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I got Reza Marashi on the line.
He's from the national Iranian American council.
He used to be a something or other.
I don't know the title at the state department back in Obama years.
Welcome back to the show.
Reza, how are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, so listen, you wrote this important thing, uh, at the Huffington post with your partner, Tyler Cullis there at the national Iranian American council that I mentioned that that's, uh, NIA council.org cause it is it's run on anti-war.com today.
Uh, it's about Trump is violating the Iran deal and in a very important way.
So first of all, just refresh our memory really quick about, uh, what the Iran deal is and what they got to do and what we got to do and then explain what it is that Trump is doing in violation of that.
Sure.
So it's a, uh, to really boil it down to its essence without going over all of the details because it's over a hundred page document.
Uh, Iran agreed to a variety of measures that would verifiably ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon ever.
And in return, the United States, the European union and the United nations agreed to lift some, but not all sanctions on Iran so that Iran could slowly reintegrate into the international economy.
And the violations that the Trump administration is, is, is, are committing, uh, pertain to Iran's ability to benefit economically as a result of its continued adherence to the deal.
So what does that mean?
That means that there are specific sections in the nuclear deal that say that the United States will a not take any steps that would inhibit fully legitimate business and transactions on the part of Iran.
And B it would actually work to help facilitate legal, uh, fully permissible, uh, economic and business transactions with Iran.
And the Trump administration is doing neither.
So that's not a violation of the spirit of the deal.
That's a direct violation of articles 28 and 29 of the deal.
Okay.
And then, so what exactly is he doing, uh, you know, specifically speaking here to thwart the implementation?
Uh, well, uh, you know, one of his press spokesmen went to the podium and said that Trump spent his time at the G20 encouraging foreign governments to not do business with Iran.
And, you know, it says the exact opposite in the nuclear deal.
Like not only is the United States not allowed to do that, but the United States should be encouraging.
It has to take steps to ensure that business is facilitated.
All right.
But now, so, I mean, on one hand, uh, yeah, he's the president United States, but on the other hand, nobody really takes this guy seriously.
Cause he changed his mind about everything.
He says lots of things.
And so does it even matter if he said that at the G20 or, I mean, I guess I understand the first part of that question implying that, I guess it would make sense for people to be worried if America's really changing its position, but I wonder if they really are worried about that.
Oh, you don't have to take my word for it.
You know, I think the Russians have already come out and said very clearly.
So have, and as have the Europeans that, uh, there's deep concern on their part about the steps that the Trump administration has taken thus far that are in violation of the deal.
And, uh, fortunately the way that the deal was constructed two years ago, a variety of measures were put into place to make sure that one violation wouldn't automatically kill the entire thing.
And that a variety of dispute resolution mechanisms are in place to try and help fix problems if, and when they pop up.
Um, so this is going to be an interesting test when all parties meet a little later this month, uh, to go over, uh, how the deal has been working and how it hasn't.
Yeah.
You know, I think you guys say in here, you bring up the North Korea model from the Bush years in 2002, where basically the question was, how can we badger these people into leaving the deal?
Uh, because then, uh, you know, you get to make matters worse, which is in our interest to do.
There's that famous quote of, um, I used to have the audio around here, somewhere in a folder of John Bolton on the phone with AIPAC in elite, a bit of a conference call where he's saying we were trying to get them to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty to escalate the crisis.
And this is not, you know, going that far, but it seems like they're trying to make it, trying to provoke the Iranians into somehow breaking their end of the deal.
But what I'm getting to here is that I don't think that's going to work, right?
Because as you and I know, since we're not liars or fools, the Ayatollah doesn't want nukes anyway.
He didn't want nukes anyway.
The previous Ayatollah said, you people better not make nukes.
That's an order.
And so that's it.
And so w I mean, obviously, they can be very upset if the Americans, I mean, I guess they could restrict some of the inspections or whatever, but that would only be symbolic, right?
They're not going to really start making nukes again.
They're certainly not going to leave the NPT, no matter how much the Americans cheat and badger them and act like a jerk.
It really just puts them in a better position in terms of their relationship with the rest of the world that look how unfairly we're being treated here.
We bend over all the way backwards and still look how they treat us.
Right.
Well, I think part of the concern that, you know, the Europeans and the Russians and the Chinese have is that, you know, if the United States continues to pursue, the Trump administration continues to pursue the trajectory that it's currently on, then it's going to look like the problems in Washington rather than in Tehran.
And in addition to that, it's going to make it much more difficult, if not possible, to discuss a variety of other issues that the U.S. and Iran disagree on, right?
And so rather than attempting to solve problems, it creates a whole new set of problems that don't currently exist.
Trump administration has made the choice, a conscious decision to pursue conflict.
It could have picked up where the Obama administration left off, where the deal was working.
Both sides were happy with it.
They were working to improve it in terms of its implementation, and they were using it as a foundation from which dialogue on other issues could grow.
If you go in the opposite direction, which was the trajectory during the George W.
Bush administration and Obama's first term, that drives things towards conflict.
And then you don't really know, with any level of certainty, what countries will or won't do if they feel like they're under that kind of pressure.
So it really behooves the United States to take a step back and realize that the Obama administration really left this thing in good shape.
And there's no if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
All right.
Hang on one second.
I got to do this.
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Okay.
Well, see, they have all these other problems, too, right?
In that, you know, I'm sure you saw, well, I guess you guys must be writing about this, the big hit piece on Iran's role in Iraq in the New York Times, which I think is largely accurate, in fact, although they leave out a lot of the details about how America made it this way.
But it seems like there's a real strong anti-Iran narrative.
It doesn't really matter that most of it doesn't make much sense.
You know, Mohamed Sahimi has a brand new piece out about James Mattis's interview with that high school student where he just gets, it's just crazy to listen to him talk about the forces of moderation that are becoming so moderate there in Saudi Arabia that they're thinking about maybe letting women drive.
And yeah, in Jordan, they can drive.
All this kind of thing.
When, you know, Mattis is the guy who overthrew Baathism in Iraq, which was keeping a lid on the Iranian revolution and where women could wear blue jeans and no hat to teach college, for God's sake.
And here he is in the, you know, fevered throes of demonizing Iran, which, you know, is run by a theocratic, you know, fundamentalist sect and all of that.
But where the average citizen has far more civil rights and liberties than certainly, well, I don't know, I guess other than in UAE and Abu Dhabi, if you're an actual citizen, but how about the majority of the population of the workers there, you know, or the lower caste people?
They don't have the kind of rights that they have in Iran.
And so I just, I don't know, that's, it's kind of a two part thing if you want to answer.
First of all, just how lost are these people making the policies?
They don't want to listen to reason at all.
They're just determined to have a conflict with Iran, to portray anything Iran does as the rise of the new Persian empire and all this kind of thing.
It seems like they're just bent on it.
And then if you want, you could take the opportunity to actually shed a little light on what Iran is like, because they never show it to us on TV or hardly ever do we get to see, hey, here's downtown Tehran.
Here's a bunch of humans going about their lives.
You know, it's like people on another planet.
Yeah, well, look, I think that if you really want to strip it down to its very essence, and the policymakers in the United States essentially believe one of two things.
You have one group of people who believe that the world is very black and white, and there's no shades of gray, and it's black and white, good or evil.
And the metric for determining what side a particular country is on is whether or not they accept American hegemony in the Middle East or globally.
And the countries that do accept it, Saudi Arabia, for example, then we really don't do anything or very little about human rights abuses, state sponsorship of terrorism and things of that nature.
Countries like Iran that don't accept American dominance in the Middle East, we do everything in our power to weaken, destabilize, and overthrow those governments, regardless of whether or not that's what the people in those countries want.
The other group of people that compose U.S. policymakers are people that believe that the world fully operates in the shades of gray.
They acknowledge full well that sometimes while the United States does a lot of good around the world, it also does some things that maybe aren't so good sometimes.
And precisely because most countries operate in that shade of gray, that's what allows and creates the space for diplomacy to try and resolve conflicts peacefully.
And, you know, the Obama administration adopted the latter approach.
They saw the world through the lens of shades of gray.
And I think the Trump administration sees it through the metric of good and evil, black and white, depending on whether or not you accept American dominance and American hegemony.
And that's the trajectory that we're on now, barring some unforeseen circumstance or barring a 180 from this administration.
But the majority of people that are in the upper echelons of this administration that are working on Iran have longstanding track records in their career of not being in favor of the approach that Obama adopted.
So it's more dangerous than people are understanding at the moment, just because it's been less than a year that Trump has been in office.
And there's so many other things happening right now that, you know, could qualify as a crisis.
But yeah, this is dangerous, very, very dangerous.
Well, and I guess nobody wants to take responsibility for the fact that all the major increases in Iranian power and influence in the region lately are at the hands of the United States.
We got rid of the Taliban forum, got rid of Saddam Hussein forum.
And then in help and support the revolution in Syria, which ended up leading to the rise of the Islamic state for three years there.
We've now helped Shiite forces in Iraq expand their power and influence further to the West, which is now, if you listen to him, this is the major crisis.
We got to occupy eastern Syria to block the Shiite crescent.
Well, who built the Shiite crescent?
It was the Pentagon and the White House over the last 16 years who built the Shiite crescent.
And then, but nobody wants to take responsibility for that, because that implicates both parties.
That implicates Obama, too.
Right.
He even told Jeffrey Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, this will help take Iran down a peg by backing these rebels against Assad.
And it didn't take Iran down a peg.
It ended up empowering them, just like, you know, George Bush somehow thought it was going to take Iran down a peg to get rid of Saddam for them.
Yeah, I mean, look, there's anybody that's looking at the situation in the region objectively, I think has to acknowledge that it's been American mistakes, predominantly by Bush administration.
And subsequently, now it's looking like it will be also the Trump administration that has empowered Iran in the Middle East.
You know, it hasn't been because the Iranian decision makers are strategic geniuses, that Iran has been empowered.
It's been one US mistake after another.
And it's been a preponderance of American militarism, and a deficit of American diplomacy that's contributed to this.
So I think the Obama people understood this, particularly in Obama's second term.
But the clock ran out on Obama's efforts to try and utilize diplomacy to resolve problems.
And again, like I said, the Trump administration had and continues to have every opportunity to pick up where Obama left off.
There's nothing that has preordained conflict between the US and Iran.
This is a conscious choice on the part of the Trump administration.
And I think they need to be honest with the American people about that.
All right, well, so I mean, I don't know, man, what is to be done?
I know you're gonna say diplomacy, start talking, work it out.
But it sort of looks like we have a conspiracy of interest that, well, just in the war cabinet, we have a bunch of people who are absolutely deaf to that argument.
I mean, Mattis, especially, I guess that sometimes he said that he doesn't want war, but he sure doesn't seem like he would mind one that much.
And you know what it is?
I'm sure you saw this article by Paul Pilar, where he was just saying, we have a lot of, you know, so called stars aligning or whatever.
I forgot his language that he used.
But basically, there's five or six reasons that we might just have a war with Iran, even though none of them are good enough.
And probably no one's really plotting on, hey, let's start one.
We have a lot of, and I can't rattle them off for you.
But we have all of these different fights that we're picking with them in so many different places and blaming them for so many different things that it almost looks like they're making it inevitable that we're gonna end up going to war.
It's no secret that the US and Iran disagree on policies throughout the Middle East, whether it be in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere.
But I think what's often understated is that there are some areas where interests overlap, whether it be tactically or strategically.
And so, again, what it really comes down to at the end of the day is not whether or not these conflicts exist, but how do you choose to resolve them?
And, you know, the people that are in the upper echelons of the Trump administration believe that Iran only responds to pressure, despite the fact that the Obama administration produced success that none of his predecessors had by moving away from the paradigm of pressure and adopting the paradigm of mutual interest, mutual respect, diplomacy, dialogue.
You don't get everything that you want, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
And so looking ahead, I would say that, you know, it's not so much about whether or not the Trump administration needs to talk to Iran.
The need has been proven and the likelihood of them doing it is low.
So what it really behooves now the rest of the world, particularly Europe, to step up and acknowledge that if they don't push back against what could end up being American belligerence, then they're going to get pushed around and their interests are going to take a massive hit in the process.
Fortunately, there are people in the Trump administration that do listen to the Europeans, as well as the Japanese, the Indian, South Korea, and other countries that we have positive and functional working relationships with.
And the damage to America's interests outside of the region, broadly conceived, I think is going to be substantial if the interests of other countries aren't taken into account when American policy is formulated.
All right.
Well, thanks very much coming back on the show, Reza.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Reza Mirash.
He's at the National Iranian American Council, the peace lobby.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org.
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Thanks.
