Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys, introducing the great Trita Parsi.
He is the founder of the National Iranian American Council.
They counsel peace between America and Iran, thank goodness, and they do a great job of it.
And he's the author of Treacherous Alliance, A Single Roll of the Dice, and most recently, Losing an Enemy.
He wrote that before we gained it back again, but I guess we'll see what happens here.
Maybe the deal of the century.
Trita Parsi, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for having me.
I read your article, and now I don't think that the deal of the century is coming to America and Iran anytime soon.
What's the deal?
Well, right now we're in a situation in which I think that Trump's sanctions policy essentially has failed.
And I think that will be very evident in the next couple of weeks and months.
And I'll explain why I think that is, but what I want to get to quickly is to say what I'm worried about is that as it will become evident that this policy has failed, there's a high likelihood that Trump will choose or will be pushed to actually escalate things further rather than to try to defuse the situation.
So in some ways, the risk of war is actually going up in the next couple of months.
Yeah.
And now, so even the first part of the Trump gambit to get out of the deal and reinstate all the sanctions, it never even really got off the ground, right?
I mean, they pulled out of the deal that much.
They set everything on the wrong path.
But then, not that I'm saying it would have worked or I recommend it, but their whole thing that they were going to reimpose the sanctions regime that was going to bring the Iranians to their knees and to the table to sign on our terms, none of that even happened with all the waivers and so forth.
They basically nullified their aggression in half or something.
Yeah.
So I think essentially what happened is that they reimposed the sanctions.
They had all of these rather naive beliefs of how this whole thing would end up working.
And even though they managed to tremendously damage the Iranian economy, I mean, people are suffering there right now as a result of this.
It never got to that level in which they would succeed in convincing the Iranian public that the government has lost control.
And as a result, the population is better off rising up and trying to do a revolution against the regime.
That psychological blow, they never managed to really pull off.
And I think that's a critical reason.
So they really put pressure on Iran.
They managed to get the currency to suffer tremendously.
I mean, it dropped more than 50%.
And for a while, it looked as if a lot of folks in the population were thinking that perhaps this time around, sanctions are going to be really different and really cripple them.
But then the currency stabilized.
Trump promised that the November 5th date when the sanctions formally would be reimposed would become some sort of a huge deal and the economy would tank even further.
Instead, it not only came, nothing happened, but also he announced that he's issuing all of these different waivers.
So suddenly, eight countries are going to continue to buy Iranian oil.
And as a result, Iranian oil exports are still going to be somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 million barrels a day.
So clearly, the amount of pressure that we're hoping to get, they were not getting.
Now, all of that was happening at a moment where the three pillars of Trump's Iran policy actually wasn't at stake.
And those three pillars are A, collaboration with the Saudis to get the Saudis to replace Iranian oil.
Mindful of what is going on with Khashoggi right now.
U.S.-Saudi relations are going to continue to be under a lot of pressure.
It's going to become partisan.
There's going to be a rallying cry for the Democrats.
So the Saudi government has lost the legislator, and their relationship is essentially right now only with the executive.
That's going to create tensions in that relationship to the extent that it's difficult to see them being able to continue that close coordination.
Secondly, the other pillar was the Netanyahu government, who played a critical role in doing all of this PR for MBS and selling him as some sort of a new leader and a reformer.
Netanyahu is likely going to get indicted, and there are several efforts now to put together a vote of no confidence against him in the Knesset.
So his government may fall in the next couple of months.
Now, the next Israeli government is obviously still going to be very hawkish, but Bibi played a critical role as a bridge between Trump, MBS, and Kushner.
And with him out of the picture, that pillar is now also at risk.
And thirdly is, of course, Trump's own domestic headaches, which are only going to get worse as the Mueller investigation comes to a conclusion.
And the Democrats now hold the House, so they're going to be doing all kinds of investigations and hearings.
So even though that doesn't mean that he wants to reduce pressure on Iran, what it can lead to is that he's simply forced to deprioritize.
He simply doesn't have the capacity of putting so much attention into that issue.
So with Trump failing to give that massive blow to the Iranian economy when these three pillars weren't at risk, I'm doubting that he will be able to do so now when they are at risk.
And then the question is, once it becomes clear that he has failed, Bibi and MBS are going to push Trump to go to war, to escalate, to essentially say, well, the reason why this didn't work was because we weren't hawkish enough.
And the question is, what will he do in that moment?
With Bolton gaining influence in the White House, with Mattis being more and more sidelined, and with Trump being so easily manipulated by these people, it does look as if the likelihood of war actually will go up.
I wonder about that.
I mean, it's certainly true that he has very little support outside of the Marine Corps and the Israel lobby in terms of establishment forces behind him.
And even in the Israel lobby, not necessarily all of it.
The neocons seem to be terrified of him, but he's got Sheldon Adelson, and that counts for a lot of money, certainly.
But it doesn't necessarily amount to even the majority of pro-Israel forces in America.
I'm not exactly sure if anyone knows how to quantify that specifically, but he certainly doesn't have their full support, as you can see with the neocons.
And, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's interesting what you say about Congress having soured on the Saudis because of the Khashoggi thing, which is certainly true.
We even have Lindsey Graham working with Rand Paul to oppose the next round of weapons sales to him and that kind of thing, which is huge.
On the other hand, we can't ever really underestimate congressional hatred for Iran, no matter how they feel about Saudi.
So I think if Trump says to Congress that he really needs them to help Saudi in order to hurt Iran, they might really get back in line.
The Khashoggi thing only has so much shelf life, after all.
I don't know.
I mean, without a doubt, obviously, Iran remains a very unpopular country in Congress, and that's not likely going to change anytime soon.
But part of the reason why I think the Saudi thing is going to be transformative and why it has so much legs, much more than people expected, is because it's coinciding with a moment in which the progressives were gaining significant influence within the Democratic Party.
They're realizing they don't have a foreign policy.
They don't have big foreign policy thinkers.
They haven't paid a lot of attention to it thus far, and they're searching for a foreign policy.
Now, it's kind of difficult to actually establish a new foreign policy.
It's much easier to kind of point out what am I against, what do I don't like.
And U.S.-Saudi relations, in my view, are very much embodying almost everything progressives dislike with American foreign policy.
Cozying up to a brutal dictator, turning a blind eye to human rights and women's rights violations, a relationship almost exclusively based on oil and arms sales.
Turning a blind eye to the support of terrorism because of those other reasons.
All of that is something that the progressives really, really find problematic.
So, I think there's an engine and a fuel for that anti-Saudi position right now that is driven by many different things, one of them being the desire of the progressives to define their foreign policy.
So, it's kind of independent of their position of Iran.
Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom.
Learn from the greats.
Click through from the link in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
So, I'll get a kickback.
That's Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom.
LibertyClassroom.com And, of course, there's so much to hate about Saudi where they execute people for sorcery over there.
I mean, what are we even talking about?
Capital punishment for made-up, silly, witchcraft stuff that doesn't even exist in the real world at all.
I mean, and they're not – never mind a laughingstock, but they're not treated as the worst pariah regime in the world, this so-called royal family.
Who made them royal anyway?
The British or something?
Who says they're royal?
I mean, the whole thing is completely ridiculous and horrible.
The justification for it is ridiculous.
And on that point, Scott, remember the way the progressives tend to approach foreign policy is very much looking at, okay, what are our values?
They're much more values-oriented than some of the realists who may define themselves more on the conservative side.
But precisely because they're coming at it from a values perspective, it makes the relationship with Saudi Arabia all the more problematic in their eyes.
As you pointed out, you can hardly find any value that the United States and Saudi Arabia share.
Yeah, or at least not that we will admit to having our values.
So that's good.
We got to work on the surface argument there that, yeah, this – I mean, America was born, after all, in a revolution against a king that said – not that he didn't have the divine right.
It said everybody has just as much divine right as he does.
So what right does he have to be the king of us?
None.
And that's the whole – if we believe in anything at all in America, I sure hope it's that, that we don't have to put up with kings.
So how could the USA be the number one supporter of royal kingdoms in the world with arms and money, as you're saying, in this way?
It ought to be completely repulsive to all Americans of any stripe, town or country, all colors, all political affiliations that we would support a monarchy, any monarchy.
Yeah.
No, no, I agree with you.
Anyway.
So listen, I appreciate what you're saying, though, about the structure of Trump's deal falling apart, where he flinched in the first place on Asian allies importing Iranian oil, which is huge.
Korea and Japan, and all their consumption amounts to zillions of dollars.
And then the Europeans, I guess, because Trump is so clumsy in the way that he's dealt with them, rather than going along at all, they're actually trying really hard to figure out – I don't know if this will really work or exactly how it's supposed to work – but this so-called special purpose vehicle, I think you mentioned in your article here, which is the way for European companies to get around sanctions and do business with Iran anyway, somehow, to keep the Treasury away.
And so I'm not so sure about – Can I interrupt you for one quick second?
I'm sorry?
Can I interrupt you for a quick second, Scott, if I could just – and I wanted to say this because I'm hearing this so often in the media in general, that people are referring to the special vehicle mechanism as a way to get around the sanctions or to evade the sanctions is a term that oftentimes is being used to skirt sanctions.
That phrasing, I think, is somewhat problematic because it kind of gives the impression that the sanctions are legitimate and the Europeans are not trying to find illegal ways for them to do things that are really illegitimate.
It's really the other way around.
The nuclear deal is still embodied in a UN Security Council resolution that was voted for 15 to zero.
The United States voted in favor of it.
It was a key member that ensured that that deal was struck in the first place.
It is not the special vehicle system that in any way, shape, or form is evading legal sanctions.
It is the sanctions that are illegal, that are in complete contradiction to international law in violation of the UN Security Council resolution.
The sanctions is what is illegal here, not the special vehicle system or anything any other country does to actually continue to do what is completely legal and legitimate trade at this point.
It's just that the Americans have put them in the position where they have to create this new institution to do it in order to get around our, as you say, the lawless criminal actions of the American cops here.
And against our allies, against what the French and the Germans, and I don't know if the Brits are in on it too, maybe.
Certainly, they're all staying within the JCPOA.
The thing is, we need to start thinking about how to give Trump a face-saving way back into the JCPOA or something close enough to that where a peaceful status quo can hold at least until he's gone.
Because, as you're saying, the other alternative is for the Saudis and Israelis to get away with pushing him more toward conflict.
Although, I mean, I really don't know what kind of fake pretext.
I mean, I guess you could have some kind of skirmish in the Persian Gulf or something.
But the Iranians are just as well within the JCPOA as the British, French, and Germans, never mind the Russians and Chinese, too.
So, they don't seem to be falling for the Bolton-esque provocation here in withdrawing from the deal in response to America's withdrawal and the sanctions that, thus far, America's been able to impose against them.
So, the Ayatollah's too smart for that so far, I hope.
I wonder if you have an idea.
I can see what you mean about Trump politically not having much of an option except to do something really stupid.
But the Ayatollah isn't really going to give him any kind of pretext to work with other than just some made-up nonsense or something, right?
So far, they have retained a significant degree of discipline.
They have not fallen into the trap.
But you never know, because once it's clear that the sanctions are not working, you're going to see more countries starting to violate them, frankly.
I mean, that kind of leakage always happens.
And once the sanctions themselves clearly are not bringing about results, countries don't feel like it's worthwhile for them to abide by something that clearly isn't working.
So, you're going to see a collapse of this, I think.
And under those circumstances, there's going to be a lot of pressure.
Remember one thing.
When the elements were pushing for sanctions during the Obama years, and the Obama administration, of course, adopted these sanctions, and I think they did so largely because they thought that it would be valuable leverage for them to trade away in a negotiation.
But those who were actually pushing for the sanctions were not designing them or pushing for them in the hope of them being used in a negotiation.
They were pushing for them because they wanted the sanctions not to work.
Because once the sanctions had been proven a failure, that's when they could take the narrative to the next level and say, okay, we tried diplomacy even.
They really didn't.
We tried sanctions.
That didn't work.
Unfortunately, the only thing left to do now is to go to war.
So, they needed to get rid of the sanctions first and say, hey, it didn't work.
I don't know if that was the intent this time around, but it can very well turn out to become that intent at this point with MBS and Netanyahu and others really increasing the pressure.
And, of course, they have friends such as Sheldon Adelson, etc., to take this to war.
And remember, thus far, it's not as if Trump has said no to anything the Israelis have asked for or anything that Sheldon Adelson has asked for.
They wanted to move the embassy.
They wanted to punish the Palestinians for all kinds of different things.
They've done everything.
Even the Israelis apparently were telling the Trump administration not to be so hard on the Palestinians on some of the things that they were withdrawing.
So, we don't have much of a track record of seeing Trump saying no to them.
Hey, let me ask you about this because you refer to this – I mean, it was a New York Times article that you cite here in your NBC piece, which great to see you writing there, that there was this plan to destabilize the Iranian economy, manipulate social media and so forth.
And there were some protests, and it was really obvious the connection between the Mujahideen-e-Khalq and the State Department and the protests that actually took place inside Iran, where one of the slogans was, stop spending money on the war in Syria and spend that money here at home.
Which, to have the Americans putting those words in the Iranians' mouth is really rich and hilarious to me in terms of talking about blowing money on wars.
But it was so obvious that it was the MEK there.
So, I wonder, what is news of that?
Is there violence that's gone along with that?
No recent assassinations or Jandala-type attacks or anything like that, right?
So, it's a really fascinating New York Times piece that shows that this guy George Nader and his Israeli partner, who had very close ties to the Netanyahu government, were selling the Trump administration a deal in which $2 billion would be spent on destabilizing the Iranian economy, helping and funding Iranian opposition groups, fomenting unrest in the country, as well as assassinating generals.
To the best of my knowledge, everything except the third thing or fourth thing on that list, the assassination of generals, actually has happened.
So, my assumption is that the Trump administration, in one shape or another, adopted that plan.
And that tells us something, because when the protests were taking place last year in Iran or earlier this year, I personally did not see any obvious connections to any outside interference at the beginning.
A couple of months into it, you started to see some evidence of it.
In retrospect, I think there were probably some signs that we missed.
I do believe those protests were indigenous.
They were not at first manipulated.
It's just that once they happened, they were very quick to jump on it, push it on social media, see if they could fund people, etc., destabilize some of the border areas, etc.
So, I think those protests were probably still homegrown, but then very quickly hijacked by some of these outside elements.
All right, Shaul, and here's a message for all you Redditors out there.
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I think I screwed up and wasn't clear about even what I was saying there.
I'm almost positive that I'd heard Mike Pompeo himself say that, yeah, the Iranian government is wasting the Iranian people's money on the war in Syria, and they're really upset about that, and they have the right to be.
And then I saw the Iranian protesters using that same kind of language, and I thought, well, he'd been briefed on their mission, kind of.
And so then he was using the words out of his briefing in his talk there.
It seemed like maybe I'm over-interpreting that.
No, I think without a doubt, once it started, there were significant efforts from the State Department, from the Trump administration to try to fuel it, try to keep it going as long as possible.
It was clear that they were using messaging that indicated that they had at least spoken to a lot of Iranian expats and opposition groups who were kind of saying, you know, people in Iran are upset about how funds are being used to keep on pushing that line.
And there's some truth in that, but I think also what probably is even more problematic is that however much the population, they are very, very frustrated with the regime when it comes to a lot of different things, including the way that the funds are being used.
That doesn't mean that for a second that they are optimistic and naive about the intentions of Saudi Arabia, of the intentions of TV Netanyahu, or the intentions of the Trump administration.
So just because people are upset with their own government over there doesn't mean that they are going to be listening to the Trump administration any time soon.
Seriously, I mean, it's funny the way the Americans consider this kind of thing, as though for all of the dissent and hatred against Barack Obama by the right or Donald Trump by the left and everybody else too, that any of that would amount to the American people being anything like near overthrowing the U.S. government.
Deciding that the entire system was time to come to an end.
Now that's my belief, but I'm a bit of an outlier.
And it would take, I don't know what, to get us from total dissatisfaction with Trump to the American people coming to anything like a consensus that it was time to abolish this form of government and do something else.
And the American regime changers, they talk about these things in foreign countries as though it's just the same thing.
That if there's dissatisfaction with the current regime, that that could translate to some huge percentage of the population going out in the street and completely overthrowing the government and then installing Myram Rajavi from the MEK as their new queen or something.
I don't know what they think is going to happen.
Yeah.
And we've spoken about this before, and I think the investment in the MEK is because those are the connections the Israelis and the Saudis have had.
And it's not because they think the MEK can take over Iran.
They know how unpopular they are.
They know how crazy they are.
But they have been useful in getting mostly bogus, but a little bit of intelligence.
And they've been useful.
And it was the Obama administration that even put this in, incidentally, NBC News back, I think, in 2012, to try to cool Netanyahu's heels a little bit, was a story about the MEK assassinating nuclear scientists in Iran for the Mossad.
So they're not nothing, but that was a different question than what you're talking about, is whether they would have any popular support to take power whatsoever.
They have no popular support, but you're quite right, because what I think they're looking at them for is precisely what you just mentioned.
They're useful if you want to do assassinations.
They're useful if you want to actually militarize protests in Iran.
They're useful if you want to use militarized protests in Iran in order to drive the situation towards a civil war.
For those things, the MEK is useful.
And their investment in it right now, I think, is reflective of the fact that if they can't get a war with Iran, at least they can get a civil war in Iran.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and the thing is, though, is they even have a name for it here, the rally around the flag effect.
We see it all the time, that war is the health of the state.
Foreign conflict with especially the great Satan, the world's superpower, America, from their side's point of view, with them as the victim of American aggression, and quite truthfully, to any honest observer's eyes, certainly to an honest Iranian's eyes, that that's the best thing possible for shoring up support for the regime.
In other words, Bush, Obama, well, not as much Obama.
I guess you could throw him in, but especially Bush and Trump on this point really have been in service of the Iranian right.
Never forget Bush in July of 2005 lecturing specifically to the Iranian population that you better not elect the right winger or I'm going to be really mad.
And then that's exactly what they did, was come out and vote for Ahmadinejad.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, and isn't it the case treated that whenever there's a student group who says the police state around here ought to lighten up, that the regime's first response is you must be sent here by the CIA.
Look, so they'll make those accusations, and a lot of times people completely ignore them because they feel like those are not credible.
But every once in a while when it turns out that, oh, hold on, there actually is some degree of truth into some of these things, it really is very damaging because then suddenly the regime can then use those accusations falsely against people who are innocent.
Right.
I mean, the accusation, the potency of the CIA accusation would never have existed in Iran in the first place had it not been for 1953, had it not been for all of the support the CIA gave the Shah from 53 to 79.
So that potency is only existing because there actually is an underlying truth in it, at least in the past.
Right.
Well, and also support for Saddam through the 1980s Iran-Iraq War and the virtually endless series of threats to attack them over their civilian safeguarded nuclear program beginning in the George W. Bush years and not really letting up entirely in the Obama years until the JCPOA was finally done.
War was always on the table as Obama and his people continued to put it.
And then now within just a couple of years of signing that deal, Donald Trump and his government have taken us out of that deal and essentially put the threat of war back on the table over a perfectly legal nuclear program under their signature, their voluntary signature to the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Yep.
Unfortunately, that is part of the absolute tragicness of the current situation.
Scott, I got to run.
I got another thing in just a couple of minutes.
Sure.
I'm sorry.
I forgot I agreed to keep it short.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time on the show, Trita.
I really appreciate talking to you again.
Take care.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That's Trita Parsi.
We're losing an enemy about the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and the Obama government's efforts to get that done.
And he founded the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
