05/14/14 – Reza Marashi – The Scott Horton Show

The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
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In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast, and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
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We should take nothing for granted.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And hey, I've got Reza Mirashi on the line.
He's formerly at the U.S. State Department, and now is over at the National Iranian-American Council, NIAC, and that's N-I-A-Council dot org, and they are very much pro-nuclear deal with Iran, and right now, as we were talking about in the last segment, we are between nuclear deals.
We have an interim nuclear deal signed by the U.N. Security Council and Iran, plus Germany, the P5-plus-1, last November, and now they're working out the details and working toward the final talks, toward the final deal, which is expected to happen or not happen, I believe, in July.
And so Reza is here, and we're very grateful to have him to give us an update on how things are going so far.
Welcome back to the show.
Reza, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
So how goes it?
I actually saw your boss, Trita Parsi, has a piece out today about the talks, but I didn't get a chance to read it.
Well, I haven't read it yet, either, to be perfectly honest with you.
And if I were a betting man, if Trita has written something, then I'm confident in saying that he's probably going to say that these talks are a marathon, not a sprint.
They have been from the outset, and getting the interim deal last November, and then it started to be applied in January, put more time on the clock, so to speak, to give both sides more political space that's necessary always in order to move the diplomatic process forward.
So right now, instead of deciding whether or not to talk or what the atmospherics of the talks should be like, now they're actually getting into the substance of the issue and trying to figure out where they can make compromises, where gaps need to be bridged, what red lines are, things of that nature.
And there's a lot of different issues, technical issues, related to Iran's nuclear program, or sanctions, things like that, and the duration of a deal if a deal is signed.
All of these things have to be discussed and so much more.
So I think that they're taking the right approach by scheduling out numerous meetings over the next two months to try and dot the i's and cross the t's.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good strategy.
It goes to show that it does seem, unlike a lot of times in the past, that there really is a lot of goodwill on the Western side here, that they really want to negotiate this thing.
I don't know how far they're willing to compromise, but it seems like they at least want to get a handshake from the Iranians, who in their eyes will have by then compromised greatly.
So at least I'll give them credit for that.
That's good.
Of course we all want to see a deal.
And the beginning of the end of the Cold War, that's why this is so important.
Stephen Walt wrote on his blog, isn't it funny how all the people who think the Iranian nuclear program isn't really that big of a deal are the ones who want a deal about the nuclear program so badly.
And that's just because it's so frustrating to have it as such a gigantic outstanding issue when really there's no reason to believe it's ever been anything but a civilian nuclear program.
And as the IAEA has verified, they've never diverted any of their uranium to any other purposes or any of that.
So it's all a big tempest in the teapot, but we just want to put the damn teapot away and get on with healing the relationship between their society and our society.
But our government's got to go first.
Am I right about that?
Well, I definitely think that governments have to be willing to take risks for peace.
And I think that's something that you hit on that's absolutely correct.
And the main problem, in my view, stems from different logic in Washington and in Tehran.
And just because you have different logic doesn't necessarily mean you're right.
And I would even go a step further and say that it's not about right or wrong.
It's about finding areas of compromise.
Because a good deal, irrespective of what two countries or numerous countries are negotiating it, in a good deal, nobody gets everything that they want.
Because if you get everything you want, that means the other side isn't getting enough.
And that's not a sustainable deal if one side's winning and the other side is losing.
You need to find a deal that allows both sides to save face, a deal that allows both sides to claim it as a victory, as a win.
That's something that they can take back to Washington, Tehran, and other capitals around the world and sell as a victory and be able to beat back hardliners who are trying to destroy this process and torpedo it.
And frankly, this process is already sensitive enough, fragile enough as is.
So if the odds of the talks collapsing are high, the stakes of failure are even higher.
And that's something that I think these governments are starting to finally wrap their heads around and admit publicly.
Right.
Yeah, well, for the American side, if they really wanted everything that they want, they should have taken the offer back in 2003 through 2005 when Bush was in charge and they blew it.
So now they're going to have to settle for much more nuclear capability than they would have got if they had compromised back then.
But so tell me what you think about, you know, I guess, well, I don't know how you measure it exactly.
First of all, how do you measure what a breakout capability is?
And then secondly, how do you measure their willingness and ability to negotiate that breakout capability to a point where it would be acceptable to both sides?
Because it is a sort of pseudo nuclear deterrent in the hands of the Iranians, even without ever having a nuclear weapons program, having a nuclear capability and mastering the fuel cycle makes it sort of a shadow of a nuclear deterrent.
Right.
But then the Americans, they just can't abide that.
That's what they've been stamping their feet about all this time.
So, you know, just how long, you know, do you think that they would be willing to allow for the Iranians to be able to make a single atom bomb if they did break for it?
Do you think that these guys could eventually see eye to eye on this issue when they've already come so far with their nuclear program?
Yeah, I don't think it's a question of whether or not they can see eye to eye.
I think it's a question of understanding that because the relationship has been so toxic for three decades, they're not going to find a situation in which they can just make a deal based on trust.
They're going to make a deal that has verifiable concrete mechanisms put in place to verify that both sides are, in fact, living up to their end of the bargain.
So you don't have to trust, but you definitely need to verify.
And then over time, and I'm talking years, not months or weeks, over years, you can build trust.
But in terms of Iran's ability to break out and make a mad dash for a nuclear weapon, you know, an honest analyst will tell you that there's a lot of different opinions going around about, you know, what the timetable for that might be and what the Iranian inclination for doing so might be.
I would point out two things.
One, since 2003, pretty much every intelligence agency around the world, the United States, Israel and everywhere in between, says that Iran has not made the political decision to pursue the weaponization of its nuclear program, right?
So we know that they're not actively pursuing it.
So then the question becomes, if you're not actively pursuing it, what would need to be put into place for the Iranians to make that mad dash if they change their mind and start to pursue a weapon?
And this is the kicker, because this is where the differences of opinion come in.
You know, the United States is pushing for a timetable of six to 12 months.
That way, they feel like it would leave them ample time to detect and to take whatever measures they think might be necessary, military or otherwise, to address the issue.
And this issue centers around number of centrifuges, how many are operating, how much uranium is produced by these centrifuges, things like that.
You're really getting into the weeds in terms of the technical aspects of Iran's program.
I'm going to separate this out, and I'm going to say that a couple of different things stand out to me.
If you want to talk about breakout time, or you want to talk about what the practical needs are of Iran's nuclear program, then you also have to pay some attention to what the Iranian government feels that it needs.
Because again, if the idea here is compromise, you don't have to agree with what the Iranian government feels that it needs.
But you have to understand it in order to negotiate effectively.
Second, I would say that if you want to reduce Iran's breakout time, one potential compromise that you could make is to say, if they scale back some of the more problematic or troubling aspects of their program that is of concern to the United States, then perhaps we can cooperate with the Iranians on the research and development aspects of their program.
Nuclear science, peaceful nuclear energy, nuclear power, things like that.
It is desirable from a Western perspective to have a nuclear industry in Iran that is safe and effective.
That's where the verification and monitoring comes into effect.
And the last bit that I would say is if you cooperate with Iran on the peaceful aspects of this nuclear program, after you ensure that it is peaceful, then that means that you can help to update the kind of technology that this nuclear program is using.
And that goes a long way towards building cooperation, collaboration, and really having a firm idea verified by both the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency of what's going on inside Iran.
Right.
Well, I mean, sure, there was even a time back in the 1990s where the Americans were willing to furnish even North Korea with nuclear reactors as long as they were light water reactors that would only produce plutonium in a very polluted, non-usable-for-weapons kind of form.
And, of course, there were other parts of the deal.
But you don't run your old Soviet-era weapons-grade reactor, and we'll give you some new ones.
I don't think they ever really followed through with that, but that was the deal that they struck.
So it just goes to show that if that's the deal with North Korea, then surely they can deal with Iran on, Hey, well, how about you guys have all the nuclear power you need, but we just make sure that any plutonium that gets produced is polluted with so many isotopes of other things that it couldn't ever be used for weapons purposes, etc.
And, by the way, I mean, they'd have to shut the whole thing down and turn off the Bushehr reactor and take the lid off in front of all the satellites and Jesus and everybody.
So I don't think that they think that they could get away with getting plutonium out of the reactors that they already have, either from Iraq or Bushehr reactors, but they need the Russians' help on all that anyway.
But anyway, just to go to show that it could all be negotiated, right?
I absolutely think that it can be negotiated.
No question.
All right, and then what about the layers of sanctions?
I'm not exactly sure what a layer of sanctions means, but how many layers of sanctions are there?
Is it politically possible to get Congress to cooperate with the President in lifting some of these things?
As we've talked about before, if he can only do a waiver here and a waiver there for six months at a time, that's not a very strong position to be able to make promises to the Iranians from, right?
When Jeb might come or Hillary might come and ruin everything in just a few years.
Sure, there's going to be concern on both sides about the ability to follow through on commitments.
And something that both the United States and Iran agreed to in November when they signed the interim nuclear deal was that steps would be taken based on the premise of reciprocity, meaning that if the Iranians are going to take steps that are irreversible, then they would have to be in return for steps that would be taken by the United States that are irreversible.
Now, an irreversible step would be something closer to lifting sanctions, which obviously you need Congress to do because sanctions have been legislated through Congress more often than not.
If the President uses his waiver authority to waive sanctions on Iran for six months at a time in perpetuity, not only do I not think that's sustainable because that just adds fuel to the fire for hawks on both sides who want to kill the deal and spoil it, and it incentivizes cheating by hardliners in both countries, but then you're also only going to get the Iranians to do things on a six-month period that's renewable every now and then as well.
The Iranians aren't going to take irreversible steps in return for reversible steps by the United States.
So perhaps a potential compromise would be both sides in a final deal for maybe a year or so take steps that are reversible, and then you build trust over that year, demonstrate your ability to fulfill your commitments, and if in fact both sides live up to it after that year or however long the period might be, then you start the heavy lifting of lifting sanctions and taking the more irreversible steps.
Because you're right in noting that Obama's going to have a tough time selling that in Congress, but if he's able to demonstrate a bit more of a win, if you will, in a final deal that Iran's living up to its end of the bargain, and therefore there's a need for us to live up to our end as well, maybe he could take that to the Hill and be able to use it to lift the sanctions that would be necessary for any sustainable final nuclear deal.
All right, everybody, that's Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council, and that's niacouncil.org.
Thanks very much for your time.
Great to talk to you again.
Thanks for having me.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
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Phone records, financial and location data, prism, tempora, X-key score, boundless informant.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy, but the offnow project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
In state after state, I've lost count.
More than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
Something important.
Something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.