01/13/14 – Reza Marashi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council.
IACouncil.org and you're formerly the Deputy Associate Assistant Secretary of State for making peace with Iran or something like that, was it?
I did spend a couple of years working at the State Department and the goal was definitely to make peace, but hopefully we can still do that even when we're not in government.
Yeah, it seems like you probably got a better chance from here.
Hey, listen, I saw you on CNN out of the corner of my eye when I was complaining about something unrelated earlier, but it was actually right during the commercial break and everything.
I didn't get a chance to put up the volume and hear you, but so now's my chance.
We got important doings going on.
First of all, the good news is that they say that I don't know what they mean by this.
They finalized the deal, the interim deal for, I don't know, they finalized the details of the implementation of the interim deal.
Is that it?
Yeah, so on November 24th in Geneva, they reached an agreement.
The permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and Iran were negotiating three rounds in Geneva and many, many rounds before that.
But the three rounds in Geneva were the ones that happened after the new Iranian president took office in August.
Those were the really important ones where real progress was made.
So when you strike a deal and you have so many convoluted aspects, so many technical details pertaining to sanctions and the various aspects of Iran's nuclear program, the science of it and all that, then you need a couple of months to figure out, okay, now we know what each side is going to do.
Now we have to figure out who does what when.
What's the timetable?
So for example, what's the timetable for Iran getting the actual money that will constitute sanctions relief?
That's something they figured out in these recent negotiations.
And then also, what's the timetable for the actual technical rollbacks on the Iranian nuclear program that will take place?
So these things take time to hammer out.
They've been hammered out.
And on January 20th, the deal will actually start to be implemented.
And that's very positive because as most sides take a step back from escalating the conflict, we're really taking a step back from war, from the brink of war.
And I think that should be everybody's goal.
All right.
Well, now on that particular point, it's a bit overstated, right, because that sort of accepts the false premise that, one, they really are trying to make nuclear bombs over there, and two, that America, Israel or anybody else has the right or necessarily would have to start a war to prevent them or that even starting a war would prevent them from making nuclear bombs.
And none of that's right, right?
Well, I don't think it speaks to that.
I don't think that a war is necessary to reach some kind of resolution to this problem, nor do I think that Iran taking steps to roll back aspects of its program lend credence to that.
And I also don't think that just because Iran has made a decision to roll back aspects of its program means that sanctions worked, for example.
What did sanctions really do?
Sanctions hurt innocent people.
We know that.
Sanctions have given America leverage, but at what cost?
If sanctions give leverage to the United States, you could just as easily say that 19,000 centrifuges in Iran give the Iranians leverage.
So what we're really doing here at the end of the day is both sides are saying, all right, you're doing something I don't like, so I'm willing to take steps to stop doing those things if you're willing to take steps to stop doing the things that I don't like.
So both sides are de-escalating the conflict simultaneously, step by step.
Irrespective of what people think that their aspirations are or what their true intentions are, trust doesn't matter at this point because they're taking verifiable steps.
So if either side cheats, the deal is over.
Right.
Well, I just think that the argument, and I appreciate it when the president, for example, says that those pushing sanctions, and I'm skipping ahead, but those people who are so against this deal that what they really want is war, they should be honest about that.
I kind of appreciate that tone, but it still sort of sets up the idea that, I mean, after all, from my point of view, Reza, it seems like if this deal fell apart, well, the status quo can hold indefinitely because the status quo is still a safeguarded civilian nuclear program, after all, and the status quo is still just a bunch of hot air from the West this whole time.
So I don't like it.
I prefer a deal to the status quo, but I don't see the status quo as even necessarily the path to war, or it shouldn't have to be.
You know what I mean?
I don't think it should have to be, but I think the political realities in Washington are so toxic, and then the political realities in Tehran are so toxic, too, that if diplomacy doesn't succeed, if it doesn't make progress over a sustained period of time where both sides make concessions and compromise, then the process could fall apart, and that empowers hardliners who want to take things in a much more negative direction.
So then you would have hardliners in the United States wanting to increase sanctions, secret assassinations of Iranian scientists, computer viruses on the Iranian program, all the things that we were doing in the past that got us to the precipice of a military conflict.
And the Iranians could take steps to advance their program beyond the level that they've ever reached at the current date that would be considered provocative in Western capitals.
So there's a political aspect to this, in addition to the actual technical aspect as well.
And sometimes the political, as you know very well, can overshadow the reality, and whether or not we like it, we've got to take it into consideration.
Right.
And by the way, how precarious is President Rouhani's political position in Iran right now compared to his McCain's over there?
Well, I think what we have right now is an Iranian president who's created one of the most diverse and well-rounded political coalitions in Iranian political history.
But, you know, alliances and amnesties can shift.
So the further we get away from his actual election date in June and him taking office in August, the more likely it becomes that if he doesn't make progress on delivering the promises, not only that he made to the Iranian people, but to his political allies as well, his coalition could fracture.
So far, though, because he's made progress on the foreign policy front and to a lesser extent, but still to a certain extent on the domestic policy front, his coalition has stayed together.
He also has the support of the Supreme Leader in Iran, which is very helpful.
But the Supreme Leader is not the end-all, be-all.
He's just one of the most important guys.
So he's doing well so far.
There's always a risk, whether you're talking about Iran or the United States, that political coalitions that you build up could fracture, could dissipate.
Obama has the same problem, as you see now, with people in Congress trying to shove more sanctions down his throat.
But at the end of the day, the political aspect is always going to be there.
So if you're going to let that be an obstacle, then you're never going to get anything done.
Right.
Well, you know, there's some very pro-Israel type politicians in the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C., who have sided with the president on this.
I'm thinking specifically of Dianne Feinstein and a few others in the Senate.
And I wonder, well, what I haven't heard from them, although, you know, you're there in D.C., so you may know better than me.
I'm curious whether anybody like Dianne Feinstein, who's, you know, supporting the president on this, but we know also really puts Israeli security high on their list of priorities as well, do they seem surprised at all at the opposition and the strength behind the opposition to this deal and the support for new sanctions, which are obviously meant to sabotage the deal?
I don't think anybody in Congress or the Obama administration that are supporting this deal are surprised.
Because really, since President Obama came into office, the relationship that he's had with Congress hasn't been a very good one.
Congress has not been very helpful to the president in achieving very many of his foreign policy or domestic policy objectives.
You know, when he came into office, he had people like Mitch McConnell saying, our goal is to make him a one-term president, not to repair the economy, not to do things that are at service for the American people, it's to make him a one-term president.
And so the dysfunction that we see as a result, I think, has left everybody really clear-eyed about what the obstacles are so I don't think it's taken them by surprise.
I think it just has added to a level of frustration that already existed.
Well, I guess, yeah, I didn't phrase my question very well, but I'm sort of thinking that, you know, for Dianne Feinstein to side with the president on this, it's not just politics.
She buys it.
She trusts him that this is a deal that is really going to roll back their program enough that it's going to make her feel better about it.
And she believes that Israel's security will benefit from this.
This is not just some, you know, D.C. game or something like that.
This is something that's very important.
And it seems like, you know, everyone who's supporting the sanctions and trying to undermine the deal claims that what they're trying to do is protect Israel from this nuclear program and what could become of it.
But they're the ones who really are creating a situation where that nuclear program is much more likely to ever become a weapons program and become an actual security risk instead of just a rhetorical one.
Yeah, no, I think you nailed it.
You know, it's not just Senator Feinstein who's buying what the president is selling on Iran right now about why this is a good deal.
The intelligence community, not just of the United States, but also the European Union and Israel, have come out and said that this is a good deal, meaning that if new sanctions were to be introduced, it would ruin the diplomatic process and it would increase the likelihood that Iran might pursue a nuclear weapon sometime in the future.
Thankfully, they're not doing that right now, according to the various intelligence agencies.
So I think Senator Feinstein and those who are thinking like her are on the right side of this issue.
The president is going to hold a meeting with the Senate Democratic Caucus this week on Wednesday, if I'm not mistaken, to try and give them some more information that can empower them and, for lack of a better term, convince them that supporting this process, the diplomatic process, and giving peace a chance, as opposed to supporting new sanctions in Congress, that could very much destroy the process and ruin one of the best opportunities we've had to solve this conflict peacefully in three decades.
It is not worth doing.
And hopefully he will be able to let the facts speak for themselves.
So hopefully they can come up with a way to empower these individuals politically, because if you're in Congress, whether you're in the House or the Senate, that's what it is about the end of the day.
What's good for you politically, what's going to help you get re-elected, things like that.
And I think that the president and his team are trying to come up with a good way to empower these folks in that way as well, besides the obvious facts that anybody who's being intellectually honest will admit to.
Well, I hate to be the one siding with presidential supremacy on pretty much any issue, but they're working on, they're trying to create a veto-proof majority in the Senate for these new sanctions.
And it's just incredible, and even the CIA, as you mentioned, has officially said, it's the official intelligence professional position of the American government, that these sanctions will sabotage the deal.
Yeah, and here's the funny thing.
If the intelligence community came out and said tomorrow that in 24 hours Iran will make a decision to construct a nuclear weapon, Congress would be all over that.
And they would use that as justification for their new sanctions and whatever other crazy measures they want to take up.
And never mind, they're the ones who made it that way.
Yeah, so it's ridiculous at the end of the day.
They're playing political football on issues that quite literally could be war and peace.
It's irresponsible.
There's a reason why Congress' approval rating is so low.
It's because they're consistently going against what the American people are not only voting for them to do when they vote them into office, but they're also going against the president himself when the president has a very clear and convincing case to make.
All right, now hold it right there.
When we get back from this very short break, we're going to talk with Reza Marashi a little bit about that public opinion and more on America's relationship with Iran and the new nuclear deal.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're talking with Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
He's formerly with the State Department and a great analyst of American-Iran policy.
Now, you talked about the president has a great case to make, which just happens to in this case.
He's on the right side of this and Congress on the wrong side of it.
And then also you made reference there, Reza, to the American people's support for this.
Now, when the lobby and I guess Raytheon, I don't know if anybody else was for it, but when the lobby was trying to push us into war with Syria last summer, end of last summer, the American people unanimously basically said absolutely not and just the whole thing ground to a complete halt.
The problem is it's hard to get them as animated in their support for steps toward peace as it is to get them to really rear up on their hind legs about an impending war, which as grateful as we are for that.
And I noticed that there was a real discrepancy in the polls.
At first they said, aha, the American people are against this fool's deal, said all the right-wing media.
But then when I go Googling it, I don't know what they're talking about because all the polls I find say that the American people support these negotiations and the interim deal and the steps toward a final deal, et cetera, by two-thirds to one-third.
So I was wondering if you could help explain the discrepancy in that to me.
Do you know?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, long story short, there are numerous polls that have been put out that more or less test this premise about whether or not the American people support the deal more specifically and diplomacy with Iran more generally.
All of them, with the exception of one that I've seen, have overwhelmingly supported not only the deal but diplomacy with Iran.
And the way that a poll is conducted, the methodology behind a poll, will oftentimes play a factor in what kind of results you get.
So how you ask the question and what question you ask goes a long way in determining what kind of response you get.
And I think that speaks volumes.
So if you have one poll that's giving you a different outcome than all the rest of them, then I think it kind of goes to show that they probably didn't do a very good job with the methodology in terms of the questions they were asking, et cetera, et cetera.
So yeah, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the vast majority of American people deeply support the diplomatic process.
They do not want another war.
And I think President Obama actually deserves some credit on this one for doing what's necessary to try to take some risks for peace.
So what's it like in D.C. as far as the atmosphere?
Obviously, we talked about this near-veto-proof majority of senators who have co-signed onto this bill or at least promised to co-sign onto it.
But is there much pressure at all from the peace movement or activists of any kind?
On Capitol Hill, are people going around teaching true facts about what's going on here as opposed to just the WINEP spin?
Or does the lobby just have the whole argument in the bag inside the beltway there, or what?
They certainly don't have the whole argument in the bag.
I think that their presence on Capitol Hill is more organized, and so far it's been more effective than the anti-war movement on this particular issue.
But we're not any more close to the ninth inning on this.
We still have a ways to go.
And there are big parts of the establishment who really want this deal, too, right?
Exactly.
So the stars kind of align in favor of those who are pushing back against the line of, this is a bad deal, or we need more sanctions now, or this hurts Israel.
All these things that are great talking points, but not factually accurate.
So I think as time goes on, momentum will build, and you're going to see some pretty significant pushback.
This is again where I give Obama credit, because Obama was more forward-leaning in comments that he made on December 7th at the Brookings Institution, which is the first time where he framed this as a choice between war and peace.
And that was far more forward-leaning than the vast majority of folks flanking him to the left that were supporting his positions.
And so when a president does that, it creates space for people on the left to be even more forward-leaning, and people in the center, too, quite frankly.
Because when you only have hardliners on the right, the far right, opposing what you're doing, but they happen to have a good amount of influence in Congress, the president taking steps like that is a very powerful thing.
And now, can you tell me about what happened with the Israeli intelligence officers coming and briefing Congress, because I think that's pretty much unprecedented.
I don't know, maybe the Brits came and briefed them during World War II or something, but that was kind of surprising to me.
And then especially hearing all the warmongering spin coming out of those meetings, because I had read in Haaretz where Mossad used the exact language as the CIA in saying, we judge with high confidence that they have not made the political decision to begin to make nuclear weapons.
I mean, they're straight plagiarizing the American intelligence agency's assessment there and adopting it as their own, according to the Tel Aviv Daily.
So, what's going on with that?
Well, I think when you send up political officials or intelligence officials from Israel to Capitol Hill to make an argument, you choose your words very carefully.
And the argument they were making when they were up there, at least one of the more recent times that they were up there, which I think is what made the headlines, they tried to say this is a bad deal because it will give Iran more money than what the Obama administration is saying it will give in terms of sanctions relief.
They tried to make the case that there would be a ripple effect, so that beyond the $7 billion that Iran is estimated to receive over the course of this six-month interim deal, it will be somewhat closer to $20 billion.
And nobody else had those numbers.
Nobody else made that case.
It was something that was fed directly to the Congress and then spun out into the media.
And, you know, that's politics.
And that's all it is at the end of the day, because it's certainly not factually accurate.
And if nobody has those numbers except for you, I think that speaks volumes.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
I knew that that story was going around right-wing circles, but I didn't realize that that was where it had originated.
That was the best that they could do, was the money angle.
Interesting.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to go against an agreement.
It's hard to make a case against the technical aspects of this agreement, because it verifiably rolls back aspects of Iran's nuclear program that Israel has for years been saying that they found troubling.
So now they're getting some of what they want, and they're going to complain about it?
No, of course they can't do that.
I mean, maybe they will in the future.
I don't know.
But they can't do that now.
They have to make an argument about why, oh, we should have asked for more, you know, this is why it's a bad deal.
Because if you come across as looking disingenuous too many times, then it turns into a boy-who-cried-wolf type scenario, and I don't think the Israelis want that.
Yeah.
All right, now, so pretend that my entire audience just tuned in from listening to the Rush Limbaugh show and selling this deal why this is a good thing.
Well, we need to put America's national security interests first.
And the people who are selling you this line, this argument, that the deal that Obama has crafted with Iran is a bad one, are the same people that were selling you the Iraq War.
And we know how that turned out.
So if you know something doesn't work, do you keep doing it, or do you try something different?
No, you try something different, knowing full well that this option, more sanctions, potentially war, is certainly in the back pocket.
Nobody is ruling that out, not even the president.
So why have a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, why have a Department of State, if you're not going to utilize the skills of those diplomats to try and give peace a chance, to try and give diplomacy a chance?
If the intelligence community, the military, the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, everybody in the United States, except a handful of hawkish senators and members of Congress, House of Representatives, if they're the only ones saying that this isn't a good idea, then we need to ask ourselves, who do we listen to, all these people on one side, or this very small group of extremists on the other?
Yeah, yeah, but Rez, I told you, pretend they all just got here from the Rush Limbaugh show.
And, of course, the entire government is riddled with the Muslim Brotherhood, or who knows what kind of Kenyan-born traitors.
And, furthermore, those Iranians, man, they are sneaky.
And guess what else?
They hate us.
And guess what else?
They call us Satan, and they burn our flag.
And I know for a fact they've got nuclear material in that country.
They're trying to make bombs out of it, and they're willing to die if they can just kill some Jews.
So, why in the world should we trust the Democrats, of all people, to negotiate with some madmen like that on our behalf?
Come on.
No, you don't have to trust Democrats or Republicans.
That's the beauty of this deal.
Everything that we've signed on to in this deal is 100% verifiable by the United States Intelligence Community, by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So if Iran cheats on its side of the deal, the deal falls apart, and then all of the kinds of punishments that Rush Limbaugh's listeners want to inflict upon Iran is very likely going to happen.
So if you want that kind of punishment, then sit tight.
But if you don't want that kind of punishment, or if you think that potentially we could get what we want, which is a peaceful outcome that stops Iran from doing things that we don't want them to do, then there's another way.
And we can give that way a shot, because it's the same thing that a lot of former Bush administration officials, believe it or not, are coming out and saying that we need to do now too.
So there's a growing chorus of voices that are saying that we don't lose a whole heck of a lot by giving it a shot.
And I think that's a very powerful message that even Rush Limbaugh's listeners would maybe pause and consider for a minute.
Yeah.
You know, I've got to admit, though, you're kind of frightening me out of it, where it's just like Scott Ritter wrote this thing for Al Jazeera back in 2005.
Instead of plan A, plan B, and plan C, well, we'll try to negotiate with them through the Europeans.
Well, we'll try a little of this, we'll try a little of that, and then if we have to, then we'll have to go to war.
He said you should look at it like steps one, two, and three.
And I guess step two was, or step three, is we tried every kind of way to negotiate with these people, and now there's no option left than war.
And I think if that's the case, and I would have preferred where we were last October, with no real progress in the negotiations, and just the endless status quo of empty threats, because if this thing falls apart, and there's a lot pushing against it, if it does fall apart, and like you say, that leads us that much closer to war, I think we might have done better without any negotiations at all.
That's a lot of reason to really see this thing through, if possible, man.
Yeah, and I think that if the White House is coming out and saying very publicly, with the backing of the intelligence community, the military, the State Department, etc., etc., coming out and saying exactly that, we need to see this through, because the alternative is a very grim one.
I think that goes to show that they're putting forth some effort that we really haven't seen.
We're in uncharted waters now.
And the Iranians understand the same thing.
They're in uncharted waters too.
You know, John Kerry said in passing the other day, Secretary of State John Kerry said the other day in passing, when he was at the podium giving a press conference, that he had picked up the phone and called the Iranian foreign minister.
Six months ago, that was an impossible thing to consider.
Right.
It never would have happened.
And now it's something so standard that it's mentioned in passing by.
So we're making progress.
Good deal.
All right, thanks very much, Rez.
I sure appreciate your time on the show, as always.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That is Reza Mirashi from niacouncil.org, the National Iranian American Council.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.
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