10/03/14 – Trita Parsi – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Noon to three, eastern time on the Liberty Radio Network on the weekdays.
Sunday mornings on KPFK in L.A.
Next up on the show today is our friend Trita Parsi from over at the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org, niacouncil.org.
Welcome back, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us on the show.
So talk to me a little bit about the diplomacy in New York and the United Nations in the last week.
Anything we've learned, positive or negative, whatever you think is most important for us to know about, you know, indications about the future of the Iran nuclear deal, Trita.
There is an increasingly pessimistic mood about it.
More importantly perhaps that they're not going to be able to finish by November 24th if the ambition is to first get a deal and also negotiate in that same package the implementation of the deal.
If you look back at what happened in November of last year, they first agreed to a deal but then they had to negotiate for another three months to figure out exactly how to implement it.
They were hoping to do all of that by November and that seems to be essentially impossible.
Whether they manage to get a deal by the 24th and then need another couple of months to negotiate the implementation of that, that remains to be seen.
It is an increasingly pessimistic outlook.
They're far away from each other on a few issues but at the same time, they have managed to essentially agree on approximately 95% of the issues but it's the last 5% that are the hardest.
It worked before, right?
You said when they came up with the interim deal last November, then they still had to figure out how to implement it.
But then, hey, they implemented the hell out of that thing.
Man, it's been working great this whole time.
The IAEA and everybody has agreed that the Iranians have done all of what they're supposed to do.
I don't know if the Americans have relaxed the sanctions in the ways that they had promised to begin doing or whatever but certainly the Iranians have been found to be living up to their end of the deal all along.
So break it down for us into smaller pieces here.
What is this 5%?
What are the few issues left that still have to be resolved and what's so hard about it?
Well, it's primarily the issue of the number of centrifuges the Iranians will have, essentially the capacity of the Iranian nuclear program during the duration of the deal.
The duration of the deal is another issue.
Iran's research capability is another issue.
And then the final main issue is the pace of sanctions relief.
On these issues, to varying degrees, they're still far apart from each other.
And it's tricky.
It's very tricky.
But I think it's important to recognize that in moments like this, you have to remember how far you've come.
And you have to remember how much you will lose unless you agree to a compromise.
And essentially, I think both sides should be judged very harshly if they fail at this.
Both sides need to be disabused of any notion that they have a good plan if they don't.
Well, I mean, one thing is if this does fail, in reality, still, so what?
It's not like this is the only option we have for stopping the Iranians from amassing nuclear weapons.
That was all a bunch of war propaganda anyway.
So if the deal fails, we still have an indefinite period of time to negotiate an additional protocol, which is really what we're talking about here, expanded inspections under the IAEA.
So it's those of us who know that the whole nuclear weapons program is just a big fake red herring anyway are the ones who are most desperate to see this deal because we want to see an end to this fake outstanding issue preventing a normalization of relations between our countries here.
But, you know, at the same time, we shouldn't give too much credence to the idea that there actually is something to panic about here at all because there's not.
Well, look, the nuclear issue to the degree that we can agree or disagree that it's real or false is at the end of the day a symptom of a larger problem, which is the bad relations between the United States and Iran.
And what you have here is a window of opportunity because you have a president of the United States that has decided that he's really going to commit himself to kind of finding a deal and pay the political price for it, but be accepting that political price.
Similarly, on the Iranian side, you have a president that is willing to do the same thing.
That is a very unusual scenario.
There's been numerous cases in which there's been opportunities for the two sides to resolve problems, but the political will on one side was not matched by the political will on the other side.
And as a result, nothing happened.
And following that, things just got worse and worse and worse.
And then we ended up in a scenario in which there were constant talks about military confrontation for the last seven, eight years.
This is an opportunity to get out of that phase, to get out of that stage in which actually some of these issues are resolved.
Whether they're pretext or not, they would essentially be resolved.
And there would be an opportunity to be able to look at the future much more positively.
The fear is that if this window is closed, if it's lost, it's going to be increasingly difficult to open it again.
And then eventually President Obama is going to be out of office.
And on the Iranian side, the Iranian president is going to increasingly become weakened internally and probably not have enough political strength to be able to pursue negotiations of this kind.
Yeah.
Well, and then I'm sorry we have very little time here, but let me switch to the fight against the Islamic State.
I've maintained that it's absolutely crazy for the Americans and their Gulf allies to pursue this policy.
Partly at the behest of the Israelis to support the rebellion in Syria in order to weaken Assad.
And as Barack Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, in order to weaken Iran, if they can break Syria away.
It's kind of a consolation prize after fighting to give southern Iraq to Iranian influence.
Well, at least maybe we can take Assad away from them.
They bargain.
But on the other side, I think even at this point with the terrible threat of the Islamic State and whatever, that it would be absolute horrible mistake to realign with the Bata brigades and the Iraqi army and the Shiite forces allied with Iran to fight against the Islamic State and attempt to dislodge them from these Sunni majority cities where the Islamic State now reigns.
It seems to me the very best option is to let the Sunni Iraqis especially do their own damn awakening without any kind of interference.
And especially not from the Iranian Quds Force backed by the USA.
Which is a big part of how we got into this mess back 2003 through 2008.
What do you think about that?
I think it's a very complex situation.
And I think the problem that I have with the general conversation in the United States or globally about this is that everything is seen from a military lens.
The reason why the emergence of ISIS was missed was precisely because we looked at the region from a military lens.
And we missed all the different factors and variables that gave rise to this movement.
It is a potent movement.
I'm not saying that it's going to be a direct threat to US national security.
But it is creating major mayhem in the Middle East.
Just let me throw out one fact.
There's about 5.5 million Syrian refugees right now as a result of the civil war in Syria.
I don't know the exact number of the children that count for among those 5.5 million.
But estimates are that no more than 7-10% of them actually get a chance to get any schooling while they're living in refugee camps.
So what are they doing during the days?
Well, unfortunately, because no one is thinking about providing them with that service, they're getting approached by these different movements, funded by the GCC states that are strong US allies, and they're being recruited into these violent organizations.
If there was just a little bit forethought and we would have done things to actually provide internationally, this is not something the United States can do alone or should even be the biggest benefactor.
If something was done to be able to, at a minimum, protect these children from being recruited by these movements, then perhaps they wouldn't be having 20,000 soldiers right now.
But we're not talking about that.
We're just talking about things from a military perspective, and I think that's a major problem.
Yeah, sure.
But, well, I mean, the thing of it is this, is that Bush unwittingly fought a massive sectarian war for the Shiite Arabs in league with Iran.
And they're not all Shiite Arabs, but, I mean, for the political power factions, specifically the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawa Party, and the Saudis.
And so that really set off this entire sectarian war in the region.
And so lately they've been backing the bin Ladenite side of it, de facto, in effect, by a couple degrees of separation, I admit, and whatever.
But they've been backing the Mujahideen Sunni-based insurgency in Syria for the last three years.
They've blown up in their face so huge, they're at least considering realigning back with the Shiite factions again.
And it just seems to me like this is not a place where I want to see America and Iran getting along better.
This is a place where America should be doing absolutely as little as possible and letting these things sort themselves out.
But if we lie with the Iranians and the Iraqi army against these Sunni parts of Iraq, aren't we just guaranteeing that that's going to blow up in our face ten times worse, too?
The next Baghdadi's going to be worse than him, et cetera, et cetera.
Look, if we're just looking at it spiritually and we think we're going to ally with this and ally with that, then eventually, yes, it's just going to end up blowing up in our faces.
But the main problem is that we're not looking at the totality of the problem, which is that there's a whole lot of other things that either the United States or others can do that can actually address this issue.
But if it's just about, okay, let's ally with this faction for now, and then, of course, there's going to be endless war.
And unfortunately, that's what it's increasingly looking like.
Yeah, I mean, as far as the refugees and all that, the number one thing we could do is stop backing all the different sides in the war that keeps making more of them.
If the question was only what are we doing for refugees, and we weren't talking about our government using the Yazidis as a pretext for further intervention, this kind of cynical maneuvering all the time, but it was really just a case of what could our government do to help these people in this crisis that we have nothing to do with, or something like that, that would be an entirely different conversation.
But unfortunately, that's not the one we're having, not really.
At a minimum, pouring more weapons into a war zone is not likely to lead to stability.
And there have been plenty of weapons that have gone into Syria from all different directions, so it's not a surprise that we're seeing this violence spread.
All right, well, listen, I already kept you over.
I know you've got to go.
But thanks very much for your time, Trita.
Good talking to you.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
All right, so that's Trita Parsi.
He's the president, founder and president, I guess, of the National Iranian American Council, NIACouncil.org, and they've been doing such important work pushing for this nuclear deal, which, you know, really could be the first big peace agreement, movement toward peace with Iran, if we did it, maybe.
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