Full Transcript: Suzanne Maloney and Maziar Bahari

Susan B Glasser for The Global POLITICO

Susan Glasser: Well, hi, I’m Susan Glasser, and welcome back to The Global Politico. This is our first edition in 2018. I have to thank all of you for being our listeners in 2017. We recently got this great shoutout from Quartz as the best politics podcast of the year, and I feel like I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I know that we do have the best audience, and we’ve certainly had a lot of the best guests.

And I’m delighted that our first guests this year will be on really the first big breaking international news story of the year, which is this surprising eruption of protests across Iran in the very first week of 2018, the very last week of 2017. We’re here a little bit more into a week into those protests, and we are going to have a conversation today with two people who’ve spent really their adult lives thinking about this question of change and when will it come, if ever, to the Islamic Republic.

Suzanne Maloney joins me here. She is one of Washington’s premier Iran experts, deputy director of the Brookings Middle East Program. She’s worked inside the State Department advising on the question of Iran from 2005 to 2007; she worked at ExxonMobil, looking at how Iran affects the question of the Middle East and gas and oil politics, and she’s an author. She’s a very thoughtful observer of our episodic and raging Iran policy debates here in Washington.

And we’re particularly lucky that we are joined as well by Maziar Bahari, who is a leading Iranian-Canadian journalist, filmmaker, documentarian, author. For those of you who are not familiar with it, his book, Then They Came for Me recounts an extraordinary story that we’re going to talk about in this podcast of his own experience covering the 2009 Green Movement, being arrested by the Iranian government, his own tale of torture and adversity in surviving that experience, leaving Iran, and continuing, not only to report and write about it, but to help found a group called Iran Wire, which has now become one of the indispensable conduits of information from inside Iran. We’re very lucky that he joins us today, as well, visiting from London, where you are based now.

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