All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest is Trita Parsi.
He is president of the national Iranian American council, and he's got a new piece in the daily beast.com called sanctions make war more likely.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going Trita?
Hey, how you doing Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
All right.
So, um, well, uh, sanctions make war more likely, but, uh, everybody who votes for them says that, um, this is how to avoid war is to just use sanctions to get what we want out of the Iranians.
I mean, to defend ourselves from Iranian aggression.
Yep.
I mean, it's one of the big myths of this entire debate is that we're pursuing sanctions in order to prevent war.
We'll just take a look at the track record of the Iran sanctions themselves.
Every time Congress has passed new sanctions, the war talk died down for approximately one week, and then it came back even more forceful than it was before.
If war, if sanctions prevent war, why is it that we're now at a verge of war in which, uh, even the secretary of defense says that war by April has a 50, 50% risk.
Well, we just need more sanctions and more and more and more and more and more.
Exactly.
Now it's absolutely ridiculous.
And as the secretary of state said about Afghanistan, when you're in a hole, you have to grab a shovel and start digging.
Yeah.
So, you know, um, and the thing is, when you take a look at other cases, you actually see a very dangerous pattern.
And this has been documented by other political scientists that have done even deeper studies of this that show that the more sanctions you impose, the deeper you get into a conflict dynamic and you start eliminating option after option after option.
And at the end of it, you're essentially only left with military action.
In the case of Iraq, a lot of people think that it was the Bush administration that simply brought the U S uh, into war with Iraq based on almost nothing.
And there's some truth to that, but we should not forget that it was the Clinton administration that accepted the Iraq liberation act in 1998 by Congress that made regime change in Iraq, official us policy.
Now regime change in Iraq, getting rid of Saddam was deeply desirable.
I'm not having any problem with that, but once you make that your official policy, you essentially signaling to Saddam that even if Saddam were to capitulate and give up the nuclear program that he didn't have, even then that would not be enough.
So as a result, his last exit ramp had been eliminated.
And the only thing that he could do was to double down, which is exactly what happened.
And once you then eliminate his last exit ramp, then you're leaving yourself with only two options, either going into a war without the country or to hope for a regime change happening indigenously, which in the case of Iraq, clearly we didn't have the patience for.
And in the case of Iran, it's a very dicey situation.
It's very difficult to predict when and if and how that all could happen.
Um, so I'm very worried that this argument that we're only pursuing these sanctions in order to prevent war is actually creating a counterproductive result in which we actually digging ourselves deeper and deeper into that hole.
And at some point we'll realize that we're just on the verge of military confrontation as a result of our sanction.
Well, now, back in 2005, I think it was former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote a piece for Al Jazeera explaining that this whole thing about the E3 negotiations on behalf of the United States and these different levels of sanctions that rather than being plan A, plan B or plan C war in order to protect ourselves from Iran's nuclear program or whatever, that really this is step one, two and three.
See, we tried to deal with them with the Europeans and see, we tried all of these sanctions.
And but and yet it's predetermined that what they want is a war of regime change, that the nuclear program, as they say, finally, on the front page of The New York Times now, there is no nuclear weapons program there.
We've all known that this whole time.
It's simply a pretext for war.
What they really want is regime change and that the sanctions themselves are just a pretext for war because, of course, they won't work.
There's a great article in in Reuters saying, wow, these Iran sanctions are bringing a lot of unintended consequences and they are certainly not accomplishing any deterrence of the Iranians from pursuing the nuclear program that they've had this whole time.
Of course, it doesn't work.
But that's the whole point.
Then you get to throw up your hands and say, you know, those crazy mullahs, you just can't reason with them.
There's only one way to solve this problem, and that is military action.
What do you think about that?
I am afraid that that actually is a pattern that we've seen in the past.
I wouldn't question that some of the proponents of sanctions have that in mind.
I think that would be almost a given.
I don't think everyone that is going along with the sanctions necessarily have this in mind.
Many of them are miscalculating, thinking that, you know, this is crazy, but it won't lead to war.
So this is what I have to do politically right now.
But the risk is there.
And, you know, we have to be very, very careful about this.
And talking about the impact of sanctions, one of the things that we're forgetting right now is the way that this is actually affecting the U.S. economy.
I was just speaking to a restaurant owner who said that as a result of the heightened tensions with Iran, which has resulted in higher oil prices, which then results in higher gas prices and gas prices, then result in higher food costs because of the fertilizers, the chemicals, all of the different things that the agricultural industry in this country need.
He is now paying 70 percent higher prices for the beef that he has to use for his restaurant.
That's a direct.
And, you know, as a result, of course, he had to lay off a couple of people because he couldn't afford to run his business with as many staff.
That's right.
Because if he raises prices that much at once on his menu, he'll just lose all his customers.
He's got to do it gradually, cut in other ways.
So, I mean, it's actually affecting this country as well.
We're not seeing a lot of people in the media picking that up yet.
I think we may see more of that shortly as more economists are starting to pick up that, you know, this is not just a natural rise in oil prices.
The oil prices are rising primarily because of the risk premium increased, which is a result of the tensions between the United States and Iran.
All right.
Now, I guess maybe this is stupid, but at the beginning of 2007, I was really worried that with the surge, they're announcing this new anti-Iran policy, blaming them for all the bombs in Iraq and all that madness.
And then Gareth Porter, the first time I ever interviewed him, Gareth Porter came on the show and said, no, don't worry.
I saw Connelly's rise going Fox and say, yeah, war.
And then she went and gave her State Department briefing to the real State Department reporters.
And she told them now we're not going to have a war with Iran, whatever.
So don't worry.
We have at least till summer.
And then that summer was the time where I really feared the most that we would have a early summer 2007.
And then since then you had the NIE and the pressure basically was off for a while.
And now it seems like Netanyahu and the government of Israel want me to believe that there really is a risk that they could start a war here.
And yet I'm just not feeling it in my gut treated that there that anyone either in America or in Israel really means that they're going to start some kind of air war against Iran, because they know as well as they were pretending not to all along.
It's too obvious.
They know now how horrible the consequences of that would be.
I mean, you talk about the price of beef now.
Just wait till the whole thing goes completely haywire.
I think the risk of war is sufficiently high for us to take it very seriously and not be complacent about it.
I don't think it is as high as the headlines would make us believe because there's a lot of grandstanding and bluffing taking place right now.
However, I think it is also important to recognize that there is a real problem there.
And unless there is some movement towards a solution, the risk of war will increase.
And at some point it will become way too high.
When you talk to U.S. military right now, they're very worried about this.
They're worried about it because they're fearful that the politicians, the civilians are not going to handle this properly, that they're going to be too politicized in their decision making.
And, you know, throw the U.S. military and the servicemen and women into something that they don't want to be in.
I mean, if you're in the military right now, the last thing you want to see is a civilian leadership throwing you into another unwinnable invasion or war such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
That's the last thing you want.
So you're getting a lot of pushback from them.
Now, there's something that happened just in the last couple of weeks that is quite critical, and that is that the Netanyahu government really pressed Obama to adopt a red line on the Iranian nuclear program that read that the Iranians could not have nuclear capability.
Obama did not yield.
Instead, he persisted on his own position, which is shared by the U.S. military, that the red line should be there should be no nuclear weapons in Iran.
There's a big difference between nuclear capability and nuclear weapons.
To eliminate...
Yeah, but that was just kind of a little bit of not even chess, more like checkers, little dialectic there, right?
Trying to...
But he did get Obama to say that we would definitely go to war if they started moving toward building a nuclear bomb at all, right?
No, I don't think so, Scott.
I think if you read between the lines, the president has put the red line at some place that, you know, people can disagree with it even if it even should be there, but it is quite different from having it at the capability level.
At the capability level, there's a couple of things that would happen.
It would mean, A, it's so ambiguous, we really don't know what it means.
Most often, it means that the Iranians should not have any nuclear enrichment.
That means that we should already be at war with them, and it also means that there's no basis for any negotiation.
It's a fast track towards a war.
Now, how do you win that war?
Well, that war could only potentially be won if you invade a country, and according to one military official I spoke to, a former, he said you would need 700,000 troops, an evasion from three directions, and a 10-year commitment for a 10-year occupation of the country, because what you need to do to make sure they don't have a nuclear capability is to destroy all the nuclear facilities, kill all scientists, and then burn all physics books.
Nice.
Yeah.
That's part of the reason why the military's so dead set against it.
Yeah, but you got to be careful with the argument ad absurdum, because you might give some think tankers some ideas up there, Trita.
Like, huh, ban all physics books, huh?
I think we could do that.
You know, like they were going to give Iraq zip codes and whatever.
Yeah.
Jeez.
All right.
Well, right now, the New York Times is running stories saying, hey, it turns out they're not making nuclear bombs after all, and whatever, but TV still says they are, and so the push for war is not really dulled, even, you know what I mean?
The narrative stays the same, the narrative in the presidential debate.
There's a competition, there's a contest for the narrative right now.
Part of the reason why you have more articles coming out right now saying, A, Israel doesn't have a nuclear, doesn't have a military option, that war would be really difficult and potentially counterproductive, pointing out that the intelligence, even in Israel, is saying that Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb and does not have an active weapons program.
There's a reason why all of that is coming out right now, and frankly, it's because the administration and the military is pushing that line out very much, because they want to reduce this war hysteria that has been created by other elements who were hoping to push Obama in the middle of an election year, which they calculated would be the easiest way to do it.
Into the corner and force them to go along with either an Israeli attack or to make sure that the U.S. itself got involved in this.
So you're seeing some significant pushback from the military and the administration against that narrative.
Yeah, well, I know there's a lot of skepticism in a lot of audiences about the administration, about their intent and things of that nature, and I understand and sympathize with it to a certain extent, because I know that there's a lot of skepticism in a lot of audiences about the administration against that narrative, but I understand and sympathize with it to a certain extent, because this is not a very predictable administration.
I think that's one of its big problems.
But I think it's important to recognize that there's some things that have been going on in the last couple of months that were not happening out of coincidence.
Well, what do you make of the idea of these new talks that are supposedly starting?
Well, there's one way of resolving this issue, and that's at the negotiating table.
I think we should not be too excited about the idea that they have scheduled talks, because the difficulty no longer is about getting to the table.
The difficulty is to stay at the table, because we need to have the type of persistence and patience with diplomacy in order to make it work.
In the past, our patience was truly lacking.
As a result, at the first hurdle, at the first problem that the negotiations inevitably will run into, the talks collapsed.
So the real test is going to be, OK, after the first and the second hurdle, are they still at the table or will they let this process collapse and they go back to more confrontation posture?
Well, you know, like when I was kind of bringing up the negotiating position of Netanyahu, which is like, well, we should already be at war.
Agree to that.
And Obama says, you know, I'll just agree to this giant trip wire sometime shortly in the future.
It sort of seems like, you know, the same kind of thing works in a larger sense when we're arguing all the time whether Iran is making nukes or whether they could be negotiated out of maybe enriching up to 20 percent or whatever these kinds of things.
We're kind of conceding that it's a problem if they have nukes.
And yet Eisenhower let Mao Zedong get nukes without launching a preemptive war against him.
And Mao Zedong was the craziest person in the history of mankind.
And yet, what are you going to do about it?
And so I wonder whether you think it would be justified to have a war if they did announce they were withdrawing from the NPT and they were going to convert their 20 percent up to 95 or whatever.
I don't recall.
I don't recall seeing a statement by the president that made it very clear that it was some sort of a promise that if they did get weapons or if they went for weaponization, that there would be war.
He said that was a red line, whether it would be war or not.
I'm not so sure if he was as clear about.
But here's your perspective on this is, I think, a valid one.
Let me give you a more optimistic read of it.
And you may be right, but let me give you the more optimistic read on this.
So the president comes out and he says, OK, weapons is the red line.
We're not going to accept Iran having weapons.
Iran has an obligation on NPT not to build weapons because it's part of the nonproliferation treaty.
So it's a red line that has the force of international law behind it, incidentally.
Although they have the right to withdraw from the treaty if they feel like it.
They just have to announce it six months in advance.
They have a right to withdraw from it if they're faced with a severe threat or if they're attacked, just withdrawing it because they feel like it is not permitted.
But if they're attacked, if the Israelis attack, for instance, then they would have a legal justification for withdrawing and they would actually get a lot of sympathy on the international scene as part of the reason why an Israeli strike would be so counterproductive.
But so what do the Iranians do?
So the Iranians respond to this with an unusually pleasant comment by Ali Khamenei, in which he welcomes that the president is dismissing the war talk.
And then a day or two later gives a speech in which he says that Iran will not withdraw from the NPT.
Iran will stay within the NPT.
So in the optimistic read, what does this mean that it means potentially that Obama has finally, in part, thanks to Netanyahu, clarified that he will not accept weapons, but by that he will accept enrichment.
He will accept enrichment.
He's not going to go for zero enrichment.
Of course, the enrichment has to be inspected.
Then the Iranians respond by welcoming that the war talk is being set aside, restating that they believe building or having nuclear weapons is a sin and then saying we're going to stay with NPT.
What you are seeing in the optimistic read is that they may have found an area which both sides red lines are met and is satisfactory to both of them, which means they promise not to build weapons, but they will keep inspections.
And in return, inspections need to enrichment and the inspection enrichment that needs to be fully inspected.
What they're signaling right now seems to indicate that they will be both comfortable without solution.
In other words, just accept additional protocol again, that kind of thing.
Exactly.
And to be frank with you, in my estimation and my conversations with a lot of folks that are in government from different governments, the U.S. would accept that right now.
The Iranians probably would as well.
They have in the past, there's only four countries that I can name that actually would object to this.
One is Israel, one is Saudi Arabia, one is France and one is the United Kingdom.
And both the French and the United Kingdom would probably cave in at some point, the Saudis would be really ticked off.
The real, more long standing problem would be where is the Israelis, what is the Israelis going to do about it?
Well, that is kind of where this started back in 2009 was an implicit acceptance of their enriching, at least up to 3.6%.
So, I'm really sorry that I have not read your books, but I'm going to soon.
I already have one and the new one is in the mail and I'm going to read them both and then I'm going to have really good questions, but I know that you got to go, so I will let you go, but thank you very much for your time on the show.
Appreciate it.
As always.
Talk to you soon.
All right, everybody.
That is Trita Parsi.
He is the president of the National Iranian American Council.
He's the author of Treacherous Alliance and the new one is a single roll of the dice, a history of the Obama administration's diplomacy with Iran on the nuclear issue and so.
