‘You Have This Assumption That It’s Going to Be Easy to Overthrow the Iranian Government’:

CounterSpin interview with Annelle Sheline on Iran War questions

By Janine Jackson, FAIR

Janine Jackson: As we record on May 28, news about the US and Israel’s war on Iran is as confusing as it’s been since Day One. A New York Times headline, for instance, reads “US Launches Fresh Strikes in Iran, Threatening Fragile Ceasefire.” And we are just now being told that Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if they don’t “behave.”

But you almost have to abandon your understanding of what words mean to put a toe in news media’s foreign policy conversation, and then accept that things will be presented in terms of who might, or should, achieve “total and complete victory,” or else a “humiliating defeat”—as if we weren’t talking about the lives of millions of human beings, and the trajectory of their political futures, rather than two Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.

I’m comfortable saying that, before February, few people—in or out of US government—were thinking, “You know what this country needs? A war on Iran.” So what did happen? Where do we go from here, and what are we learning?

Annelle Sheline is a research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as well as a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. Her book, Weaponizing Tolerance: Arab Monarchies and American Support for Moderate Islam, will be published by Cambridge University Press next year. She joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Annelle Sheline.

Annelle Sheline: Thank you for having me.

JJ: You kind of called out this regional nightmare, unfortunately. This is a big question—but what important miscalculations, or maybe straight-up ignorance, about Iran, about the region, were at work when Trump launched this? How do you reckon we got here?

AS: It’s a very good question, and, as you said, I don’t think many people, in Washington or around the country, had this on their bingo card, or really saw—there was very little desire for this unnecessary war. I do think, as others have said, that Trump’s experience with Venezuela was influential in making him think that all it would take would be the assassination of the supreme leader and the Iranian regime would crumble, and he would be able to install a much friendlier government, as he was indeed able to do in Venezuela.

Despite the fact that we do have evidence that people close to the president were trying to make clear that that was quite unlikely to happen, it seems that instead he listened to Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, who has advocated for the US to fight a war against Iran since the ’90s.

So the fact that Trump was the first president to finally move forward with that, I think does say a lot about the influence of Netanyahu inside this White House, and Netanyahu’s ability to play to Trump’s ego in terms of—again, it was not hard to anticipate what was going to happen, in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and yet here we are.

JJ: And there seemed to be some sort of baseline misunderstanding about Iran and Iran’s capacities. The idea that they would roll over seemed to be part of it, and I don’t know where anyone would get that notion.

AS: Certainly. In terms of the misconceptions, it is sometimes fairly maddening because, on the one hand, right, you have this underlying assumption that it’s going to be easy to overthrow the Iranian government, and then you hear people like Pete Hegseth saying things like, we’ve totally destroyed their entire weapons system, they have no more air force, we’ve gotten all their missiles and bombs.

And then, in this most recent exchange of fire, the idea that these were defensive strikes, which is ridiculous, because Iran cannot actually strike the United States. And if it can strike US servicemembers in the region, that does beg the question of, well, then why do we have so many US servicemembers in the region? What purpose are they really serving?

I think another crucial misperception about Iran is, you’ve heard the media talk so often about “Iran’s nuclear program.” Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. Iran is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, and, as a result, it does have a legal right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. It has done that.

Obviously, after this recent round of fighting, it does have, certainly, a heightened incentive to perhaps try to make a break for a nuclear weapon, to try to protect it against future aggression.

And, in contrast, you don’t hear at all about Israel’s numerous nuclear weapons. This is partly a result of the fact that the official policy of the US government is not to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons program, because that would then trigger sanctions against Israel for illegally engaging in nuclear proliferation, as a result of collaboration with France and earlier apartheid South Africa.

So you have an American population that has heard so frequently about an Iranian nuclear weapon, even when no such weapon exists, and has heard almost nothing about the fact that Israel is actually the only state with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

JJ: It’s the US exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism that calls out; it’s implicit in a lot of the conversation, media conversation, political conversation, that some countries should have nuclear weapons and other countries, oh my gosh, if they develop them, we have to obliterate them, if they’re even trying to develop them! And I don’t think that’s often interrogated in the coverage, that somehow the US has rights and abilities and capacities, and should have, that other countries just shouldn’t have, and that those can be grounds for war. I think if we talk more about that, the conversation would change.

AS: Certainly, and as you said, this is just baked into the underlying assumption around—this is something that I saw repeatedly at the State Department, working on human rights, although the part of the State Department where I worked doesn’t really exist anymore, has been very drastically restructured and reduced. But when I was there, it was very evident that there are certain countries that the US government already is opposed to, sees as antagonistic, whether it’s Iran; at the time I was there, it was, under Assad, Syria. Obviously countries like Cuba, Russia, China–the abuses of human rights that these governments certainly engage in receive significant attention and drive policy, including sanctions. Whereas human rights abuses by Israel, by Saudi Arabia, by the UAE, by numerous other US partners and allies, those do not get the same kind of attention, and we do not impose sanctions on those countries for their human rights abuses.

So while I very much continue to believe in the importance of the recognition of human rights, the way the US government has weaponized human rights I think is deeply counterproductive to the overarching project of trying to push for countries to actually base their policy on recognition and respect.

JJ: Can I ask you just talk a little about Lebanon, because why, even in the sort of simplistic US policy terms, why would the US now be killing civilians in Lebanon? And now we’re talking about Oman. I think people, even people who got behind war on Iran, are now going to be mystified by why now we’re attacking Lebanon and threatening Oman. What’s going on there that we should understand?

AS: Lebanon is such a tragic example. It’s not getting the same kind of attention. I think, in many ways, Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, has normalized this targeting of civilians, civilian infrastructure, going after and hunting down survivors of earlier strikes, double tap strikes against humanitarian workers. I mean, it’s totally horrifying, the way Israel is acting with such impunity in Lebanon.

In terms of Trump’s comment about Oman, this is also just part of his broader comments yesterday about the idea that the US isn’t going to sign any sort of deal with Iran unless these various Arab countries normalize relations with Israel. This was confusing, on one hand, because he also named several countries that already did normalize relations with Israel—countries like the UAE, for example—and then other countries, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that have made very clear that they have no interest in normalizing relations, although the Saudis do have quiet, under-the-table relations with Israel, that they are not interested in including for this normalization.

And I think, at least in reporting from the New York Times, it’s presented like, well, what on Earth would the Abraham Accords have to do with a US/Iran deal? I think it just demonstrates that the Abraham Accords were always intended as a sort of anti-Iran coalition, tying Israel and the Arab Gulf states closer together as a broader region, uniting them against Iran. Which was always going to be a recipe for more aggression, more violence, and completely ignored the fact from the perspective of many, many of the Arab states, as well as Turkey, [that] view Israel as posing as much of a threat, potentially, as Iran does, just given Israel’s behavior, in not only Lebanon, but bombing Qatar last fall was truly, I think, a wake-up call for the Gulf states, who are very concerned about the fact that Israel seems to operate with such total impunity. And there doesn’t seem to be likely any shift in that policy coming down the line, even if, after the Israeli elections, they do end up with someone other than Netanyahu as the prime minister.

JJ: Right. The war, for reasons we’re talking about, is widely unpopular, at least in the US, and I’m sure elsewhere. And I think that’s probably connected to a growing interrogation, if you will, of the US/Israel relationship, the idea that we’re just in with Israel, right or wrong. That concept is also losing favor right now. And I think folks are asking more questions, maybe, than they were even in the Gulf War or in the Iraq War. I think folks have more questions, and that’s affecting people’s support for this illegal and undeclared war on Iran. Am I wrong about that?

AS: You think about statements from someone like Joe Kent, who in his resignation tried to appeal to Trump’s ego by blaming this disastrous war on Israel. But in many ways, he’s not wrong. And just in general, I think you have, in particular, folks on the right who are asking, how can we have a so-called America First foreign policy when it seems like what we actually have is an Israel First foreign policy?

One thing I want to highlight is, we’ve heard interesting statements from people like Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying things like “It’s time to end US aid to Israel.” You saw an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying the same thing, and it initially seemed confusing. And what they’re actually trying to do there is, because we’re coming up on the end of this 10-year Memorandum of Understanding, 10 years will be up in 2028, and they’re looking to renegotiate a new one. But what the Israel lobby is trying to do is to move that funding out of the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing and Security Assistance, which is subject to oversight. There are legal attachments to that. It’s subject to things like the Leahy Laws, for example, which have never been applied to Israel, but theoretically should apply for gross violations of human rights by members of the military. And, instead, to move it to the Pentagon, under the defense procurement process, sort of defense cooperation, where there would be much less oversight, much less visibility.

And it would be essentially to shield it from what you acknowledge, the shift in US public opinion, and questioning: why do we provide billions and billions of dollars every year to Israel, when it seems like their interests are not necessarily aligned with ours? And so the desire from Netanyahu and the lobby is to move that money so that it’s harder to oppose, it’s harder to even see where it is, and to bake it in for the long run into these military contracts that can be decades-long, and would be very difficult to unwind.

JJ: I’m a media critic, of course, and so I want to ask you about the way that the story is presented, the way that the reality is presented, and it is “US versus Iran.” But the United States includes both me and the guy I saw online saying he’ll pay anything at the pump as long as we free those poor girls in Iran. So I have to question any story that tells me about “what the US wants,” or “what Iran wants.” And I just wonder, how do we complicate people’s understanding of Iran, so that they don’t imagine it as religious zealots who every day wake up and think about how they can harm Americans?

AS: Yeah, I think a super important thing here is to think about US sanctions policy. You think about the fact that, for years, the US has had these crippling sanctions on Iran. You think about the sanctions the US had on Iraq throughout the 1990s that led to the death of millions of children, US sanctions on Cuba that have now escalated to this horrifying blockade, where Cuba has no fuel. You think about US sanctions on Afghanistan now under the Taliban.

And the fact that sanctions do not hurt the governments that are in charge. They hurt the people. It actually often empowers the government, because the government has the means and capacities to evade the sanctions, and just consolidate whatever resources are available within itself, and the sanctions end up just starving and depriving the population.

And I think there was this narrative in early January where you saw a collapse in the Iranian currency. You saw this massive popular uprising, and people said, “Look, the sanctions are working. We finally brought the Iranian regime to its knees, and it’s going to be overthrown by these popular uprisings.” And instead what we got was, they’re still executing people who were trying to organize those rallies, and it didn’t work, basically.

One other note on that is, not only did sanctions harm the populations and consolidate the control of the government, they also undermine US interests in the long term, because they incentivize countries to look for alternatives to get around sanctions, and undermine the long-term global confidence in the US dollar as the global reserve currency. And if the US dollar were to lose that status, it would really make it much more expensive for Americans here at home; there would be higher domestic borrowing costs, increased import prices.

So in general, things like sanctions do not achieve what they’re intended to achieve. They hurt the people that the US government tells us ostensibly we are trying to help, and they’re bad for US interests in the long run. So my hope going forward is that the future administrations would be much more cautious about using sanctions, when often they really do not have anything like the intended effect.

JJ: Yeah, we often hear about sanctions as the “peaceful alternative to war” when, in fact, they feel a lot like war on the people that are affected by them.

AS: Exactly, exactly. You can kill someone by starving them or preventing access to medicine, just more slowly than you would kill them by dropping a bomb.

JJ: Exactly. Well, a lot of folks in the US seem to be very concerned about our position on the world stage, and that seems to be the idea, that we’re the ones who get to tell everyone else what to do. It’s bizarre, frankly, just at the level of language. But I want to refer you to something you wrote, which is that

leaders around the world appear to be struggling to respond to an American administration that is no longer constrained by pretending to care about human lives, the law or the cost of its hubris.

In other words, if the idea is to make the United States seem big and strong and in charge of everything, it is not working. It’s not working.

AS: Exactly. I think in the long run, this war, as well as Trump’s tariff policies, as well as his various comments, like what he said about blowing up Oman, the earlier debacle about wanting to take Greenland, annexing Canada—just all of this, I think, is rightfully making the rest of the world second-guess their reliance on the United States, the centrality of the US through the international global system, in particular because of the ways that, not only the Trump administration, but also the Biden administration, were willing to completely ignore both international law and US law, largely to protect Israel, but in other ways as well. And you think about the strikes on unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, just murdering people with drone strikes.

The moral authority that the United States has claimed to embody for so much of our history, I think it was already clear to much of the rest of the world that that was a fiction. And I think, increasingly, a lot of Americans are waking up to the ways that the United States does not behave in the way that we as Americans were told to believe that our country… the values that we were supposed to be standing up for, and that many Americans do believe in.

And so, moving forward, I think we are likely to see other countries that are trying to limit their exposure to the United States, trying to reduce their economic reliance, trying to diversify their security relationships. I think, probably in the long run, that is for the best, given the history of what the US has done with our unchecked power. But I think it is going to be difficult. It’s going to be more difficult for Americans who have been accustomed to this position of privilege, and I worry that it’s going to be violent and chaotic, not just a smooth transition. So it’s not a rosy perspective for the future.

JJ: No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I will just say, finally, not to make it personal, but to the extent that it’s relevant, and you’ve referenced this, you were a foreign affairs officer at the State Department, in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs. But you made a choice, and you chose to leave in March 2024, in opposition to the Biden administration—and I appreciate your stretching it out; it’s not just about Trump—the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

I don’t think people are used to seeing morals outside of movies. And I’m saying that seriously. People need to keep their jobs. They’re used to just accepting a lot, because they need the paycheck. So I think it’s meaningful, deeply meaningful, when someone says, as my mother used to say, “I may have to work. I don’t have to work here,” to protest something. And I just, any thoughts on that, and to listeners who are wondering where to stand at the moment?

AS: Yeah, thank you. I would do it again in a heartbeat. When I resigned, this was at the time when the Uncommitted Movement was gaining steam, whereby they were signaling in the primaries that they wouldn’t necessarily vote for Biden if he didn’t shift his policy on this unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And so I was hoping to add to that momentum, and ultimately, obviously, we didn’t see the Biden administration, or even Harris as a candidate, say that she would do anything differently.

I think that this right now, if people are intending to vote for a Democrat in the next election, I think making very clear how significant the need for a new US foreign policy, a new approach in the Middle East, one that is not guided by Israel’s interest, that’s guided by US interest, is critical.

One very particular thing that people could do is, regarding that effort to shield the US tax dollars going to Israel from public opposition, the National Defense Authorization Act just was dropped. And Section 224 is a section dedicated to trying to move that money from where it, ostensibly, has legal oversight, from the State Department, moving it into the Pentagon. So if people can call a representative and ask them to block or to strip Section 224 from the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, that is a very concrete action that is doable, and would be a very significant way to not allow the Israel lobby to have Americans continue to fund Israel’s aggression and murder of innocent people in Gaza and around the region, and to make clear that as a country, we do not want our tax dollars funding that.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note, and thank you very much.

We’ve been speaking with Annelle Sheline. She’s research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Thank you so much, Annelle Sheline, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you for having me.