.
Iran's strategy of disproportionate retaliation
Glenn Diesen: We saw something earlier as well with Iran and Israel, when Israel hit the southern Pars gas fields and Trump stepped back and said, "No, we have not agreed to this, you should stop." It seems like a good way of managing the escalation ladder — if you say they did this and we do not approve of it, and as long as Iran doesn't retaliate, then we will restrain the Israelis. So the Iranians and by extension the Russians always have this idea that if we retaliate, we'll pull America into this, so it's better to keep America outside. But meanwhile, of course, they are fully wedded to the idea of destroying Iran and Russia for that matter. How do you make sense of the Iranian position? Everyone keeps being surprised that the Iranians are prepared to strike back or retaliate disproportionately — that if anyone attacks them, they will hit back very hard. How do you see the Iranian retaliation and the overall strategy in terms of fighting both the US and the Israelis? Are they happy with doing this low-intensity war, or do they see this as benefiting the Americans?
Dimitri Lascaris: Up until the strikes that Iran launched a few days ago on multiple US military bases in the Persian Gulf, the Iranians were pursuing a strategy of commensurate retaliation — that is, their retaliation would be essentially as severe and as damaging as that to which they were responding. But they realised that wasn't working. I think they came to that conclusion within the past week.
So first they tested an approach of disproportionate retaliation by striking multiple US military bases when the US attacked Qeshm Island, and I think they may have attacked some other military site in the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians attacked very hard — Kuwait, Bahrain. I saw a report also from Trita Parsi that there were attacks on other Persian Gulf military bases, although I haven't been able to confirm that myself.
Then what happened within the past 24 hours is again an example of the Iranians saying it's no longer sufficient to engage in commensurate retaliation — we have to pursue disproportionate retaliation. There was wave after wave of Iranian attacks on Israel. As far as I can tell from the reports, they didn't launch four or five missiles and drones — they launched tens of them in four to five waves, and they struck multiple targets across the north of occupied Palestine. I think at this stage they're probably going to continue down that course of action going forward. They will not content themselves with a commensurate retaliation. They will respond disproportionately.
I'm not sure where this is all going to go. The Israeli defence minister Katz just put out a statement reiterating the position that if Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel will attack Beirut. He's sticking to the line they were advancing before the retaliatory strikes of the last 24 hours by Iran. But this is a completely untenable position, because if Hezbollah and Iran were to accede to this framework — that if you don't attack Israel, we won't attack Beirut — that would leave Israel free to attack the rest of Lebanon. It's absolutely inconceivable that Hezbollah and Iran are going to agree to this. Not only would Israel be free to attack the rest of Lebanon, they would be free to continue to destroy civilian infrastructure in the parts of the country that they control, and there would be no obligation on them to withdraw their forces.
If the Israelis are serious about attacking Beirut in the case of Hezbollah attacking Israel, we are going to continue up the escalation ladder, and we're going to get up there really fast. I don't know whether they're serious — we'll have to see. Within the past few hours, I think there has been a report of Hezbollah striking in the north of Israel. But I don't think at this stage that either the Iranians or Hezbollah are going to tolerate any attacks, whether on Beirut or the south of the country. I think their patience has been exhausted.
Glenn Diesen: I think this is also an effort by the Israelis to control the escalation ladder, assisted by the Americans, where they make the point that they're not going to strike Beirut but that south Lebanon is acceptable. I don't see the Iranians accepting them picking the targets like this. Also, it wouldn't be set in stone, because the US does incrementalism very well. You saw it again with the Ukraine war — they began first with some weapons, put some self-imposed limits and constraints on them, saying here are some weapons but you're not allowed to use them against Russians outside of Ukraine's territory. Then gradually those restraints were removed, step by step, and eventually the rules of the game changed. I think Iran has probably looked at the Ukraine war and come to the same conclusion.
The Strait of Hormuz toll and Iran's strategic leverage
Before I forget, I wanted to ask about the toll which the Iranians have set up in the Strait of Hormuz. I saw a video of you actually on the water there. Is the toll now functioning as it should? Is it up and running? How is this impacting traffic? Where do things stand on the Strait of Hormuz, because things are developing?
Dimitri Lascaris: It's very hard to say. The Iranians are playing their cards very close to their chest. I think a big part of the reason for that is that any state or shipping line that is revealed to be paying a toll — they could call it an environmental fee or whatever — to Iran is going to be subject to some kind of retaliatory action by the United States. So Iran doesn't really have any interest in revealing exactly what is going on, and they've been very secretive about this.
My sense from speaking to officials in Iran and experts within Iran — I've spent a lot of time not just on the ground reporting on this but interacting with them on my own program — is that they are almost certainly exacting some kind of a fee. Certainly perhaps not from their closest allies; maybe they're giving them a free pass. But everybody else who's going through the Strait of Hormuz with Iranian consent is paying some kind of a fee, and they will continue to insist upon that, because this is the greatest leverage that they have. It's the greatest prospect they have for actually recovering some form of compensation for the immense destruction that the United States has inflicted upon Iran, not just during the hot war, but through the sanctions and the freezing of Iranian assets.
It's going to be extremely difficult — I think the Iranians understand this — to compel the Americans to pay any kind of reparations to them. So they're going to extract compensation by some other means. The best way to do that is to impose fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
There is absolutely no military solution to that problem. None. If you've been there and you've seen the Strait of Hormuz, you would come to that conclusion very quickly. The Iranians don't need to send massive naval forces into the strait and set up some kind of military wall to impede the passage of commercial shipping. All they have to do is materially increase the risk of commercial ships suffering catastrophic damage if they attempt to pass through the strait without the consent of the Iranian military. And they can do that in a variety of ways — with drones, with ship-to-ship missiles, with land-to-ship missiles, with mines, with Iranian fast attack boats. There is absolutely no military solution to this, and they are going to hold on to that control for dear life. It is their nuclear weapon. At some point, the United States government — whether it's Trump or his successor — is going to have to pay the piper. That means they're going to have to cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran.
Glenn Diesen: I think this is what's missed by many people. First, I think people fail to recognise that this is an existential threat to Iran, which is why they're willing to absorb this pain. But also how important the strait is — with the Strait of Hormuz, they can create incentives for neighbouring countries to remove sanctions, to scale back or even remove US military bases. There's a lot built in: reparations, many things. You called it a nuclear weapon, and I don't think that's an overstatement at all. This is a very powerful weapon to hold, and given that they can't really be deprived of it in terms of material capabilities — Trump always makes the point that we destroyed their navy, their air force, their army, but even if that were true, you don't need a very sophisticated navy to shut down that strait. If you've got some drones, which are relatively cheap to make and can be decentralised, there's nothing they can do about it. It must be a difficult spot for the Americans, because they lose a lot by having the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian control. But if there's nothing they can do, at some point, as you said, it's time to pay the piper.
The prospects for a diplomatic settlement
What is a realistic diplomatic settlement between Iran, Israel, and the United States? I always get the feeling that the Americans have something that Iran wants, and that would be sanctions relief. Even if Iran wins and holds on to the strait and the Americans have to pack up and go home, America can still make life very miserable for Iranians. But if there would realistically be sanctions relief — could the Americans extract something from the Iranians? Not giving up the Strait of Hormuz of course, but do you see any possibility of a diplomatic settlement where both sides recognise some kind of agreement is better than staying in a de facto war?
Dimitri Lascaris: When I was in Iran last year, we were given the opportunity to meet with the spokesperson of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran, and we were also given a tour of the research reactor in Tehran and spoke to some of their nuclear experts there. Without getting into the details — that's a whole other conversation — I don't think there's any hope at all, zero, of Iran giving up its nuclear program. That will not happen under any circumstances as long as this government is intact and Iran is a functioning state.
Would Iran be prepared to accept JCPOA-type restrictions on enrichment for some period of time? Sure, they would accept that if they were given full-blown sanctions relief and if their assets were unfrozen. But are they going to hand over to Donald Trump the 60% enriched uranium? That's not happening. I think they're not even prepared at this point to give it to the Chinese or the Russians to hold in custody for usage by Iran.
What they may be willing to do — and they've signalled this — is dilute that enriched uranium, not all the way down to 3.67% but perhaps down to the level of 20%. And by the way, to use enriched uranium for research purposes, it has to be enriched well beyond the level required for civilian energy reactors — somewhere in the range of 15 to 20%, as I understand it from my discussions with people in Iran's atomic energy program. So I don't think they're going to put up indefinitely with the JCPOA limit of 3.67%, because that would preclude them from using enriched uranium for research purposes. But for some period of time they would put up with that, and there would have to be a quid pro quo — a lifting of sanctions and an unfreezing of assets.
The problem — and this is the big quandary for the United States — is that if they lift those sanctions and unfreeze Iranian assets, Iran is going to emerge as the most powerful state in the region. The only thing that has really held it back until now is the economic war that has been waged upon it. Both the United States and Israel would have to accept that Iran would be the most powerful state in that region. Iran is an extraordinarily well-endowed country — as large as Western Europe, with tremendous resources, a very large and well-educated population, a high degree of technological sophistication, a topography that is very challenging from a military perspective, and a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz because of its geographical position.
If you take away the economic warfare being waged upon Iran, then you can flush down the toilet Israeli dreams of being the regional hegemon — that's gone. I just don't see at this stage any indication that the United States and Israel are ready to accept that reality, which means — and I'm sad to say this — I believe this is going to continue to escalate. This is going to have catastrophic consequences for the global economy, and at some point the United States government, whether it's Trump or his successor, is going to have to accept that in order to bring an end to the economic carnage, they are going to have to effectively recognise Iran's status in the region and allow it to assume its rightful place in the world. I think we're a long way from that point yet. I hope I'm wrong. But I think that's probably where we're heading, and the consequences for people all around the world are going to be quite negative.
Reporting from Iran: what Western audiences don't see
Glenn Diesen: Well, on your visit to the nuclear facilities in Iran — I was there with you actually.
Dimitri Lascaris: I guess you were.
Glenn Diesen: Yes, we were both there. It was May last year, before the bombing began.
Dimitri Lascaris: The difference though is that I left before the bombing — you actually stayed during the war and reported on it, which is quite important. I very much recommend that people follow your work, because whatever we get through the media is a very distorted picture of Iran. This was one of my thoughts as well last year when I was in Tehran — essentially what I had expected to see, based on your average media report in Europe, would be a Shia version of the Taliban almost running a country. It was very different from what I had expected. In Europe there's a lot of focus on the repression of women, so you assume everyone would walk around in burkas. I didn't expect to see a large part of the female population walking around without veils, in t-shirts and jeans. It's a different picture. But just as a last question — what aspects of Iranian society do you think the foreign audience really doesn't get to see, as someone who's been there on the ground?
Dimitri Lascaris: If I could pinpoint one thing that stood out for me more than anything else, it's this: the image that we have been given of the Iranian people and particularly their leadership is that they're extremely aggressive, irrational, and fanatical. My experience of them — both during that trip, my apologies for forgetting about it, it seems like an eternity ago in May of last year, and especially during the most recent visit when we went to seven Iranian cities in eleven days — is that they're a peace-loving people. They really, really want to live in peace with their neighbours. They are not aggressive at all. They are not violent. They're not prone to violence. They're quite prepared to be reasonable and compromising.
But at the same time, this is an ancient civilisation of which the Iranian people have much to be proud, and they expect to be treated with respect and for their contribution to the betterment of humanity to be recognised. This is very similar to what the people in Russia and the people in China feel. They deserve a seat at the table and to be treated as sovereign nations worthy of our respect. If we give them that, I have no doubt that the state of Iran and the people of Iran can become fully integrated and productive members of the global community and of West Asia.