07/21/15 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Our next guest on the show today is Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
He's been writing a lot about the Iran deal and Yemen, too.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And, you know, I forget if I said this out loud or I only thought it later or what, but when Tom Woods was interviewing me about the Iran nuclear deal the other day, I definitely at least meant to say, you know what, just ask Daniel Larrison.
He'll tell you.
He's from the American Conservative Magazine.
He can make the case better than me.
You seem to be pretty convinced that this Iran deal is better than the status quo or the next most possible future.
Do I have that right?
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it does a number of things that are beneficial, both for us and for the Iranians and for the wider region.
I think the most important thing from our side is that it finally addresses the nuclear issue in a way that's satisfactory to Washington and to the other major powers, which I believe greatly reduces the chance that there's going to be any sort of so-called preventive attack on Iran over the nuclear issue.
And I think that it makes that prospect much less likely.
That's a huge win for us, in that it keeps us from getting drawn into yet another conflict in the region when we're already involved in far too many.
And certainly that's also a win for all of the countries in the region that won't be sucked into the conflict along with us.
And obviously, on the Iranian side, not being attacked, not being starved and sanctioned in the way that they have been over the last several years is to their advantage as well.
The other thing that I think it does is it definitely advances the cause of nonproliferation.
It does put meaningful limits and monitoring on the Iranian nuclear program so that in the event that there were a desire on their part to try to build a nuclear weapon, that would become evident and there would be ways to discourage them from proceeding along that line.
And it's also very much to the advantage of Iranian civil society because they're finally going to be allowed to breathe again and these sanctions that have been crippling them are going to be lifted, which will in turn make it much harder for the regime to keep squeezing them as much as it has.
All right.
So, first of all, let's start with that point right there.
That is an important point.
It's one that's been made at least from time to time over the years that, you know, and, hey, Iran's far away, so it's kind of hard for Americans to see these things going on.
But they've got their right-wing hawks that hate the great Satan and don't want to deal with us and that like to use the excuse that anybody who opposes them must be working for the Americans.
We saw a lot of that in 2009.
The whole green movement was described as the green movement.
The whole green movement was discredited as a CIA plot when I don't think much of it was anyway.
I mean, certainly the American government supported it.
I don't think they invented it.
But and that's something that student activists and so forth have had to put up with over the years there.
And as, geez, I guess Scott Ritter said, you know, a decade ago, yeah, the moderates are the enemy.
The Iranian moderates are the enemies of the American hawks.
They want to silence those voices and make it look like only the hawks have sway in Tehran.
And so what you're saying is the opposite of that.
Now that we have this deal, that this is really good for the moderates, it makes them write about something very important in Iranian politics.
Yes, well, it's going to, it should yield very tangible benefits for Iranians generally and specifically for the Iranian middle class that has been squeezed very badly over the last few years.
And really, they are going to be the foundation of any significant movement for social and political reform inside the country.
And anything that works to their advantage is going to undermine the position of Iran's hardliners, which I think we could only be glad to see.
I mean, obviously, our hardliners aren't glad to see that because they sort of feed off of the antagonism between Iran and the U.S. and regional climate.
So by undermining the grip that hardliners have on within their own country, that could eventually help to reduce tensions between Iran and the surrounding countries as well.
All right, now, so yeah, now that's a real important point, too, because of course, really, with all American foreign policies, there's the truth.
And then there are a lot of competing narratives against that.
And the biggest competing narrative here, other than just the nuclear program itself, which we'll get back to, but is that by normalizing relations with Iran, really, we're appeasing their hegemony, we're allowing them, we're giving away the entire store, not just letting them keep their nuclear program, but sanctifying Iranian expansion and domination of the region.
And so even though their nuclear program is being scaled back from 20 miles an hour to five, or however you want to characterize it, that kind of thing, and the Saudis and the rest of the GCC have that much less to worry about when it comes to that, they still are pushing this entire narrative.
And maybe it's true that America is moving more toward, as Pat Buchanan says in his article that's running today, in fact, opening up our options for, and in fact, I think Scott McConnell talks about this as well in your magazine, opening up the options for allying with the Iranians and working with the Iranians in a more open way on issues like fighting al-Qaeda in the Islamic State and other things in the region that were always completely off the table because of the nuclear program.
So maybe the critics are right, that actually, oh, we're backstabbing all of our great allies in favor of these Iranian mad mullahs.
Well, and I don't know that I would go that far.
But what I think we are, what we are going to see is that there will be some greater acknowledgement on where Iran and the U.S. have common security interests in the region.
But we're clearly seeing almost a desperate attempt by the administration to keep placating the Gulf States and Israel by sending loads more weapons to them.
In one report this week, I think I saw that they were proposing that the annual aid to Israel be increased from the 3.1 billion that it is to a higher figure.
So there's a desire to try to buy off these clients and to prove that, in fact, there is no realignment going on.
There is no major change in our regional policy.
And unfortunately, I think that's the case, that there won't be a major change.
I think the good news is that, at least as far as the conflict with Iran goes, that has become much less likely.
Whether we continue to back our clients in their obsessions with battering Yemen, for instance, in their fear of Iran is another question.
It seems like we're happy to do that.
The government is happy to do that.
So in other words, we can still keep up our Cold War against them in a lot of ways and don't necessarily have to change just because we've got this biggest issue out of the way.
What it does mean is now war is off the table, finally, as long as we have this deal.
I believe so, yeah.
And funny to think, because I saw even Bill Kristol was retweeting and adding his own comment to something that Aaron David Miller said, that they gave up something they didn't have in order to get all this money.
Of course, it's their money, but never mind that.
Point is, here's Bill Kristol even making the argument that, man, they weren't even making nuclear weapons.
And now we're lifting all the sanctions just for them to continue not making nuclear weapons.
Seems kind of silly, but hey, that was the position that they put us in, right?
The Bill Kristol and his merry men.
Sure, well, and of course, the point or the response to that would be that the sanctions were put in place in order to, to the extent that they were of any value, they were put in place to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon.
And so once that, once Iran is committed, once again, not to doing that, of course, they'd already committed to not do that under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But by accepting these even more stringent standards that go above and beyond what the NPT requires, Iran is demonstrating that they don't intend to pursue that sort of weapon.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Daniel Larrison.
I'm sorry, I gotta go.
Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
We'll be right back in just a sec, y'all.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison.
He teaches peace in the pages of the American Conservative Magazine and at his great blog there at theamericanconservative.com slash author slash Larrison.
We're talking about the Iran deal and conflict.
And I'm sorry we were interrupted by the heartbreak, Daniel.
You were finishing up a thought there about how the threat of war has really been pushed aside if the threat of the Cold War has not here.
Right, and I think that's one of the great gains for our side out of this.
And I think the great news for the U.S. is that this was achieved simply by accepting a compromise and maybe a compromise we could have had a decade ago, but a compromise that acknowledges that their nuclear program is going to remain in place in some form, but that as long as it's kept under reasonable limits, there's no reason why we can't live with that.
And arguably, there's a reason why we couldn't live with them with a much more advanced nuclear program either, but that's another debate.
Well, what we have right now is a very successful compromise that actually costs the U.S. nothing.
And this is the point I think needs to be emphasized even more in talking about it and in trying to persuade people of the merits of this deal.
The U.S. gives up nothing except the punitive measures that it has been imposing on Iran.
In other words, we lose nothing and we gain the benefits of this compromise, which include making a new war less likely.
And so all of the costs and risks that would go along with that new war are also fading away or becoming much less likely to happen.
And it seems like that's a great success for our foreign policy for a change and one that makes the avoidance of war more certain.
All right.
Now, then again, we've been fighting for Iran in Iraq for the last, what, 14, 13, 12 years or whatever.
And I know it's a funny quirk of history that George Bush refused to talk to them the whole time he was fighting a war for them and for the most Iranian-backed parties, the Dawa and Supreme Islamic Council and the Bata Brigades there through the whole Iraq war.
And it looks like, hey, at least de facto right now, we have a joint operation between the Iranian special forces, the American Air Force and Navy and Shiite militias on the ground led by the Bata Corps attacking Fallujah.
That's the shape of the war against the Islamic State, at least in the former Iraq.
It's a much more divided and quote-unquote confused policy in Syria anyway.
But so do you worry that maybe this is going to lead to a full-scale kind of alliance with them again in Iraq?
Because, well, I'll just say one more thing about it.
It seems like if that's who rousts the Islamic State out of Fallujah and Mosul and Ramadi, if that's even possible, then you have a real problem with hardcore Shiite around Iran-backed sectarians occupying those cities or being in charge of their, quote, reconstruction where they choose the new Sunni leaders of them or however that's supposed to work.
That just seems like a whole new mess of details, more blowback to come.
Well, I certainly think there are...
I've been saying for some time that our involvement in the war on ISIS doesn't make sense for us if it's not necessary for us.
And it does put us in these very ugly compromises with sectarian militias, with the sectarian government in Baghdad.
And that was true from the beginning when we first got involved when Maliki was still in charge.
I mean, that's something that would need to be addressed as a way to fix our policies in Iraq and Syria.
I suppose by concluding the deal, we may actually have a little bit more freedom to back away from that sort of collusion with Iran-backed forces.
But it's not clear at all that there's any desire to make use of that freedom to extricate ourselves from this conflict.
So, yeah, I think that's an ongoing problem, but that's got to do with our preoccupation with fighting ISIS quite apart from anything else that's going on in the region.
I see what you mean.
I think I see what you mean.
You're saying that if we're getting along better with the Iranians now, then it's less of a worrisome talking point that, oh, no, the Iranians are the ones fighting the Islamic State instead of us.
So that makes it easier to go ahead and just let them and let it be them instead of us, because who cares?
Right.
Well, and an acknowledgment that they're a regional power that has the incentive to fight them.
And obviously our regional clients and allies in the case of the Saudis and the Turks clearly are not making that a priority and are, in fact, working on the other side to some extent.
So I would see that as a certainly a better arrangement is letting the Iranians take responsibility for it.
And I wouldn't be concerned, as many talks are about being accused of so-called losing Iraq to them, is that that was already done a decade ago.
Yeah.
All right.
So now what about GOP politics?
Because you've written quite a bit about this, the different Republican candidates and their stands on this deal.
But then I think it's one of your most recent blog entries here is, yeah, second to last, is about the poll results that show that even Republicans pretty much support this deal, especially you tell them the alternative is invasion if that's the only way to make sure that there's no nuclear program at all there, which is supposedly the only definition of a good deal, even according to Rand Paul.
But then as Tom Woods was pointing out to me on his show the other day, that by the time of the election, this thing will have been going on, the deal will have been in effect for more than a year at that point.
And if the Iranians are abiding by it and everything is really cool, they're going to be, and this is a deal the American people in general already supported anyway, then they're all taking their stand.
They have their consensus among Republicans and they think it stands for the consensus of the American voters, or even the Republican voters, but it's really not looking like it.
So what do you think is going to happen with that?
I think it is going to be a liability for whoever ends up getting the Republican nomination because they have taken such a reflexive and uncompromising position, and not just against adopting the deal, but going farther and saying that they will repudiate it as soon as they have the opportunity.
And that's clearly not what the public endorses.
The one survey from the Washington Post this week showed that just over 40% of Republicans are in favor of the deal.
So there's a large constituency inside the party that's not being heard at all and is not being represented in the presidential field, but which is fairly extraordinary.
Would you think that this would be, because it is one of the most important foreign policy issues, that there would be at least some dissent somewhere.
But unfortunately, that seems to be the one issue on which there's pretty much total uniformity.
Well, it would be fun to see the GOP completely impale themselves again on their foreign policy, and then wonder, why do people like the Democrats when that's not it?
That surely is not it.
It's just that they're worse.
That's all.
They prove it over and over again.
If that's even possible, they prove it.
All right.
Thanks, Daniel.
You're the best, man.
Thanks, John.
That's Daniel Larrison.
He's at TheAmericanConservative.com.
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