Daryl Cagle: [00:00:00] Hi, I am Daryl Cagle and this is the Caglecast. Today we're doing the war in Iran, and we have Nik Kowsar, Iranian cartoonist, who I've known for probably 25 years, 20 years. And uh, Nik is—uh—was a very prominent cartoonist in Iran until the clerics didn't like his cartoons and they threw him in the infamous Evin Prison. And since then, he's thriving in the West, and he is a syndicated cartoonist with Cagle Cartoons writing about Iran. So it's a delight to have you here, Nik.

Nik Kowsar: Thanks for having me, Daryl. Yes, it was the year 2000 that I was actually surfing the web and found Cagle.com at that time. And then of course, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, it was MSN Cagle or uh, what type of—

Daryl Cagle: We were partnered with Slate and we were partnered with MSNBC. That's right. And now we're not partnered with anybody. We're an independent voice. You know, I get lots of uh submissions from Iranian cartoonists and they are actually really pretty good compared to the other stuff we get. And they're very earnest and I would love to work with them, but I just can't.

Nik Kowsar: I hear you. Unfortunately, that's because of the Islamic regime and uh what it has done all these years, and the pressure actually comes on the pens and backs of uh Iranian artists.

Daryl Cagle: Well, this cartoon is by Steve Sack, and I think it's a wonderful cartoon. It made me laugh. The FIFA Peace Prize is actually pretty funny in itself, and uh I think we will notice that the editorial cartoonists are entirely against Trump and Trump's war in Iran. And uh, I wonder how you feel about it.

Nik Kowsar: Uh, first of all about that wonderful cartoon by Steve. Uh, Iran was supposed to be one of the participants in the World Cup this summer, and there's a thought that Iran would actually boycott this event and because how can uh first of all, how could the US give the players a visa to play on American soil while the two countries are at war? That's one thing. Second, it would be very hard for the Iranian people actually to accept the national soccer team playing in the US under these circumstances. So it's a complicated situation and uh yeah, it doesn't sound—

Daryl Cagle: Well, it seems like soccer is a pretty trivial thing to be concerned about as we're having a war. Yeah. And you hear uh you know Trump bashing with the FIFA Peace Prize, that triviality makes it funny.

Nik Kowsar: It does, it does. But uh talking about the war, uh I hate wars. I lived through one from uh 1980 to 1988, just days before going to middle school, the Iraqi MiGs attacked the Mehrabad airport. That was about, let's say two and a half miles away from our house in Tehran, and we heard the explosions. We went to the rooftop with my cousins and witnessed the smoke, the explosions and all the noise and the eighties became hell for many of us. So I don't think war is uh something that we should love, at least from my perspective. I remember it was in the 2014 uh cartoon convention in San Francisco when uh I think we were all on the bus coming back from the Snoopy Museum and the Blue Angels were flying over the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the cartoonists on the bus were scared of hearing the F-18s roar at that time. So that was our whole life in the 1980s because of course not F-18s but MiGs and uh Tomcats and French Mirages that uh Saddam used to send to bomb our cities. So we went through all of that and it's not a very good feeling, I should say.

Daryl Cagle: [00:04:00] Well, we don't like war. I think the cartoonists are uniformly opposed to Trump on this. We've seen a lot of farting. It's interesting that war leads to Trump farting. Um.

Nik Kowsar: And the farts actually in the other cartoon looked like Ayatollahs, so that was really—

Daryl Cagle: Beautiful. Oh, yes, yes. Ayatollah farts.

Nik Kowsar: Ayatollah and a beard. Yes.

Daryl Cagle: This is Pat Bagley. He's just great. And he's uh he started drawing Trump farting in almost every cartoon now. I don't know that the editors care much for farting, but uh—

Nik Kowsar: It's artistic. It's about art and farts working together, so it makes it work. Uh it's really artistic.

Daryl Cagle: So uh, given the horrors of war, what do you think about all of this?

Nik Kowsar: It's horrible. Uh first of all, I've been focused on the environment and water for a long, long time. Aside from being a cartoonist, I was a geologist once upon a time and worked on water issues. I don't remember a single war that has had benefits for the environment, except I think the Korean War that created that DMZ area between South Korea and North Korea, where uh no man can make things worse. And because of that, some ecosystems I've heard thrive over there, but apart from that zone, no. Every war has had a negative impact on the environment. I was in Vietnam a few months ago visiting the Delta, and you could hear uh you could listen to stories from uh old Vietnamese professors that were talking about Agent Orange and other chemicals that had ruined the soil and the ecosystem over there for years. And in some parts it was taking years and years to actually make things better. So I know war is uh not just hell for human beings, but also for the environment. And I think you as a Californian are more concerned about the environment than many other people that I have spoken to. So I think we have an understanding on that as well.

Daryl Cagle: Yeah, we keep our eye on the environment, but that's getting to be true all over the world.

Nik Kowsar: It is, it is. And by now I know so many groundwater sources, aquifers have been contaminated. The air is so polluted right now because of all the asbestos in the air after each and every explosion and the lives lost is not something nice to actually even witness, but it's happening. When I learned about that elementary school that was bombed the other day in the southern town of Mena, the school was next to a military compound, but those children had nothing to do with this.

Daryl Cagle: So how do you see the war going now? You have uh unusual insight into uh the character of Iran and the characters that run it. Where do you see this going?

Nik Kowsar: Uh, we have a saying that the Islamic Republic does not bow to power unless the power is too powerful. So I see that uh you have to see when the camel's back is gonna break with just one single extra straw, dust particle, or even straw. And it'll happen. But the price that people are paying for this war is too high. And we don't know, what's the objective? Is it regime change? Is it changing the behavior of the Ayatollahs? Is it more oil? I don't get it. I know that um Israel has always been concerned about Iran's nuclear plans. It's a true concern. Many deny it, but I believe that Iran has, the Islamic regime has always been after a nuclear bomb, and it's a big concern for the whole region. But was this war the answer to that? I don't know. I don't think so.

Daryl Cagle: Well, it seems to me that Trump is undergoing a plan to deal with all of the leftover issues from previous presidents that other presidents weren't able to deal with. He's gonna take care of Venezuela and Cuba and Iran, and I would imagine there are a few of those leftover thorn in the side issues that are outstanding on his list of things to do. There are reasons the other presidents didn't wanna deal with these things because the solutions were so abhorrent. I get the point. It doesn't seem to me like he's an enigma in this. He seems pretty uh out in the open in his thinking.

Nik Kowsar: Look, in the environmental business, we always have this benefit to cost assessment and usually in environmental impact assessments, they try to understand is doing something uh would it have more benefit than the cost of doing nothing or actually going through that project or not. But what I'm seeing here, I don't see a benefit to cost ratio or any report about that of going into this war. Uh, it seems that there has been a strategy and everybody's playing based on that strategy without understanding the impact in the long run and in the long run I'm not sure if this war is going to benefit the region, even Israel. So there are many questions over here uh for uh experts on nuclear issues, on military issues, on human rights issues. And so far, yes, there's an excitement among many Iranians that have been fed up with the Islamic regime. I've been a target of the Islamic regime for over 25 years, and I was about to get murdered on the streets, and in 2003, after I got a death threat, I was on a death list. But the thing is solving the problem of the Islamic regime through a war that is killing many innocent people on the ground, I don't think is the best solution. So

Daryl Cagle: what is the best solution?

Nik Kowsar: I've been thinking about this for a long time, but I see nonviolent movements. Although they may take a lot of time, beneficial to the whole area, to the whole region, not only to Iran, because honestly we don't have a democratic nation around Iran as well. The only country that has real elections in that region is Israel. And you've seen what Israel has gone through uh in the last few years with those elections. Well,

Daryl Cagle: I see what Iran has gone through with peaceful demonstrations. So tens of thousands of people killed for being peaceful demonstrators.

Nik Kowsar: The problem is the leadership behind those demonstrations wasn't good leadership. Look, when you actually guide people to go on the path of all those machine guns and you ask them to go on the streets at the time when the regime is ready to shoot at people, that's not leadership. This is what Avi, the former Crown Prince of Iran did. Actually, the regime had said that if anybody is on the streets at that certain time, they will shoot. And they did. The regime is murderous. But what did Reza Pahlavi do? What did his followers do? The ones, the intermediaries, his propaganda machine—did they warn the people on the streets? No. They encouraged them to go on the streets where they knew that IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were waiting for them.

Daryl Cagle: Pretty harsh to blame the victims.

Nik Kowsar: No. I'm not blaming the victims. I'm blaming the leadership.

Daryl Cagle: Leadership of the victims. He

Nik Kowsar: is not a victim. I don't see him as a victim.

Daryl Cagle: Okay. You know, when I look at it, I see the terrible deaths. You know, the girls school, they're saying about a thousand people have been killed in these first six days, but you know, they also say 35,000 people were killed in those peaceful demonstrations. It seems like a pretty small percentage of what we've seen before that's going on in the solution rather than the continuing problem.

Nik Kowsar: I don't want to say that let's say 35,000 people being killed is not okay, and a thousand people being killed is okay. Even one soul lost is one soul lost. And we have to care for even one person being killed.

Daryl Cagle: Well, that of course, but you know, we look for the cost benefit analysis, as you described.

Nik Kowsar: When we're talking about human life, it's something else, to my belief actually, I don't look at it, oh, let's kill 1000 people. It's better than 35,000 people killed in another time. No, even that one individual, that student, that poor student who had no idea what the nuclear deal was or what the nuclear negotiations were about in Mena. She, he was supposed to be alive today, and they're not. Those students are not alive. But let's go back to what's happening over here in Iran. Look, I've learned a lot about peaceful demonstrations from the Yugoslavs. From the Serbs who actually brought down Milošević. He was the, as you remember, uh and I bet you've drawn lots of cartoons about Milošević uh being sent to the Hague in the early two thousands. So they had peaceful demonstrations, but they had planned peaceful demonstrations. They knew what to do. They had strategy, they had good tactics. In the January demonstrations that we had in Iran, the first few days, we had very few deaths. But then at one point when the leadership had to change tactics, they didn't. You have to evaluate the situation. You have to study the situation. Not just ask people to go on the streets while you're in the United States and not on the streets yourself, and not risking your life yourself. In Serbia, the leaders were on the street. I know them. Srđa Popović is one of them. He now teaches in uh Colorado. He was on the street next to all the protesters. But here you have somebody in Potomac in a luxurious house asking people to go and give up their life. This is not gonna help people. You have to be on the ground to ask people to risk their lives. So that's one big problem that I have with so many of these political leaders. I consider them political leaders, not leaders because they are dealerships for other politicians. So I don't trust them.

Daryl Cagle: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about cartoonists in Iran and because we are looking at cartoons that you are an escapee from Iran because of threats to your life from the cartoons. So, uh, yeah. These days, tell us about that.

Nik Kowsar: Sure. We have wonderful cartoonists in Iran and a number of cartoonists actually fled the country. The Nili brothers are well known. One of them, Mana is right now in France. Touka is in Canada and they've been very successful. But also we have many good cartoonists inside the country who have had to self-censor themselves to be able to continue their work. Some are cartoonists, animators, um, designers, architects—they have different hats for different jobs and they know the limits. It's really difficult. They're not able to draw the Ayatollahs 'cause drawing the Ayatollahs means making fun of Islam to the eyes of the judiciary. Once I drew the uh what's the name? The symbol for justice, the angel that has the blindfold, and I was going to be arrested because they thought that the blindfold was a turban. And I had to explain that, no, this is not a turban. I'm not making fun of Islam. Just a blindfold around the eyes of the angel of Justice. So we had these problems, but even when I drew a crocodile that I uh was sent to prison for in 2000, I didn't draw the cleric. The name of the crocodile rhymed with the name of that cleric. That's why they arrested me. In Persian or in Arabic, crocodile is "timsah" and the name of the cleric was Mesbah. So because of this rhyming and the guy was shedding crocodile tears, and I had used that metaphor. Uh, my cartoon created a national security crisis in the country, apparently, and hundreds of thousands of people were shouting for my death without even seeing that cartoon. So there are so many things that cartoonists have to be concerned of before even actually putting the pen on the paper and even sketching. And those days I didn't even sketch. I had Ayatollahs in my private sketches so I wouldn't be arrested for having hidden sketches of uh Ayatollahs in my closet even. So it was funny, once I uh I got back home in 2001 and I found out that somebody had uh checked out everything in my house, opened my files. They hadn't even touched my coins, my gold coins that I had at that time. They just went through my sketches and I guess they wanted to find something, uh some dirt, some sketches of Ayatollahs that they could take me to court for them, but fortunately I didn't have them. So yeah, cartoonists are always scared of even thinking of drawing Ayatollahs in Iran. So that's the situation. And the funnier thing is that while I was uh working for a publication and that was in France and it was called Ruse Online, my publisher didn't even dare publishing cartoons of Ayatollahs, though we were living abroad and not under the supervision of Iran's judiciary. It took me a lot of effort to convince my publisher to publish my cartoons with Ayatollahs and their turbans and their robes in it. So really hard to be an Iranian cartoonist and hopefully one day that would change.

Daryl Cagle: Well, I have noticed that there are just particular countries in the world where cartoonists seem to be great and thrive and in the nature of their work, and uh appreciate other cartoonists and have a community of cartoonists and stand out above other countries. I would say the Romance language countries and some other odd ones like Turkey have great cartooning traditions and I would put Iran among those. I think uh Iran has very impressive cartoonists. You can look at our unsolicited submissions and wow, Iran stuff really stands out and given the horrible circumstances in which they have to work and uh I can't figure out how you would make a living being a cartoonist in Iran. It is amazing to me that that survives, and I can't explain it, but I certainly observe it.

Nik Kowsar: That is true, and I'm sure you've gone to many of these cartooning festivals and exhibitions where you have a winner over there and Iranians have won numerous prizes through the years, but it doesn't translate to uh editorial cartooning being that successful in the country. Unfortunately, publications are really scared of cartoonists, newspapers usually censor very, very simple cartoons. Of course, that's for a reason because the courts can ban the paper and hundreds of people will lose their jobs over a simple cartoon. And this is the feeling I had when one of my cartoons was being uh in a way I could say targeted by the judiciary, my colleagues other parts of the paper were worried for their jobs and how to feed their families. So uh self-censorship becomes a shared value of many cartoonists, and that's hard to be a cartoonist and just go through all that pressure of self-censorship. You have to think of the families of your colleagues while you're uh working on a funny idea or funny subject. So it's really difficult and I value the work of those who have been able to publish their cartoons through all these troubles, all these limitations going through all the red lines, and they have kept cartooning alive in Iran. I hope that if we have a democracy in the next few years, cartoonists would be able to do what they should do and a healthy society needs healthy cartooning. So I drew this uh a few months ago, but it was published two weeks before his death and by an Italian newspaper. So it was a sort of I can say prediction of ending. And uh it was weird. I had a weird feeling when I heard Hani had died through the Israeli campaign in attacking his compound. This guy was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people, and his belief in building the bomb could have actually killed many more in the future. And he, well

Daryl Cagle: it seemed quite credible that if he had the bomb, he would've been using it. And I think they actually said they would destroy Israel.

Nik Kowsar: It's funny. On one side, he had a fatwa against the bomb, and on the other, he was actually after having the bomb, some were saying that, okay, the bomb was to prevent Israel or any other nation attacking Iran, but it didn't happen. They spent billions and billions of dollars on building the nuke, and fortunately they still don't have it. But the thing is Iran. The Islamic regime destroyed Iran's environment as much as it could. Its water resources, its forests, its agriculture, everything. We lost lakes. We lost lit rivers just because all the budget that was supposed to be used to protect the environment was spent on the nuclear program. And what did that nuclear program get? This guy dead?

Daryl Cagle: Well, let me twist your arm and get you back into predicting things. It seems to me my prediction is that the Iranian economy is gonna be worthless. Iranian currency is almost worthless, but it'll be completely worthless. As you say, the environment is screwed over there. They were talking about emptying out Tehran because there's no water. Um, it seems to me that there's gonna be another refugee crisis because there's nothing to sustain people in Iran, however this turns out. What do you think?

Nik Kowsar: I'm actually uh scared of this 'cause I've been warning many people in the uh think tank environment here in Washington and on the other side of the Atlantic, that the bad policies will actually create a major crisis when millions of Iranians will actually leave Iran for other countries. And it's hard to stop that flow of immigrants, and it's just because of Iran's extremely bad water policies and environmental policies and spending too much money on the nuclear project. So it's going to be a very, very harsh reality for millions of Iranians and also governments who have to deal with uh millions of migrants.

Daryl Cagle: So the answer to how's the war gonna turn out is just that,

Nik Kowsar: uh, I'm sure you've heard about the pizza sales. Pentagon in Pentagon City, Arlington and

Daryl Cagle: oh, you mean like the pedophiles in the basement of the pizza place?

Nik Kowsar: No, no. Sales go up whenever there's gonna be a war.

Daryl Cagle: Oh

Nik Kowsar: yeah. So they order uh thousands of thousands of pizzas. They pay people's lunch, pay for people's lunch so they don't leave uh and stay there working.

Daryl Cagle: Yeah. So whenever uh you they get too many orders, you know that there's gonna be a war. It happened before the Venezuela campaign and before they attacked Iran. So I think at least war is good for pizzerias.

Nik Kowsar: I think they're the only winners of these wars

Daryl Cagle: that said, uh. If there's gonna be a war of choice, it seems to be that there's enough upside this for this to be a war of choice. I'm not entirely against it.

Nik Kowsar: It would've happened sooner rather than later. Many had predicted this and even Iranian uh the Islamic regime's military was ready for this. That's why they made thousands of thousands of those Shahed drones to attack uh to shoot targets in the Gulf States, Israel, and other places. So they were thinking about this from, I think, decades ago.

Daryl Cagle: You know, they could have avoided all of this and been just as evil as they wanted to be. If they only weren't enriching the uranium.

Nik Kowsar: That's a big problem because they, I think they made the decision to enrich uranium from the 1990s. And Rafsanjani, who was the president in the nineties, once said that we need an Islamic bomb. It seems that, oh, they want Islamic halal bombs. I made this joke yesterday about, let's say an Islamic rocket. It should be circumcised. Apparently it should be Islamic to handle, but there's a big problem. There are many people in the regime that believed that uh let's say as a Shia nation and the one that all Shiites are looking to, Iran needed a nuke. And that's a stupid idea. It didn't, it just brought misfortune for the people.

Daryl Cagle: It did. And, you know, if you could look back on what's the least Iran could have done to avoid all of this, that's the least. And they could have gone on with all of their uh evil proxies and their internal repression and all of the nastiness throwing cartoonists in jail that they wanted to, and it wouldn't have amounted to anything.

Nik Kowsar: That is true. That is true. And you know, they created all those proxies to guard themselves from Israel and the US and it didn't work out for them. They created Hezbollah, they created different factions in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq. Where are they now? Many of them are dead, but killing those people also cost lives. And uh the Islamic regime has been responsible for the death of so many American servicemen in Iraq. The Quds Force uh Qasem Soleimani, who was the commander of the Quds Force, were killing Americans in Iraq. And this is something that we should remember. And when I think of what Trump did to Qasem Soleimani in uh 2020, I always remember what Qasem Soleimani did to many Americans on the ground over there.

Daryl Cagle: Well, we've been talking a long time, Nik, do you have any uh last things you'd like to say before we uh sign off?

Nik Kowsar: Um, I just hope uh this war ends as soon as possible and we get rid of the Islamic regime as soon as possible, and I pray that we have a democracy. And funny candidates so I could start drawing cartoons again and making fun of those stupid politicians.

Daryl Cagle: Okay. Well, uh, I guess that's it for us, Nik.

Nik Kowsar: Thanks for having me, Daryl.

Daryl Cagle: Thank you for coming and I appreciate all you do. I've been a fan of yours for decades now.

Nik Kowsar: You look younger than uh talking about decades. So

Daryl Cagle: I've got the turkey neck.

Nik Kowsar: Well, I don't know what's mine. Is it a turkey neck or turtleneck, whatever it is, but look good.

Daryl Cagle: Okay.

Nik Kowsar: Meet again, and have kebab.

Daryl Cagle: We must do that. So, uh, thank you much Nik. And that's it for the Caglecast today. Uh, remember to like and subscribe. Remember to subscribe to our free daily newsletter at cagle.com/subscribe. It's very cool. It's uh got the top three cartoons of the day the editors are running in newspapers and it costs you not a dime. So go do that cagle.com/subscribe and I will see you later. Thank you so much, and thank you again Nik.

Nik Kowsar: Thanks a lot. You take care.

Daryl Cagle: All right, that's it. Bye folks. [00:27:00]
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