Iran and the West (BBC documentary)

It’s never been easier to express my idea about a documentary. This is by far the best documentary I’ve seen on the relationship between Iran and the western countries. They have interviewed high profile political figures (Khatami, Rafsanjani, Putin, Rice, …). I strongly recommend you to watch it.

The easiest way to watch it is on bliptv (embedded in this post). I’ve include links to download the movie from bliptv (you can always use proxies to download the file if the site is filtered). Information included below if from wikipedia.

Episode 1: The Man who Changed the World

Key figures tell the inside story of Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power, the fall and exile of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the events surrounding the Iran hostage crisis.
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Episode 2: The Pariah State

Inside stories are told by two ex-presidents of Iran and leading westerners. Subjects covered in this edition include the Lebanon hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the changing political climate of the Middle East following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War.
Download

Episode 3: Nuclear Confrontation

The inside story of the West’s continuing nuclear confrontation with Iran. Subjects covered in this episode include the rise of the Taliban in Iran’s neighbor Afghanistan, the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War and Iran’s emerging nuclear program.
Download

If you have problem watching this, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to put links to youtube and rapaidshare uploads of these videos.

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February 27th, 2009 in Politics | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

13 Comments

EmadFebruary 27th, 2009 at 10:45
quite impressive!
Last weekend,I watched half of the 2nd episode in Swedish TV with Swedish translation.
Thanks for your post.It was better to watch it in English and whole of the episodes at once!

AminFebruary 27th, 2009 at 11:47
Well, I just had time to watch the first one. It was nice but with a mistake! The speaker, mentioning US plan for taking back hostages, told “… from Arabian sea…” ;)

MahdiFebruary 27th, 2009 at 14:35
There was no mistake with that. It is indeed “Arabian Sea”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sea

But maybe technically they parted from “Oman sea”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oman_sea

AminFebruary 27th, 2009 at 17:26
yeah that maybe…

AminMarch 2nd, 2009 at 14:18
This 6 part video is also interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww24QGZ6pC8

JubeenMarch 3rd, 2009 at 15:55
It was great man! Thanks for sharing it.
I was lead to here from facebook and my friend Babak Lotfalie.

esiMarch 5th, 2009 at 01:26
great!

Saeid BMarch 10th, 2009 at 21:08
Although the producer has put a significant amount of effort to be as complete as possible, it lacks three important aspects of the tension between Iran and West particularly the United States:

1- The main source of tension between Iran and the West is due to “Israel”. I could not see anywhere in the documentary other than a few minutes in the second episode that the reporter talks about Israel! As a point of fact, even in those few minutes, they talked about confliction between Hezbollah and US rather than Israel itself! It makes me doubtful if they had any incentives/threats for not talking about Israel! It is surprising even in the nuclear confrontation nothing is mentioned about Israel and its level of importance to the west!

2- Nothing was mentioned about the civilian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655) shot down by US missiles on 1988 on the sky of “PERSIAN Gulf” leaving 290 Iranian dead and resulted in a quiet bit of conflict between the two countries! Neither was mentioned anything about the navy crashed and drowned by Iran in the same region. It makes me more doubtful about the clarity and the objectives of the producers of this documentary!

3- Nothing was pointed out about Iran’s win over US in 1998 soccer Worldcup in France … :)

Best!

MahdiMarch 10th, 2009 at 22:33
I think the main point of this documentary was to expose unknown facts going on behind doors rather than talking about the points known to the general public. I myself didn’t know a big chunk of stories. As you can see, the main theme of the story was about the secret discussions and dealings that do not usually appear in the news. I don’t think they missed or avoided the points about Iran Air 655, but rather were focusing on other issues.

As for the tensions with Israel, I assume they couldn’t publicly broadcast the Iranian viewpoint on the topic. You might say that this is not professional or it looks sneaky. But, as far as I am concerned, it is much better not to even bring up the topic than to viciously edit the interviews to make them “politically correct” for the British television.

shohreMarch 12th, 2009 at 09:28
man emrooz taze ina ro diam ,kheili bahal bood,eyval merC

Saeid BMarch 12th, 2009 at 21:48
Mahdi, I wish the producer had thought like you, but really I doubt about it! Missing out the big pieces of a puzzle believing that people already know them is not the best thing to do in the world. It just doesn’t look good at the end. I wish they had put one more episode for the sake of completeness, pointing out the important missing facts. Probably it would have dramatically changed the balance between the two sides of the confrontation! It is in fact unbalanced! Who has paid more has probably gone through more discrimination.

Anyways, thanks for sharing the videos.

ایران و غرب « آيندۀ بشرApril 27th, 2009 at 01:09
[...] نمونه هایی از آن را اینجا، اینجا، اینجا، اینجا، اینجا، اينجا و اینجا بخوانید. فردی که اين فيلم را روی يوتوب گذاشته [...]

ronAugust 29th, 2009 at 01:14
they also left out the fact about reagan’s campaign manager going to Iran and making a deal not to release the hostages until Reagan become president. In effect Reagan kept the american hostages there much much longer than they needed to be. This is right on par with Nixon and Kissinger escalating the vietnam war for neo-con reasons and instead failing miserably by sending double the amount of soldiers to their deaths without anything to show for it, but a genocide in Cambodia.

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