Centrifugal force: attacks on Iran

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In the 1980s, Europe pioneered so called harm reduction policies to tackle drug abuse, a model of care over punishment. That's not how things work in Eastern Europe today, where a social intolerance policy aims to make drug users lives miserable. And lockdowns have driven vast growth in streaming services of all sorts. One genre with striking gains is religious content, Living scriptures, pure flicks, Godify. It's all good clean fun. And it may well end up appealing to more than just the faithful. But first, Tensions between Iran and Israel are rising this week. On July 2, there was a mysterious explosion at an Iranian nuclear facility. Suspicions mounted that it was no accident and that Israel might be responsible. Iran has been ramping up its nuclear program since 2018 when America withdrew from an international deal crafted to contain those ambitions.

We cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement. Therefore, I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Many condemned the withdrawal.

The Iran nuclear agreement was the best way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state. Threatening this agreement does not isolate Iran, it isolates America.

The Secretary General is deeply concerned by today's announcement. That the United States will be withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and will begin reinstating U.S. sanctions the following day.

Iranian lawmakers burned the Stars and Stripes in Parliament. Two years on, and Iran's nuclear ambitions have only grown. And recent attacks on its facilities may hint at an emerging covert war and how Israel sees the current political moment.

It's all pretty murky, but here's what we know. Over the past month, there have been a series of suspicious explosions in Iran, and the most notable came at a nuclear facility in the Tanz.

Roger McShane is our middle east editor.

Officials initially tried to downplay it, saying that a small shed had caught fire. But it became clear pretty quickly that this was actually an important building. I mean, it was used to make centrifuges, which are key to the nuclear program. And then you began to hear whispers that this wasn't an ordinary fire. You had some spies claiming it was a cyber attack. Now, the consensus seems to be that a bomb was smuggled into the facility. By who is unclear. But suspicion has fallen, as it normally does in these situations, on Israel and, to a lesser extent, America, because both countries have tried to sabotage Iran's nuclear program in the past. And Israel is kind of funny in this respect, in as much as it likes its enemies to know that it's capable of doing these things, but it doesn't usually cop to them. So this week, you had its foreign minister saying, we take actions that are better left unsaid.

So what's the goal of whoever did it doing it this way? And do you think that doing this way achieves those goals?

Well, you gotta remember that sort of between 2015 and 2018, you had this nuclear deal that Iran signed with America and other world powers, and that pretty much kept its nuclear program in a box. But ever since Donald Trump pulled America out of that deal, Iran has slowly been breaking out of that box. It's began stockpiling more enriched uranium. It's been developing newer, more advanced centrifuges, and it's been stonewalling international inspectors. So, you know, Iran says all this is in the pursuit of nuclear energy, but. But it's lied about its program before. So the attack on the facility, if it was, that would have been aimed at slowing down all this work. And experts seem to think that, you know, it was effective. Iran admits that it caused significant damage and that it may have set back its program by at least a few months and perhaps longer.

So why would this attack, if it is, in fact an attack, happen? Now? Do you Think?

Yeah. Well, apart from Iran's progress on the nuclear front, there's one more important reason, I think, that this could have happened now if we assume that Israel was behind it. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, is no doubt looking at the polls in America the same as we all are, which show Donald Trump with a pretty slim chance of getting reelected. So, you know, he's aware that these could be the last days of that friendly administration, an administration that sees eye to eye with him on Iran. So he'll want to take advantage of that while he still can, because it's not clear that America under a Joe Biden presidency would give Israel a green light for such operations.

And how do you think Iran is likely to respond to this?

It's tough to know. I mean, I think Israel, whether it carried out the attack or not, is probably bracing for a response. But with Iran, who knows? Everyone worried that it would respond very forcefully to America's assassination of Qasem Soleimani, one of its top commanders, earlier this year. But it didn't do much. It merely lobbed a few missiles at bases in Iraq. And now it's under so much strain because of COVID 19, which has hit Iran especially hard, and American sanctions, which are still suffocating the economy. It's really not in a great position to respond. At the same time, hardliners are making their voices heard in Tehran much more forcefully. While Trump's actions have undermined Iran's relatively moderate politicians, people like President Hassan Rouhani, people like the Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, while they've been undermined, the hardliners have really ascended. Just the other day, in a speech before Parliament, Zarif was heckled by Conservative MPs who now control the chamber, and they're even talking about impeaching Rouhani. So you could see a situation where these more sort of hawkish forces try and hit back at whoever they think carried out the attacks. Still, I imagine whatever action Iran takes, it will also be done in the shadows.

And if the suspicions are right and that these are the closing days of the Trump administration, what do you think Joe Biden's options would be for rebuilding a deal, for putting a cap on all of.

To start, I think, let me just say these attacks highlight how important the old deal was. I mean, if this was Israel or America attacking Iran, they are, to some extent, trying to solve a problem they helped create. Even the Trump administration said Iran was complying with the nuclear deal. When America, with the encouragement of Israel, pulled out of the agreement. So today, getting back to a deal is going to be exceedingly tough, whether you're talking about the old deal or reaching a new one. Trump constantly says he wants to talk to Iran, but he's done all he can to poison relations. So I don't think you're going to see a new deal under him, at least not this term. But even if Joe Biden is elected, he probably wouldn't jump right back into a deal. Iran's actions make that too difficult, and the rise of hardliners in Tehran sort of leave America without a real negotiating partner. Add to that the fact that America's president next year, whoever it is, is going to have plenty of other things to worry about. So you could see this sort of shadow war continuing with all the inherent risks of escalation. And that's sadly ironic because the whole point of the nuclear deal was to make these tactical actions unnecessary.

Roger, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to the Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer.

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In Eastern Europe and Russia, drug use is high, but it can be difficult for addicts to get help.

It's a spectrum of all kinds of problems, social and medical and political, and we are trying to deal with it to try to bring some resources to these communities.

Anya Sarang runs an organization in Moscow that tries to help people who use drugs.

We try to provide as much resources as we can make available to these people because unfortunately, there is no, you know, through the state or through insurance, available services.

Her organization provides health advice, clean needles, condoms, counseling, and it does so in the face of official opposition because the.

Russian drug policy is different from our ideology. The Russian drug policy is based more on the principles of zero tolerance and not helping people with drug problems, but putting them in prison, so using police and depressions.

It's an approach that has long fallen out of favor in Western Europe.

Harm reduction approaches emerged in the 1980s in places like Switzerland and the Netherlands as a new and progressive and at the time, pretty controversial way to deal with drug addiction.

Sarah Donilon writes about international affairs for the Economist.

Countries with harm reduction policies accepted the reality that some fraction of people will abuse drugs and tried to make doing so safer and less disruptive to societies with clean injecting equipment, oral and slow acting drugs rather than injected, and fast acting drugs rather than demand total abstinence. And pretty soon after they were implemented, harm reduction policies were shown to be effective in reducing drug overdoses, associated crime and infection. But while much of Western Europe was experimenting with harm reduction, Eastern Europe relied on an addiction treatment philosophy that it inherited from the Soviet Union, which is known today in Russia as social intolerance, which is deliberately making the lives of drug users miserable.

And what are the effects of a social intolerance policy?

One is the big and harmful effects is that it scares people off who want to quit drugs from seeking treatment. So I talked with one woman in Ukraine who started injecting opium at 16. At 19, she learned she was both pregnant and HIV positive and she was terrified of hurting her baby. So she wanted to stop using drugs, but she was almost as terrified of formally getting help. Because if you want treatment in Ukraine, you, you have to register as a drug user with the state and you just have to hope that the narcologist treating you. A narcologist is a Soviet era profession that's sort of part doctor, part addiction specialist, and often part law informant. Won't leak that information to potential employers who usually don't want to hire drug users. And often narcologists coax women who use drugs in into abortions or remind them that substance abuse is grounds enough for losing parental rights later and that discrimination against mothers is just one of the ways that this social intolerance approach harms women the most.

How do you mean? Why does it disproportionately harm women?

Well, in addition to the unique questions related to motherhood, many of them, the women who use drugs in the region are subjected to high levels of gender based violence. So in Georgia, one study found that 80% of women who used drugs said they were victims of gender based violence, compared with 35% of the general population of women that could be at the hands of an intimate partner or police who have power over women using illegal substances. In Ukraine, more than a third of women addicted to opioids have been threatened with violence by police and 13% have been raped by them. But domestic violence shelters from Ukraine to Moldova frequently turn away drug and alcohol addicted women as a rule. To make matters worse, women are often punished for either using drugs or being HIV positive. So in Ukraine, where there is a large HIV epidemic second only in the region to Russia, women have been criminalized under a provision that bans intentionally putting someone at risk of contracting HIV much more than men have. And that likely results from higher expectations in some ways for women to be well behaved and not to use drugs and certainly not to be a mother who uses drugs.

Drugs.

And what is it do you reckon about Eastern Europe and Russia that makes their policies so different?

Some of the explanation is that the region is quite culturally conservative and has this shared history of the Soviet Union in which these harsh and punitive policies against not only drug addiction, but alcohol addiction were devised. Another reason for resistance in places like Russia is that the harm reduction approach is now kind of branded as a Western idea. So one Russian official derided harm reduction as a, quote, narco liberal idea.

So that is to say the policy successes in the west aren't going to penetrate the East.

Luckily, so far, harm reduction approaches have proved to be so effective that even Eastern European countries but for Russia have adopted some sometimes meager level of harm reduction support. So at least on paper, the western way has gained ground in the last several years. But implementation is patchy. And Russia in particular has gone the other way in cracking down on organizations like Anya Sarong's, which has had to take down its website.

So it doesn't have to be something controversial even, it's just any information on drugs would be considered controversial. So now they're discussing to make it a criminal offense. They already increased the fines. So if my side is under attention, like just mentioning drugs and problems and ways to reduce harms or just providing some scientific information becomes a criminal offense. So we decided, well, nowadays there are many other channels that you can use to distribute information and get it across, but probably website is a bit dangerous.

Very few programs focus on the problems of female drug users in particular. And that's a problem that's reflected in global policy too. In just 2% of resolution adopted by the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs over nine years focused on the burdens of women. And that's despite the fact that theirs are often the heaviest.

Sarah, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

45 years ago, Matt Brown's father started going door to door in Utah selling T from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

He left another company that was kind of like more of an encyclopedia type company. That sold Book of Mormon readers as well as other scripture titles. And he broke off and eventually started doing audio tapes.

Business boomed and Living Scriptures was born. The company expanded, spreading across the state and branching out into videotapes for children, cartoon stories from the Bible, as well as from the Book of Mormon.

So that animated library kind of became the next generation past the audio stuff into teaching families the scriptures. That's how the company ran for really another 20 years or so.

But by the 21st century, when Matt took over from his father, the company struggled. Now it's adapting in a way that might sound familiar.

You know, we could see where things were going. We could see that the future was kind of more digital. And so about five years ago, we kind of just said, it's time to start to really get the new platform up and running.

Living Scriptures is a movie streaming service geared to the Mormon audience. Very similar to Netflix.

Saskia Solomon writes about culture for The Economist.

For $9.99 a month, subscribers have access to a 3,000 strong library of movies, documentaries and animations. On signing up, subscribers receive a welcome email from Matt Brown, which reads, you are one of the brave ones helping us fight the bad media that is trying to invade our homes. And the brave are growing in numbers. Living Scriptures has 200,000 regular users with many signing up during lockdown.

And so is Living Scriptures the kind of market leader for this kind of religious content?

Yes, it is. Living Scriptures is one of very few Mormon centric streaming services out there. While there are many and there's a growing number of faith based streaming services in America, most of them are geared to the evangelical Christian market. There's FaithLife TV and Godify, there's Pureflix and Cross Flicks. At the moment, Living Scriptures is a leader in Mormon movie entertainment. And it has a competitor in the Saints, which is the Church of Latter Day Saints own streaming service, which is produced in tandem with BYUtv, which is the Brigham Young University of Utah's film and television department.

And so have you had a look at any of this sort of Mormon oriented content?

Yes, I have. I had the great pleasure of watching Baptists at our barbecue.

Baptists at our barbecue. You're joking, right?

Which concerns a 29 year old man named Tartan who decides to change his life and takes up a job as a forest ranger in the fictional town of Long Winded, Arizona.

Have you ever met people like these here in Long Winded?

I like them. They're not afraid to be themselves.

They should be where he meets a great deal of Hostility.

Stop right there.

Please let there be at least a couple of normal people here.

He finds that the town has a long standing feud between the Mormons and the Baptists.

What religion are you? Mormon.

Dang it.

He decides to take matters into his own hands and try and bring the two warring factions together through a barbecue.

For our summer celebration, we're going to throw a community barbecue.

It's a distinctly cheesy, uplifting film.

And so these streaming services are massively popular. I mean, who's watching them?

Utah is Living Scriptures main hub in terms of subscribers. Outside of Utah, California and Idaho are second and third biggest subscriber bases beyond the states. Australia, at 5,000 subscribers, is its second biggest market currently. Living Scriptures is expanding its dubbing to Spanish and Portuguese, which will of course help bring its offerings to Latin America.

And the appeal, wherever it exists, is simply because it reinforces the faith that people have or just represents a bit of good clean fun. I mean, what's the broad appeal to your mind?

I think it's a bit of both. I think it's a welcome break from what people see as the ills of society or sort of questionable moral content being promoted on other sites and television. And I think it permits greater control on Sundays. As Matt Brown told me over the phone, is the sort of live and die day for Mormons.

We actually also have a Sunday mode that people can turn on and make it so only religious stuff is there. A lot of people want to use it as more of a religious inspirational thing on Sundays.

It's when the whole family gets together and wants to watch something that while is entertaining, has some relations to their faith and to the Mormon scriptures. And I think Living Scriptures does provide that.

But as these services expand in reach and geography and so on, do you think the appeal will stretch beyond the faithful?

I think it would. A lot of the films would work beyond the sort of faith setting. A lot of them are very comedic and are well known beyond the Mormon Church already. I think there is a market, regardless of religious values, that would probably enjoy cleaner content and less cynical content.

One of the top reasons why families say they subscribe is because they just know they can hand the remote over their kids and there's nothing there that they're going to be offended by. It's a really safe place for families to have a good time.

This Saturday we're going to have a.

Barbecue and I hope it is packed with Baptists.

This whole thing is crazy.

Like us. Saskia, thanks for joining us and happy onward viewing.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.