12/02/16 – Trita Parsi – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out the archives at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow and help support.
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And introducing Trita Parsi.
He's the director of the National Iranian American Council.
That's NIAC, N-I-A council dot org online.
Welcome back to the show, Trita.
How are you doing?
Thanks so much for having me.
Listen, I'm very happy to have you here.
Sorry, I don't have your books in front of me.
I got them over on the shelf, but I can't recall.
A Roll of the Dice is one, and The Treacherous Alliance is the other, right?
And the new one coming out in just a couple of months is Losing an Enemy, Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.
Alright, cool.
Well, boy, you better rush that thing into print.
That's why I have you here, to talk about what's going to happen here, you know, crystal ball style, with the new Trump administration, the very anti-Iranian hawkish war cabinet that he seems to be putting together, his previous threats and bluster about the Iran deal, the brand new sanctions that have just passed the Senate unanimously.
Thanks a lot, Rand Paul, again, scum.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Tell us what's going on here, man.
As you just said, there's been a great triumph, but now we're at a possible real turning point here.
Certainly, and it's important to understand that, you know, this was a victory.
We actually have the deal.
It is working.
On some of these radio and TV shows where people are saying, well, is it really working?
I've asked the interviewer, you know, when was the last time you did a show on how close Iran is to the bomb, or how close Israel is to bombing Iran?
It's been at least two years, and it's a very simple reason for that, and that is that the deal is working.
But as a result of the orientation of the new team coming in, and, you know, I think a lot of people had been holding up some hope against all logic that perhaps Trump's non-intervention rhetoric would translate into policy, or that his pro-business orientation would translate into policy, and as a result, he would not tear up this deal, and he would move towards a more constructive engagement rather than militancy, but mindful of the people that he has chosen, the person who is handling Iran for the transition, et cetera.
These are people with very, very strong track records, lengthy track records, of supporting the Iranian Mujahideen terrorist organization.
There's actually an Iran desk in the transition.
Who is that?
There's a woman who used to be Congresswoman Ross Lederman's advisor.
I think she's a Cuban-American, just as Ross Lederman herself.
She's a longtime supporter of sanctions confrontation.
I've had some dealings with them in the past.
And it's very, very clear that this specific woman, Ilem Poblet, is not going to be pursuing policies that Trump was hinting at when he was a candidate, because, you know, when you listen carefully to what he said, he really hated the Iran deal because it was bad, and when you scratch the surface, he hated it because it didn't lift sanctions on U.S. companies.
But now we're seeing, on the contrary, that there's going to be a move for more sanctions, more confrontational policies, a strategy of how can you be as confrontational as possible without getting the blame for sabotaging the deal.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, you know, there's always been this huge gulf between the narrative and the reality, particularly on the issue of the nuclear program itself.
And there's, you know, a new rumor every day or a new thing that's taken out of context every day.
You know, the Wall Street Journal reported that somebody, I forgot who, but not in any official capacity, I think someone at the U.N. had urged the Iranians to reduce their stockpile even more, even though they're still totally within the threshold of the deal, that just to make everything look real sweetness and light before Donald Trump takes power, to make it even harder for him to screw up the deal, you guys ought to go ahead and go the extra mile now.
And then that article was being put all over Twitter by the hawks and saying, see, they're cheating still.
No, no, no, no, no.
Just it doesn't matter what it is.
There's always going to be this spin that something is terribly wrong, that they're getting away with murder.
And yet, as you said, or you kind of referred to there, the fact is we know the deal is working because the IAEA inspectors say so.
Whatever hype we all hear, whatever rumors we all hear, they got the run of the place.
And they haven't squeaked as far as I know a single time saying that, hey, we want in and they won't open the door.
Not anywhere.
Not this whole time.
And the problems that have existed have quickly been resolved because that's the thing with a deal like this.
There's inevitably going to be an issue popping up here and there.
The question is not whether an issue pops up.
The question is does the issue quickly get resolved or does it escalate into a bigger problem?
Whatever problems have existed and emerged, which are inevitable, they have quickly been resolved because both sides are actually trying to stick to the deal.
Mistakes can be committed.
Things can end up being done in a way that perhaps wasn't intended.
But the mechanisms within the deal quickly have corrected those, and that's another indication of a deal actually working.
All right.
Now, so it's come up that really Flynn and Mattis, I think Mattis is on the record speaking this way, but Mike Flynn was certainly in the same relative position in Iraq War II as McChrystal's deputy at JSOC fighting against the Sunni-based insurgency but also fighting against the Mahdi army.
As you know, even though Muqtada al-Sadr was the most nationalist of the three pillars of the Shiite alliance in Iraq War II, he was the one who was targeted as being the Iranian sock puppet and that that was the reason for his resistance when really America was backing Skiri and Dawah who were the more Iranian-backed factions.
But regardless, the point is that Mattis and Flynn both presumably have lost men that they knew and cared about in battles with the Mahdi army that they pin all on Tehran and have a real then personal problem with the Iranian government far beyond just everyone in D.C. hates them for declaring independence back in 1979, right?
Now we have a whole new animosity just from the last decade, Trita.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this is the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Advisor now.
Yeah, and my own impression of the Secretary of Defense based on some interactions that I've had with him is actually he's reasonable and he's actually very well-read and he tries to understand these issues.
I think perhaps he differs from others who believe that the region has lost strategic significance and that it's actually more important to shift our focus towards Asia instead of trying to maintain or revamp some form of hegemony in the region.
I have to say, you know, I really have a hard time understanding why anyone would like to be the hegemon of the Middle East right now.
States are falling apart, massive instability, no prospects for any stability in the short or medium term and being the hegemon, that means that you're responsible for all of this.
That's why I laugh when people say that the Iranians are looking for hegemony.
I don't think they are looking for that at all.
I think that would be insanity to look for hegemony in the Middle East right now.
Well, yeah, I mean, we all know it was America that knocked off Saddam for them and fought a whole civil war for them to give them the capital city, kick all the Sunnis out of it and create this, quote, federal Iraq that basically left the Sunnis all out in the cold and therefore vulnerable to, you know, ripe for the takeover by the Islamic State.
But, you know, that was the USA's fault.
They're just the ones who took advantage.
When in fact, I'm sure, you know, you've written about this and know all about this, that this is why when George Bush Sr. urged the Shiites to rise up in Iraq in 1991, he quickly changed his mind.
And it was because the Baader Brigade came across the border from Iran and said, yeah, let's do this.
And they went, whoa, wait a minute, let's not do this.
And stopped.
Yeah.
So anyway, you know, crying all day, pointing our fingers about Iran when it was our own goal.
It was Mattis who invaded Iraq and got rid of Saddam for the Ayatollah.
It was Mattis himself who did that.
And then he wants to, you know, be an Iran hawk and cry about their increased power in the region.
It's amazing.
How about them new sanctions, Trita?
Well, I think it's against the spirit of the JCPOA to pass, you know, a renewal of the sanctions.
But the bottom line is that these sanctions at this point are rather irrelevant because as part of the JCPOA they are supposed to be, they're not supposed to be implemented.
So they're just keeping them on the books, but they're not supposed to be implemented because they're waived as part of the JCPOA.
But what it does, it kind of tells you that there is this desire to keep at least one strong confrontational front with Iran alive.
Based on the very estimation of many members of Congress themselves as well as the White House, these unilateral sanctions actually have had no effect on Iran in the sense of changing Iranian policies.
The only time on the U.S. side there is any attempt to say that sanctions have worked in shifting Iran's attitude is when they've been multilateral.
So the very idea of just continuing with broad-based unilateral sanctions I think is highly problematic.
We're just digging a deeper hole for ourselves when it comes to pursuing policies that actually by our own account don't have an effect.
Yeah.
All right, so now on a scale of 1 to 10, distance from 1 to 10 feet from here or whatever, how close are we to the Iranians throwing up their hands and saying, listen, if you guys are going to keep harassing us and refuse to really live up to lifting the sanctions you promised you'd lift in the first place, and then you want to keep threatening us with these new, I guess you're saying they're sort of suspended animation sanctions, but still passing new ones and this kind of bluster, is there a real danger that they might go ahead and withdraw from the deal or even the NPT?
I think what they're doing right now is they're signaling, because their parliament is now having an emergency meeting on Sunday in which they're going to be discussing these things, and they're going to be discussing various types of hawkish responses that they're going to be considering or pursuing.
I think they're trying to send a signal that they have their own hawks and they can also play this game.
More importantly, I think they're careful not to fall into what ultimately is a trap, because the Trump folks, the folks around Trump that want this confrontation, they do recognize that if they do things that actually causes the collapse of the deal and it's very clear that the U.S. was at fault, then that ultimately is going to be problematic for the U.S. and is going to isolate the U.S.
So what they're trying to do is to do smaller measures, but a large number of them that will have the same effect, but will cause the Iranians to do exactly what you said, just throw up their hands and walk away from the deal so that they can be blamed for it.
I think what the Iranians are doing right now is that they're not going to walk into that trap, but they're also going to send a lot of hawkish signals because they want to put pressure on the rest of Europe and others to put pressure on the United States not to go down this route.
Well, yeah, that can really backfire, too, but I understand that that's the position we're putting in.
Exactly.
It's a very, very dangerous game, because if there's one thing the Iranians have been good at, it's to walk into the traps of American hawks and respond by giving a lot of hawkish rhetoric and do a lot of really, really unhelpful things.
Well, you know, it's just the same as ever.
I had a guy who, a Twitter friend, but a guy I've seen around for a long time, and he was saying, are you sure that they're not making bombs and missiles to target us with them?
And I said, yeah, man, I really am sure.
And here's how I know.
Okay, man, you know, I trust you if you say so.
I know you're certain, but, you know, what he didn't say, but what is the obvious end of that sentence is, all he ever hears for years and years and years on end at every AM radio top of the hour news break is Iran nuke this, Iran nuke that.
And, I mean, you'd think they'd have killed us all by now, if they were really making bombs as much as they were accused of doing it.
But that's the thing is, there's such a mountain of propaganda to overcome, of just prior conditioning that whatever's going on over there, even if we can't prove they're making nukes, they must have a secret lab under a mountain somewhere.
That's the starting premise of every American's understanding of Iran and their program and what we're dealing with.
So that puts us in a very disadvantageous position.
But anyway, I'm glad that you're working as hard on it as you are over there, Trita.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Trita Parsi.
He's at niacouncil.org.
That's the National Iranian American Council, and they really do a lot of great work in pushing for peace between our two countries.
And he is in a real hurry and had to go, and I really wanted to talk with him.
If I had remembered, I would have stopped ranting so much and maybe brought up the Nixon goes to China thing and the possibility of Trump maybe going ahead and using Mattis to protect his right flank and going ahead and shaking hands with Ayatollah over there.
I don't know.
I guess we'll hope and wait and see, but probably not put too much faith in it.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
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