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Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got our friend Trita Parsi.
He runs the National Iranian American Council.
That's nia council.org nia council.org.
And he's the author of losing an enemy.
That's his latest.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me again.
Very happy to have you here.
And man, there's a book that needs to go on the top of my pile.
Oh, this pile of books.
Hey, listen, it looks like maybe we're gaining an enemy back.
The last time I spoke to you, Trump was about to do the wrong thing and refused to certify that Iran is living up to their obligations under the JCPOA, aka Obama's Iran deal.
And then so we did that.
So now what what's going on?
What's the deal?
What's next?
So what the administration is planning to do pressured by the Saudi is to come and make an absolutely absurd claim, which is that Iran is supporting Al Qaeda.
Contrary to all evidence, the Iranians were fighting the Taliban, they've been fighting ISIS, they've been fighting Al Qaeda, even before the United States was fighting the Taliban.
But they're going to make this case now.
And I think we see that it's starting to look very much similar to what it did with the Iraq war, in which the United States government at the time was essentially cooking the intelligence going to the American people.
They couldn't win the argument by saying that, look, Saddam Hussein is a threat necessarily.
They made that claim.
But what was perhaps a more effective argument was to say, look, he's just a bad guy.
He's a human rights violator.
He's a horrible, horrible dictator.
And it was the combination of those arguments that enabled the Bush administration to get an overwhelming amount of support for military action.
The Trump administration is now starting to go down that same path by cooking up intelligence and claims that the Iranians are behind Al Qaeda.
What is so fascinating and ironic about this whole thing is that the Saudis are very much pushing this line.
And mindful of the fact that Al Qaeda was funded, armed by Saudi Arabia, so much of the money going to Al Qaeda, even after the Saudi government turned against Al Qaeda was still coming from Saudi Arabia, from individuals which the Saudi government knew about.
The fact that they would be pointing the finger at Iran is just beyond ironic.
All right.
Now, here's the problem, though, is it's not 2002, 2003, when total panic and emotion was overriding all capacity of American adults to think these things through.
We know better.
Everybody knows better.
Julian Borger has already reported for The Guardian, as he did back then, but nobody paid attention.
But this time around, the CIA comes crying to Borger, hey, the White House is trying to bully us into making up lies or, you know, to justify their position on Iran.
And we don't want to.
They've been through this before.
They got the blame for what was really not entirely their fault the last time around.
And so they're already bucking.
And never mind all of the rest of America who's seen this movie before.
And it's, look at how late we are.
I mean, if Iran's behind the 9-11 attacks, how come Bush didn't bomb them back then?
You know what I mean?
So how are they gonna do this?
You know?
How are they gonna do this?
Yeah.
So you mentioned something interesting.
It's absolutely true.
There were people who resigned from the CIA and they pushed back back then.
Now you have a scenario in which Pompeo, a very close Trump ally, is heading the CIA and he is completely in line.
In fact, when the recommendation was given to Trump not to decertify, the recommendation that came from Mattis, from Kelly, from McMaster, from Tillerson, the only two people in the cabinet that were in favor of Trump decertifying was Pompeo and Nikki Haley.
This is a person that is far to the right of even some of the major hawks in the administration.
So the idea that there will be that type of significant pushback from the CIA, at least from the top of the CIA, does not seem to be very, very likely at all.
I think we're going to see this campaign roll out within a week or two, and then it's going to be very much coming down to the fact of, is the American public going to allow itself to be tricked twice in a row?
Or is it going to be pushing back?
Is it going to ask for scrutiny?
Is it going to listen to the voices that were right last time around and were proven right in a very unfortunate and costly way?
But nevertheless, they were right when they pointed out that there are no WMDs in Iraq.
They were right when they pointed out that there was no connection to al-Qaeda.
They were absolutely right when they pointed out that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9-11 bombers.
But now we're going to hear those same arguments, but instead of Iraq, it's going to be Iran.
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Well, you know, you mentioned the military junta up there.
McMaster, Mattis, and Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At least he's supposed to be a general.
But then, has Kelly, too?
Anyway, never mind.
You can add in Kelly, but that's a parentheses, whatever his position is.
But at least the National Security Advisor and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, they have said, as a factual matter, Iran is within the deal.
So, that's pretty hard to override.
I mean, that's not like Donald Rumsfeld up there, right?
There's something different than that.
But, Scott, that is precisely why they're going to shift the conversation away from the deal and towards this fictitious relationship with al-Qaeda.
Because if the war decision is based on the deal, clearly they don't have a case whatsoever, because their own cabinet members have testified that Iran is incompliant.
If they shift it to this much more flimsy situation with Iran-al-Qaeda ties, you don't have an IAEA, an international neutral body that is the referee on that issue.
Instead, they can go back to the playbook of Bush, in which they quote each other.
I mean, remember how Dick Cheney goes on TV and says, well, according to the New York Times, well, it turns out that it was his chief of staff that was the source of the New York Times.
So, when you have a scenario when you don't have an actual objective referee, that's when you can much easier push the country towards war.
That's why they want to stop talking about the nuclear deal, and they want to shift towards these other fantasies.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, it's funny.
I mean, maybe it's just because it's such a low IQ administration overall, whether it's the president himself or Nikki Haley or these goofballs.
The best that they can come up with is, well, they're in violation of the spirit of the deal.
Because, as you're saying, yeah, we can't really deny that they poured a bunch of concrete into their heavy water reactor or anything like that.
So, we'll just basically change the subject and pretend it has anything to do with this.
But so, at the end of the day, though, the deal is the deal.
And it has, you know, these stipulations in terms of sanctions and all the rest of this.
And then, so Congress had passed a law that Obama signed back then that basically allowed him to have the deal.
But then the president, whoever that may be, would have to recertify every 90 days that the Iranians are in compliance.
So, now that Trump has refused to do that, that means, as they say, I guess, that he has, you know, punted the issue over to Congress.
So, what are they going to do about it?
They're just going to go ahead with this narrative and seize on the al-Qaeda issue too and pretend that's good enough?
Talk about the spirit of the deal, just don't read it?
Yeah, they're going to.
And one of the other things they're going to try to do is to change the terms of the deal through legislation, which is completely ridiculous.
I mean, you can imagine if the Iranians were to just suddenly change the terms of the deal unilaterally, that would be a violation of the deal.
So, all paths in Congress, except the path of doing nothing, essentially would lead to the deal either collapsing or being at least violated by the United States.
So, they're looking at a whole set of bad options.
I mean, they don't have a clear and clever and straight line towards the war that they want to achieve, but they have the determination, they have the ear of the president, they have the major funders who all are to the rights of this cabinet, even when it comes to the issue of Iran.
Three of them together, Mercer, Singer, and Adelson, have given more than 41 million dollars to one of Trump's super PACs.
So, the idea that the American base or the base of Trump cares about this issue and wants the war, I think, is ridiculous.
They couldn't care less about this issue.
They don't even know about this issue.
But his donor base really does care and care so much that this is really essentially the only issue on their agenda.
And I think that is one main reason as to why Trump is going in this direction.
You know, my friend the comedian Dave Smith reminded me of a bit from one of the Republican debates in 2012 when Ron Paul was talking about Iran and was saying, and Rick Santorum kept interrupting him and interrupting him as he's talking, and he's trying to say, look, Iran, they have no Navy, they have no Air Force, except leftover, you know, fighter jets that Gerald Ford gave them from back when.
They're no threat to us.
They can't, and Santorum tries to interrupt, oh yeah, no, they're the great Satan, blah blah, with his ridiculous narrative.
And Ron Paul goes, oh sure, just build them up, just build it up, just like you did.
I bet you supported the Iraq War too, didn't you?
And that finally shut him up.
And, you know, here we are in 2017 still having this conversation like any of this is even possible, and yet here we are, even after Obama took a single giant fake outstanding issue preventing a real rapprochement between America and Iran off the table, our government is now putting it back on the table, and apparently even over the dead body of the military guys that supported Trump's rise to power here in the first place.
Like all bad sequels, the plot is even more predictable and transparent this time around.
The storyline is far more boring and less creative, and it's leading to the same conclusion as the first one.
I think the critical thing is to make the American public aware of this, so they don't see this as a new development.
They don't see this as something that has never happened before.
There is a track record to look at.
There is, you can pull up the last chapter and see the ending of this story, and once you do, I think it will be quite clear why you don't want to go down this path at all.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, man.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Trita Parsi.
His new book is called Losing an Enemy.
He runs the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
Niacouncil.org.
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ScottHorton.org for the show.
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Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys, a lot.
