06/24/15 – Reza Marashi – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Reza Marashi on the line.
He is at the National Iranian American Council, that's niacouncil.org, there with Trita Parsi and forget the other guy.
He's real good, though.
Anyway, so he's written a couple of good pieces here.
Ending the Iranian-Saudi Cold War, that's at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
Ending the Iranian-Saudi Cold War.
And then this one, brand new, at the National Interest, Iran Nuclear Talks, Clearing the Final Hurdle, and that's where I want to start.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Reza?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
Okay, so the final hurdle, sanctions relief and inspections and verification, you say.
Both of which are resolvable?
I think so.
The reality of the situation is that both sides are essentially looking at a Chinese menu of options here that can solve the technical problems that are preventing solutions on both issues, sanctions relief and inspections verification.
So now it's up to political leaders to find solutions that are feasible for their needs, both in Washington and in Tehran.
That's not easy to do.
If it was easy to do, it would already be done by now.
But the clock is ticking.
Both sides would prefer to get this done sooner rather than later.
But there's going to be a lot of haggling between now and June 30th, or perhaps a few days even after June 30th, when they try to seal this thing and get it done.
Well, by the way, if they need another couple of few days, is that going to be that big of a deal?
I don't think so.
I think what we're really looking at here is July 9th, because Congress comes back into session on July 10th.
And if nothing is presented to Congress when they come back into session, Congress has the ability to extend its review period of any deal that's signed from 30 days to 60 days.
And if they have a longer review period, that could add additional layers of complication to a negotiation process that's already very complicated.
So I don't think the Obama administration wants that.
I don't think the Iranians want that.
So it's going to affect the calculus.
But that being said, that does not prevent the possibility that this could go beyond July 9th or 10th.
I don't think either side is going to agree to a deal that they don't feel meets their needs.
And finding solutions to these problems technically is possible.
I think politically is also possible.
But the politics on both sides is where the real complications come in.
So leaders have to be willing to take risks for peace in order to make this thing work.
All right.
Well, so in your article, you say when it comes to sanctions relief, there's some things that can be done immediately and hopefully enough to make up for the fact that not everything can be done immediately.
And you're differentiating between the U.S., E.U. and U.N. levels of sanctions.
Is that it?
Yeah, I think that there's a variety of things that can be done without the White House having to go to Congress and ask them to lift sanctions.
This Congress has not played ball with the White House really on anything foreign policy or domestic policy.
So the Obama administration is going to have to look into its toolkit to see what it can do on its own.
I think it has a couple of options that would be relatively appealing to the Iranians, at least for the first phase of a deal, because this is the deal that's going to be multi-phased.
That ranges from unfreezing Iranian assets and returning them directly to the Iranian government.
We've had various assets frozen from anywhere between 30 some odd years to three to four years and removing different designations of Iranian individuals and entities that had previously fallen under sanctions designations, to waiving sanctions that are already on the books.
You know, if you add all of these things together and you front load a deal, that could provide substantial relief in the beginning.
It's not going to be the end all, be all.
It's going to require a lot more hard work on the part of the United States.
But it would be an important first step to demonstrate our commitment to diplomacy.
In other words, the Iranian side, they need to be able to go back to the rest of the politicians in Tehran and to the Iranian people and identify some wins that they achieved before they're going to do their part at all.
And in fact, as you say in the article, they've already gone way beyond their fair share under the interim deal.
But now it's time for the payoff or they're going to be in trouble.
After all, it's just their John Kerry over there trying to cut this deal, right?
He's not Iran.
He's just their foreign minister.
It's very much a situation where both sides don't feel like they're getting what they need.
Then the process is not going to be sustainable and a deal won't be sustainable.
And it's very much a process where the Iranians believe that they gave more than they received when the interim nuclear deal was signed.
Now, right or wrong, perception is reality when it comes to these negotiations.
Well, they have a pretty strong case to make on that point.
It would seem like to me.
And, you know, and I think that's going to be probably the trickiest issue to try and resolve sanctions relief, because Iran has already agreed to make a variety of limitations on the various technical aspects of this nuclear program.
Not all of the kinds of confessions that the United States would like to see, but far more than any U.S. official could have possibly imagined 18 months ago.
And it requires a certain level of intellectual honesty on the part of U.S. officials to acknowledge that.
So I give the U.S. officials who do acknowledge that a lot of credit.
Yeah.
Well, and the ones who refuse to acknowledge it, I think, look pretty foolish because when they announced that agreed framework, the last big hurdle, it was pretty impressive and, you know, beyond what I thought that they would get.
And, you know, that's for sure, at least at that point anyway.
And so now that brings us to the other part of what you're talking about here in the piece, and that is how far the Iranians will allow the inspections and verification to go.
I mean, ultimately, they're there, I guess, literally to re-sign the additional protocol to their safeguards agreement, but they're going to have other subsidiary arrangements and agreements to what degree?
I don't know, I guess.
But there are obviously some places for some real confrontations here, because at least in the past, the Americans have demanded access to things that are only tangentially related or, you know, kind of secondary to anything that's really under the IAEA's purview for investigation, you know, actual nuclear materials in machines, you know, being introduced into machines.
But we want to look at your military bases and your missiles and your centrifuge factories and all these other things.
And do you really think there's enough split in the difference in middle ground and compromise room there between past American demands or whatever they're demanding now, and what the Iranians can be, you know, reasonably expected to accept?
I think so, because neither side wants this process to fail, first and foremost.
And beyond that, I think that there is an increasing acknowledgement on the part of Western countries that Iran's nuclear program is already the most heavily inspected program in the world.
The additional measures that will be brought in if and when a final deal is signed, is going to add to what is already the most heavily inspected program in the world.
And those things will be locked into place, not just for 10 years, 15 years, but some of them for the life of Iran's nuclear program.
So to sacrifice what would clearly be a net gain in an unprecedented fashion in the history of inspection, verification, over a few issues that relate to sovereignty, sensitivities, or whatever other classification the Iranians might describe it as, I think would be a mistake.
So finding a way to split the difference here, where we can say with as much certainty as possible that every link in the supply chain of Iran's nuclear program is monitored from start to finish, while also allowing the Iranians to maintain sovereignty and be eventually treated like any other country with a nuclear program in the world, is going to have to be the endgame here.
And there's a couple of different roads that can get the two sides there, it's just a matter of, again, finding one that's politically digestible in both of their respective capitals.
Well, from my point of view, it seems like Obama is much more invested in this, he and Kerry both, are much more invested in this now than they were in the past.
They were more willing to declare failure, I guess as Gareth Porter put it, as long as they could make it Iran's fault, as best they could.
They were perfectly happy to throw their hands up and go back to the horrible status quo as best they could.
But it seems like now they really do have the political will, at least in the White House, to push this thing through.
I guess we'll still, like you mentioned, got to see what Congress does with it, but anyway, reasons for real optimism.
And when we get back with Reza Marashi on the other side of this break yard, we're going to talk about the upcoming new and improved, possibly, relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Hang tight.
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Alright guys, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show, I'm him.
Hey, all you people who listen to these interview archives on the podcast feed there, you do know they come from this live show I do, noon to two, eastern time on the Liberty Radio Network, right?
Yeah, it's true.
You can hear the whole show archives at scotthorton.org too, if you like.
Right now I'm talking with, well, people tell me, you know what, I listened to your interviews for years before I figured out they came from something else.
Well, god dang, I guess I should say that more often or something.
Alright, I got Reza Marashi on the line.
He's at the National Iranian American Council, they push for peace between this country and that one.
I like that.
He's written a couple of very interesting pieces for your brain here.
Iran nuclear talks, clearing the final hurdles is one, and then we're about to get to this one on Iran and Saudi in a second.
But I wanted to ask you here about this dispute resolution joint commission that you propose here that maybe if we can't quite get the PMD issues and the inspections worked out by the deadline, maybe we can create a little commission, can down the road a little bit, but then they'll have the flexibility to go ahead and resolve the issue, but it'll already have the big red stamp of approval on it by then, the final deal will.
It'll just include this commission and we'll relegate these issues to this kind of lower status, which I'm all for, kind of, except it seems like it might be a tripwire there where if the Iranians push back at all, then all the Republicans can say after the final deal is signed, oh no, look, they're cheating, oh no, they refuse to go along with their agreements and blah, blah, blah, and that could set us up for a problem, but maybe I'm missing something.
What do you think?
Well, I think you're going to have Republicans and probably even some Democrats sniping at any final agreement that might be signed, no matter what happens, but I don't think most members of Congress, really any members of Congress are going to be in a position to gauge what is or is not a violation by the Americans, the Iranians, or anyone else that's party to this deal, unless they're briefed by the negotiators who have the access directly to the classified information that Congress otherwise is not able to have.
So, at the end of the day, if some kind of joint commission is put together, it's going to be the responsibility of Iran and the P5-plus-1 countries to figure out how they parse through the issues that would come to the joint commission.
So if some countries in the joint commission decide that, okay, for example, Iran has committed a violation, then how do they decide as a commission together, if in fact it is a violation?
How do they decide what kind of penalties will be brought forward?
Is it going to be one penalty by any side and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket?
There's no more deal?
Or is there going to be a menu of options that, you know, lead up to perhaps abandoning a deal, but that's not the first step that you go to, right?
So maybe there's some kind of sanction, maybe there's some kind of penalty.
These are the kinds of things that they have to parse through here that have to get the approval from all of their respective political leaders, which of course makes it complicated.
But the idea here is that they decide together what constitutes a violation the same way that they decide together what constitutes success.
That way, you either win together or you lose together.
And that actually increases the likelihood of success.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
Let me ask you this now.
What happens if the talks fail?
And I'll go ahead and take, oh, no, they're going to make bombs and there's going to be a nuclear war and attack on Israel off the table, because we all know that that's a fancy.
All they ever had was a safeguarded civilian nuclear program.
But the politics of failure on either sides could go all kinds of ways.
But are you worried about what might happen?
Yeah, I'm very worried about what would happen, because we were at the precipice of war just a couple of years ago.
And we got lucky, frankly, and I don't even believe in luck.
Luck is for losers.
But we got lucky that both the United States and Iran decided to step back from the brink and try this whole diplomacy thing that had never truly been tried in any kind of serious and sustained fashion.
Now, it took us quite a long time to get to the brink of war.
If the negotiations fail and there's no deal, it's not going to take the same amount of time, years, to get back to the brink of war.
It's going to get back to the brink, I think, much, much quicker.
And not only will we get back to the brink of war much quicker, but the forces of sanity and pragmatism, moderation, call it what you will, in Washington and in Tehran and in other capitals that helped get us to the precipice of not war, but a diplomatic solution.
If the deal fails, they'll be emasculated.
So there's not going to be that line of defense, that line of sanity, that line of pragmatism standing in the way.
It's going to empower the worst element on both sides, and I think that gets us to war, or at least the potential for war, much, much quicker and in a much more serious and real way.
All right.
But here's the thing, though.
Specifically speaking, I know the Americans can just make up things and launch wars if they want to.
I'm not discounting that.
I mean, I know it wouldn't be exactly status quo, it would be a whole new world we live in if the talks fail.
But on the other hand, do you think it's automatic that they would say, well, that's it, we've had it with the nonproliferation treaty and the safeguards agreement, and we're going to go North Korea and start making nukes now?
Because I don't think they would.
And it would take that to be even what amounts to not a good enough cost to Spelly for me, but it seems like the kind of thing that would really drive the Americans to actually go ahead and bomb Natanz or whatever it is.
I don't think that if a deal fails, that Iran will immediately dash to build a nuclear weapon.
I don't.
I think that there are a handful of steps that happen between diplomacy failing and a potential Iranian nuclear weapon being constructed.
But you just think the Americans will attack them anyway?
No, I don't think that that will be the first step.
It doesn't matter if you have a Republican president or a Democrat president.
I don't think they're going to want to immediately go to war.
But what we've seen over the history of this whole nuclear impasse is that the United States will escalate the conflict through sanctions, cyber warfare, secret assassination, some punitive measure.
And rather than backing down, the Iranians escalate in response.
So you have this cycle of escalation that moves both sides closer and closer to war because neither side backs down.
And as you said, the sides that always preach that they only understand force would be the winners politically on both sides of the fight in both countries, too, going into the new crisis.
Exactly.
So I think both sides understand this.
That's the kind of outcome or scenario that they're trying to avoid.
But the only way to avoid it is to continue producing success at the negotiating table.
Yeah.
Man.
Well, I'm sure with it.
It's always been unfortunate, I think, as Stephen Walt put it, that everybody who's actually not that concerned about Iran's nuclear program itself are all the ones who are most concerned that we get a deal because they're, you know, whether it's a fake costus belli or not, we know that it is one or could be one could lead to a real calamity.
And all the people who say that they're just obsessively worried about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are the ones who are always working to scotch the deal and prevent there for being these new, highly expanded regime of inspections, making sure that just just such an outcome that they stay nuclear weaponless, you know, stays the reality of situation.
So but again, at least, you know, there's does seem to be a lot of momentum at the very top levels, at least to get this deal done by the end of the month.
And I'm still optimistic on that.
I'm not optimistic on the clock, though, as the drums are hitting.
So we've got to go unless you could stay one more segment to talk about Saudi or do you need to run?
Yeah, I can stay and talk a few more minutes about Saudi, if no problem.
OK, cool, because it's this great article you wrote here and I want to hear what you say all about it.
It's Reza Marashi, formerly of the State Department, now at the National Iranian American Council writing in the national interest and the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
We'll be right back.
OK, we got Reza Marashi on the line.
He is at the National Iranian American Council.
That's NIA Council dot org, NIA Council dot org.
We were just talking about this piece, Iran nuclear talks clearing the final hurdles.
That's at the national interest.
And this one is that the Cairo Review of Global Affairs ending the Iranian Saudi Cold War and actually seems like more of a proxy war being fought really ever since George W.
Bush invaded Iraq for Iran back in 2003, as it's depicted in the State Department cables leaked by the hero Chelsea Manning, the Saudi king or ambassador, I guess, said to the State Department flunky that, oh, no offense, that I don't understand it.
It was always you, me and Saddam against Iran ever since the revolution.
But now you've handed Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
Not even a silver one.
And I still don't know if he got the idiom wrong or if he deliberately was emphasizing it was even nicer than a silver platter, a golden one.
But anyway, sure was right about that.
And the Saudis have been back in the Sunni based insurgency ever since in a massive civil war which is now region wide.
And you're saying, hey, instead of this getting worse and worse and maybe even eventually ending in a real hot war between Iran and Saudi, which would obviously necessarily involve the Americans as well, maybe they could get along.
Really?
Come on.
I think so.
And, you know, there's a demonstrated history of the ability to get along.
And oftentimes when you look at the relationship between regional powers and any area of the world, whether it's the Middle East or Asia or Africa or anywhere else, you see the relationship between regional powers kind of oscillate between competition and confrontation.
And we've seen Iran-Saudi relations go through both phases.
And right now they're in the confrontation phase.
Since Iranian President Rouhani came into office in 2013, his administration, with the support of the supreme leader and Iran's national security establishment, have tried to shift the relationship from confrontation to cooperation, you know, from enemies to rivals, if you will.
And the Saudis have been either non-responsive or resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons.
This is unfortunate because any durable solution to the conflicts that are burning the region alive right now is going to require buy in from both the Iranians and the Saudis.
If both sides aren't buying in, the problems will get worse before they get better.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so you talk about going to the Gulf and talking with some Saudis about the situation and they sound pretty intractable.
That's how they sound.
And the unfortunate reality is that, at least right now, the rhetoric that they say publicly and privately largely matches.
And I think that you have a new cast of characters in power in Saudi Arabia right now, new king all the way on down, who perhaps have a little bit less experience managing the affairs of not just state, but also Saudi Arabia's foreign policy and national security interests.
And they're going to have to learn the hard way that durable solutions require the buy in of each country with the capacity to wreck the solution.
You cannot impose your will on the other side.
It only incentivizes them to respond and adversely affect your interests.
So you're either winning together or you're losing together.
This is a common theme in international affairs.
It doesn't matter which two countries you're talking about.
Yeah.
They always treat this like a zero sum game.
If Iran is doing better than it's at Saudi's expense.
And I guess there must be some truth to that, right?
If the Saudis want to set the oil price here or there, if the Iranians are out from under sanctions, they can have a stronger hand in determining whether they want to go along with that or not.
Something like that.
I don't know.
Whatever.
I'm sure you got better examples of the kinds of state power politics where maybe it is kind of zero sum.
They do have things to lose.
But in terms of the population of Saudi Arabia or Arabia in general and Iran, the more interaction of wealth and trade for everyone, the better, right?
There's no reason that they should necessarily have to have confrontation at all.
Exactly.
There's nothing inherent that would require the two sides to be in a permanent state of confrontation.
And as recently as 10 to 11 years ago, both the Iranian government and the Saudi government and I mentioned this in the article that I wrote for the Cairo Review, both the Iranian government and the Saudi government made the strategic decision to abandon confrontation and instead try and promote cooperation.
And they very publicly announced policy initiatives to go in that direction.
So the precedent is there.
It just requires the foresight, the vision and the courage for political leaders in Tehran and Saudi Arabia to readopt those policies.
The Iranian leadership has adopted those policies.
The Saudis have yet to adopt them.
So we're going to need to see some kind of reciprocation, at the very least for dialogue and cutting deals.
Saudi Arabia just needs to be willing to talk.
And right now they're not, because once they start talking to the Iranians in some kind of serious and sustained fashion, this Iranophobia straw man that they've built up is going to come crumbling down and they don't want it to crumble down yet.
And that's that's unfortunate, because it exacerbates the conflict the longer they perpetuate this.
Yeah.
Well, now, on the other hand, are you sure it's true that the Iranians have been so willing to get along?
I mean, I know the Saudis view, as you quote in here, too, is, you know, they sound like Krauthammer.
No, the Iranians are building an empire.
They're on the march.
They're going to dominate the region.
They're in Sanaa.
They're in Baghdad.
Ahem.
Never mind how they got to Baghdad.
And and, of course, the terrible war going on in Syria and they're building a gigantic empire.
And you just want to characterize that as trying to get along in the Saudis as the intractable ones.
But is that fair?
I think it's fair because there's a handful of examples over the past 18 months that demonstrate the Iranian intent and the Iranian desire to hit the refresh button, hit the restart button on their bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia.
They've extended the olive branch numerous times, not just rhetorically, but also through concrete action.
The Saudis have not responded in kind.
And it takes two to tango.
It's that simple.
Can you give us some examples of those?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
President Rouhani's first press conference that he gave immediately after being elected and immediately after taking office, he prioritized improving the relationship with Saudi Arabia as Iran's foreign policy priority.
So that's the rhetorical initiative.
They followed through by sending the deputy foreign minister to Saudi Arabia.
They followed through by sending the Iranian foreign minister to King Abdullah's funeral in Saudi Arabia.
They followed through by the Iranian foreign minister reaching out to a Saudi counterpart, unplanned and unsolicited at the UN General Assembly.
So you have three examples of outreach right there where the Iranians have tried.
And you also have, according to European officials that I've spoken to, two Iranian efforts to reinvigorate relations through what's called track two diplomacy.
And the Saudis have been non-responsive.
So really, that's five, five examples of how the Iranians have tried to reach out.
Well, I think I have a sixth, too, would be Rouhani and the speech that he gave right after they announced the agreed framework.
He said he wanted to, you know, start anew with relations with all the neighbors, which obviously was meant Saudi first and foremost.
Sure.
Yeah, you could say that, too.
So at the end of the day, if the Saudis are going to say we need to see something tangible for the Iranians, from the Iranians, so where they demonstrate their intent, they need to articulate what that something is.
To say that it should be the Iranians, you know, abandoning Assad in Syria, well, that's not realistic.
That's that's that's that's what happens after you negotiate, not before you negotiate.
So as far as them being behind the Houthis in Yemen, that's all a big red herring anyway.
You know, that's one of those drop the gun when they're not even holding one.
Yeah, I think Iran's role in Yemen has been overblown and the Saudis have, I think, intentionally over and look, you don't have to take my word for it.
The United States government has came out and said very openly that the Iranians aren't controlling the Houthis.
So there you have it.
But yeah, we're still helping the Saudis bomb them anyway, not that they even need that cover story.
They apparently don't even need a cover story.
Well, what the real hope is, is that cooler heads prevail so that innocent people don't have to continue to suffer.
The Saudis have a better way.
They have a way out.
And the United States actually deserves some credit because privately, we've been trying to encourage the Saudis to take that way out.
Well, while our guys are helping them pick their targets, according to Wall Street Journal.
But anyway, hey, thanks for your time.
Great to talk to you again, Reza.
Appreciate it.
Reza Marashi, everyone.
Much appreciated.
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