For Pacifica Radio, April 1st, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And I'm the editor of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,600 interviews now.
Going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
All right, so you guys introducing Trita Parsi.
He runs the National Iranian American Council, NIAC.
It's niacouncil.org.
And he's got an important new piece in foreign policy.
Blame Trump when Iran races for the bomb.
I don't know if that's your headline or not, but welcome back to the show.
Trita, how are you?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Appreciate you joining us.
Is that your headline?
No, it's not my headline.
I would, if I were to use that phraseology, I would say blame Trump if Iran races for the bomb, not when.
I thought that was a little strong for the way the article's written, but go ahead, make your case.
Yeah, yeah.
Because if you read the article, that's not the case I'm making.
The case I'm making is that if the Trump administration decides that they're going to kill the Iran deal, partly as a way of strengthening their cards with the North Koreans.
And the logic there would be that Trump would kind of signal to the North Korean, see, I'm even willing to kill an existing deal.
So don't you think for a second, I'm not willing to walk away from the table if you don't give me what I want.
That's the kind of Trump way of looking at things.
If he does it that way, and then the U.S. actually does end up striking a deal with North Korea, even though they have a nuclear weapon.
Those in Iran who have been arguing against a nuclear deal and who have said that instead of just having enrichment, the Iranians should have actually gone much further, perhaps even building a bomb before they negotiated with the U.S., that they're going to feel that their argument was vindicated because the United States had no choice but to negotiate with the North Koreans because they had a bomb.
The United States struck a deal and it honored the deal, whereas with Iran, the Iranians only had enrichment.
They had no military dimensions to their program and the United States struck a deal, but didn't honor the deal and is now killing the deal.
So the mistake the Iranians did from that perspective was that they actually didn't go further rather than saying that, you know, the mistake was that they negotiated it all.
Essentially, it would be that, you know, they should have had more facts on the ground, more bigger program and military dimension to the program before, because the United States only respects you if you have that capacity, not if you don't.
Yeah.
Well, a couple of things there.
First of all, what a stupid strategy for convincing the North Koreans that you ought to make a deal with me.
I'll break deals anytime.
Yeah, exactly.
And the conventional wisdom has been that, look, if he does that, he's going to why would the North Koreans trust him?
And that's conventional.
And I see what you're saying, though, that that you better do everything I want because look at, you know, just what a hard ass I can be.
But it seems like there's a limit to that when you're such a hard ass that you'll break deals that are already struck.
That's pretty counterproductive, I would think, for convincing someone to sign a new deal with you.
The logic would be, look, I'm willing to kill deals and risk war and I'll risk it with you as well.
If you if you want to strike a deal with me, it's got to be a deal that I'm happy with.
Otherwise, you're going to have to deal with me in a completely different and much more problematic way.
I mean, that's what he's trying to convey, I think.
And it's very much the type of thinking you would expect from a Manhattan real estate developer who makes a living off of bullying around contractors.
But sovereign countries are not contractors of the United States.
Yeah, well, some of them are.
But yeah, all right.
Now, so, boy, wouldn't it be horrible if really that was the deciding factor?
Dealing with Korea and trying to intimidate Korea was the deciding factor in the administration deciding to go ahead and sabotage the Iran deal, which makes sense.
But then so let's break that down a little bit.
That so I guess one position, maybe the Bolton position is just abrogate the deal and say the deal sucks and I don't know what maybe.
And then the less worse option would be to try to amend it and force the Iranians to accept getting rid of whatever sunset provisions or even probably less workable demand that they include restrictions on their missile program inside the same deal.
This kind of thing.
What do you think is going to happen?
I got to tell you, anything they do that is not moving in the right direction is going to make things move in a very, very bad direction.
Even if they do smaller things that are bad, it's it's still going to lead us to a disaster.
In other words, the Iranians are not going to give in to pressure to include missiles or delete sunset provisions at this point.
There are no such thing as sunset provisions.
That's a fallacy.
That's foundation for the defense of democracy has created.
There are restrictions that have time limitations and there are restrictions that have no time limitations.
Well, that's the idea.
No, no, it's a different thing with a sunset because essentially things go completely away.
That's not the case here.
But the bigger point is this, to think that the Iranians are going to come back and offer more when they are being offered less, when the United States has not even lived up to the current agreement is frankly violating the existing agreement is complete nonsense.
Even if there were people in the Iranian system who would say, look, it's the best thing to do, they would be in such a small minority because the political winds are already shifting the opposite direction.
Those who are arguing that this deal is a mistake and that the U.S. is going to stab Iran in the back are the ones who are gaining power in Iran right now because of the way Trump is behaving.
They, from the very outset, said you can't strike a deal with the United States.
It doesn't matter if Obama is being reasonable right now.
Obama is not America.
Obama is an exception.
That's the argument they were making in 2014, 2015.
All right.
Now, let's talk about that in detail, if you could, a little bit about how America is failing to live up to the deal as it was already signed.
Well, I mean, the United States had to make sure that they were issuing OFAC licenses for companies that would be doing legal trade.
The Trump administration has not issued a single OFAC license since they came into office.
OBERBANK was a midsize European bank that was agreeing to facilitate European trade with Iran.
They've now stopped doing it, citing the risk of U.S. sanctions.
So the fear of U.S. sanctions and the fear of the fact that the U.S. is pushing Europe against this deal has already caused a lot of companies not to enter what would be legal trade.
And there is a clause in the agreement that says that the United States cannot do this, that it cannot stand in the way of what is legal trade.
And the reason why you have a bad economic situation in Iran is primarily because of Iran's own corruption and mismanagement.
But part of it also is because of the fact that so many banks have been afraid of entering the Iranian market out of fear of the United States and out of fear of U.S. sanctions.
And as a result, the economic windfall that the Iranians were promised never materialized.
Right.
Well, which is very important, right, because this guy, Rouhani, the president, he promised that he was going to deliver results here.
And the promise was, hey, we're going to be welcome back at least into the economic community of Earth.
And then the Americans, I guess you're saying under Obama, but then especially under Trump, have cast that into doubt.
They still have what Robert Higgs coined the term regime uncertainty.
And so nobody wants to invest.
Nobody wants to make any big economic decisions when they don't know what the governments involved are going to do when the deal was supposed to settle the question of what the governments were going to do.
Yeah.
And this is the thing, you know, the United States is good at imposing sanctions, even if it didn't have this negative intent as the Trump administration does.
It would still be bad at lifting sanctions because some of these problems even existed during the Obama years.
And I know some of the people in the Obama team privately expressed regret that they didn't do more back then to actually make sure that the sanctions relief process was working.
If they had done it, it would have been more difficult for Trump to undermine it today.
But they didn't.
And as a result, we're in a situation in which the United States has essentially violated this deal and is making it impossible for the deal to survive, even if Trump renews the waivers in two months.
Even if that happens, it doesn't matter.
More and more businesses are deciding it's not worth the risk to them.
So they're walking out of the Iranian economy, which means Iran is not getting what they were promised.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so if America continues to not live up to the deal or if Trump just does everything he can to bully them out of the deal or outright abrogates it on this side, what do you think will be the Iranian reaction to that?
They will first wait to see what the Europeans do.
And I think they will want to be careful.
They don't want to come across as if they're at fault and that, you know, the collapse of the deal is not their making.
They want to make sure that the international community blames the United States, which is what's most likely will happen unless the Iranians do something stupid.
But there's also this other risk that they will view this as it's not just a rejection of the nuclear deal.
It's a rejection of the idea that the United States could come to terms with the reality that Iran is a major power in the region and that even when a deal was struck, the United States nevertheless refused to accept Iran's decontainment pressured by Saudi Arabia and Israel.
And that then means that Iran will only be accepted not by making compromises and changes in its policies, which would the nuclear deal was, but rather by forcing itself onto the others and forcing them to accept Iran's role in the region, which then would mean much more of an aggressive posture in the region, which would significantly increase the risk of war, even if the Iranians don't restart their nuclear program.
The elements inside of Iran who believe that Iran should get nukes were in a very, very small minority in the past, and the broader majority wanted to have the technology.
They wanted to have the option, but they no one had made it the political decision to build it.
And the U.S. intelligence is of the same view of this.
Even the Israeli intelligence is of the same view of this.
But that was all pre-JCPOA, post-JCPOA, where there actually was an agreement, but the U.S. breaks it.
And if the U.S. breaking it has no consequences for the U.S., because the Europeans and others don't dare to really oppose the U.S. beyond what they're doing now, which is protesting but not really creating obstacles for the U.S., if that is the new environment, there's going to be people in Iran who are going to argue, you know what?
As long as Iran has or is building it, the risk of an invasion or a war is much less.
Yes, the U.S. will go after and try to isolate them, but the U.S. is doing that anyways.
Even when the U.S. had a JCPOA with Iran and Iran wasn't doing anything, Trump has been constantly calling for Iran's isolation.
So my fear is that we're creating incentives for the Iranians to actually do something that they early on were not planning to do.
They were planning to have technology.
They were not planning to build a bomb, according to U.S. intelligence itself.
I fear that our actions may tip the scale in a way that most likely would never have happened otherwise.
Well, you know, I guess I could be wrong about this, but it seems pretty obvious that Trump really picked this issue in order to just simply find a way for him to outflank everybody else in the primary field in the Republican campaign.
That we may all be against the Iran deal, but I say it's the worst deal anyone ever signed.
You know, basically just staking out that territory politically, and now he's just stuck with that statement, even though it's nonsense.
Right.
I have a bit of a different take.
I think part of what you're saying is true.
But if you actually go back to the primaries, he was not the most hawkish one.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were the more hawkish ones.
They were the ones who said that we will rip it up on day one.
And he was asked the same question.
And he said, no, I will not rip it up on day one.
I will.
I think it's the worst deal ever.
And he will use all that hyperbole.
But he said, I will try to renegotiate it.
So he kind of distinguished himself from that in the sense that he was not the worst one.
But I don't think it's because of those things that he's beholden to.
I think he's opposition to this more than anything else is that this is part of Obama's legacy.
And he's just against everything Obama did.
And he wants to undo everything of it.
Yeah.
Well, and I think he's he can't find a reason to disagree with anything Sheldon Adelson says, because what does he care about any of that?
You know what I mean?
He sees the I don't think he needs to be lobbied or convinced to see things through Israeli eyes when it comes to all of these issues, because why wouldn't he?
I mean, we're all golfing buddies here, right?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, Sheldon Adelson has a lot of money, and that means a lot to someone like Donald Trump.
If there's anything he respects is people have more money than him.
And Sheldon Adelson is reportedly the reason why Bolton is now national security adviser soon, because earlier on, Trump was not that impressed with Bolton.
And didn't like his mustache.
Apparently, it was Sheldon Adelson.
It was a big financial supporter of Bolton that rehabilitated Bolton in the eyes of Trump.
Yeah, this whole Bolton thing.
Well, you know what?
So let's talk about the politics more in a second.
But let's talk about the Iran deal for a minute here.
So anybody who gets their media from the right at all, they know nothing about this deal other than Iran got some money and also the deal is bad.
And I heard that maybe they'll cheat and something's not trustworthy about it.
And it's obvious to me that this kind of basically this fear is a placeholder for any information about Iran's nuclear program or any information about what the nuclear deal actually mandates the Iranians do with that nuclear program and the degree to which they follow through on that.
So can you talk about the program, the restrictions they've agreed to and the expanded lengths that the inspections regime goes to now?
Yeah, I mean, it's I'm happy that you're asking this question because at the end of the day, it's extremely frustrating to see how little is known and understood about this program and about this deal.
So what this deal did is that it eliminated two very bad outcomes, the risk of war with Iran and the risk of the Iranians building a nuclear weapon.
All of the pathways Iran had towards a bomb were closed off its stockpile of low and rich uranium, which stood at ten thousand kilos, which was enough to build eight to ten bombs.
Ninety seven percent of that was shipped out.
Iran under this deal never has enough material of uranium and rich uranium in on its own soul enough to be able to build a bomb.
You can't build a bomb if you don't have the material and the Iranians will not have it.
It will maximum have four hundred.
They need twelve hundred to build a bomb.
And that would be if they went ahead and continued to enrich it up to weapons grade.
Exactly.
Absolutely right.
So and moreover, then the facilities all but one essentially has been closed off.
The enrichment is continuing at the Natanz facility, which is an above ground, the Fordow facility that even the U.S. most likely would not be able to take out because it was so deep in the mountains has now only been used for research.
You have the Iranians committing not to enrich uranium beyond three point seventy five percent.
You needed to have it at 90 percent to be able to enrich uranium.
They're not doing it at 20 or any other percentage point.
They have opened up their program for full transparency.
The IAEA is essentially inside of the program and we ask to get to the inspections in a second.
But also it's worth mentioning here, too, that they filled the reactor of the Iraq heavy water reactor with concrete.
They shut the thing down forever.
Now, they never had the facility to reprocess that waste and make plutonium bomb fuel out of it.
But now there's not even the risk that they could do so, because now they don't even have any fuel to reprocess if they had the facility to reprocess.
Exactly.
That's a huge one there.
You pour a bunch of concrete into a reactor.
That thing is done.
Oh, it's done.
And the reason why that was important was because they had a uranium path.
They had a plutonium path.
The plutonium is destroyed because they don't have the reactors.
I mean, once you pour the concrete into it, it's dead.
So all of these things were achieved.
And none of this, none of this could be achieved through military means.
None of it.
And all of it, unfortunately, can be lost if Donald Trump kills this deal.
The Iranians can renew their program very quickly.
They can kick out the inspectors.
Go back to the expanded inspections there, too, because that was where I interrupted you.
I'm sorry.
So the inspections are extremely important because those are permanent measures.
Those are things that always will be there.
Granted, of course, that the deal survives and the U.S. lives up to it.
But they're inside of the program.
It's not like back in the 1990s when, you know, the U.N. was knocking on doors in Iraq trying to find nuclear weapons.
Now you have instruments inside of the nuclear program that is sending signals to the IEA headquarters in Vienna in real time.
And as a result, if something fishy is done, these instruments would measure that, would be able to detect that very quickly and report it back to the IEA, even if no individual is actually entering it.
Moreover, because of the additional protocol, which the Iranians would ratify on year eight if the U.S. again lives up to the end of the bargain, would enable the IEA to be able to make inspections in sites that are actually not declared nuclear sites.
Granted, of course, that they have a valid basis to be able to request access there.
So this is one of the most important elements that would prevent a covert program, giving the IEA the ability to be able to go and visit other sites that actually have not been declared.
Yeah.
Now, let me stop you there.
Let me stop you there to elaborate or ask you to elaborate more if you want, because this is something that actually just the other day someone on Twitter had heard me on a radio show talking about this and saying, oh, yeah, the IAEA can inspect all they want at the places they're allowed.
But they're deaf, dumb and blind to the whole rest of the country and all the military sites.
And so that's, you know, he actually linked to an article in Commentary magazine making this claim.
So this is sort of the narrative on the right that like, oh, sure, you can inspect this.
But what about that?
But so elaborate a little bit more about that, about the right that John Kerry, he really did negotiate the right for the Americans to accuse the Iranians of of anything at a at a military site, even, you know, at their military bases, and that if he has any evidence of it, then he has the right to send the inspectors in there or else the whole deal collapses, the sanctions snap back, et cetera.
Can you explain that?
Yes.
The way that works is, is that as long as evidence can be produced to present to the IAEA that there's something fishy going on at this site that is not a declared site, may even be a military site, as long then that goes to a committee.
As long as the Europeans and the U.S. vote together, the Iranians will always lose and they will be forced to grant access.
And now I make sure I understand that right.
In other words, they only need a majority of the Security Council.
They don't need Russia and China to agree.
No, this is not a security.
This is a body inside of the deal.
OK, I would make this decision.
And not no one there has a veto.
So as long as the EU and the U.S. are on the same page, they have the majority vote and then the Iranians will be forced to give access.
And if they don't, then they are in violation.
Now, one of the first things the Trump administration did is that they went to the IAEA headquarters.
They sent Nikki Haley, another grantee of Sheldon Adelson, and they started pushing them to request access to all kinds of different places.
And the IAEA said, no, because you are not giving us any evidence.
We're not your tool for you to start a war.
We're here to make sure that there's no spread of nuclear weapons.
If you have evidence, give it to us.
We'll assess it.
And if we find it to be valid, then we will request it.
But in the absence of any evidence from you, we're not going to jeopardize the integrity of the IAEA and the entire inspections regime.
But just asking for access because you want the Iranians to say no so that you can say they're in violation and then start your war.
Right.
And that's such an important point.
That's not the Iranians who refused.
It was the IAEA who refused to ask because they said, you're not going to abuse our power this way.
Exactly.
But this is what happened with Iraq, in which the U.S. was abusing the IAEA.
And it really damaged the IAEA and the integrity of the process.
And at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is to harm the integrity of the IAEA and the inspections regime.
Because if you do that, that's actually what would give hardliners in Iran an opportunity to cheat without getting infected.
Right.
I mean, you know, it's not like these are pro-Iran partisans here in the IAEA.
This is a European institution, essentially.
Well, it is an international institution is headed by a very, very pro-American Japanese former diplomat who was very, very tough on the Iranians.
And the Iranians were very unhappy about him getting that job and who, you know, the WikiLeaks revealed that he promised the United States that he would be their man at the IAEA.
But that was under certain different circumstances.
That was actually, you know, not with Trump being in office.
But nevertheless, he's actually been a strong defender of the IAEA and he was clearly not going to fall into the trick of turning into a tool for Sheldon Nielsen to start a war.
So he's been on record saying several times, everything we have requested access to, the Iranians have given us access to.
And by the way, when you talk about, you know, being on board, him being on board for Obama's agenda, it wasn't just to have a deal.
He also, you know, helped hawk it up and make all kinds of accusations against Iran during the era of the crippling sanctions before the talks ever began.
Exactly.
I mean, there was a very controversial report that came, I think, in 2012, in which the IAEA suddenly now was starting to say that there were elements of Iran's military dimensions that had continued beyond 2007.
And there was a lot of controversy because the methodology that the IAEA used to come to those conclusions was not the ones that usually are being used.
And the Russians were furious.
Others were furious because they were saying, look, once again, the IAEA is essentially becoming a tool of what the United States wants.
And particularly with the WikiLeaks coming out and showing that that's exactly what the IAEA had promised that he would do if he was given the job.
It didn't look good.
So you can by no means accuse the current head of the IAEA of not being sympathetic to the American position.
On the contrary, that's how he got his job.
Now, one of the controversies about this story is it's kind of like a scene out of Breaking Bad.
You got to admit, or like Brewster's Millions, right, where there's like a pallet of cash money and the Iranians got billions of dollars.
How much money?
And then and where did that money really come from?
That's Iran's money.
That's another one of these very strange lies that have been spread around by opponents of the deal.
What happened was that during the sanction years, the Iranians had a lot of money in different banks around the world in which that they were using to pay for their imports.
And as a result of the of the deal and the compromises the Iran agreed to, their money that was frozen in these bank accounts got unfrozen and they got access to their own money.
At no point did the U.S. give American money of those dimensions to the Iranians.
There was a thing outside of the nuclear deal, which was a legal settlement over a dispute between the U.S. and Iran dating back to the 1970s.
And that led to a scenario in which the U.S. cleverly struck a deal because they knew the courts, the international courts, were going to rule in Iran's favor and probably give Iran a pretty big penalty from the U.S.
And they struck a deal so that penalty would be less.
But, you know, the 100 billions that we're talking about, Iran's own money at foreign banks that was unfrozen was not America's money.
Right.
And what a propaganda point, you know.
And and yet to fall so flat on closer examination that all they really got was not sanctions relief, only, you know, promised but never really delivered and a little bit of their own money back that had been stolen and kept without interest all these years for 40 years.
Right.
Almost.
So, yeah, it's a miracle, I guess.
I don't know.
You know, if you want to get into back into politics for a second here.
What about Iranian politics and the the various positions of, I guess, first of all, the the president who must have egg all over his face there and the supreme leader who tolerated.
But I don't know how badly he really encouraged these negotiations.
And then there's got to be a mess of guys that you mentioned earlier who are to the right of both of these men.
And so, you know, I don't know.
Tell us what you know about that and why it matters.
Why it matters tremendously, because, you know, you have people in the Iranian system who, as I mentioned earlier on, they were skeptical about this.
The supreme leader is always trying to position himself of being the biggest skeptic.
And if if this deal collapses, it's not just a deal that collapses.
It's the very idea that the Iranians can, by being reasonable, by agreeing to compromises, be able to change Western policy and then come to some sort of a mutually accepted term.
That idea is going to be defeated.
And instead, you're going to see the Iranian elite essentially only include views about, OK, how hawkish do you have to be against the West?
You know, we're turning a country that actually was agreeing to compromises and we're convincing them there's no compromise that will satisfy us.
The only way you actually can get something from us is by being so problematic and so strong that we're going to be forced to agree with you.
That's the signal we're sending.
Yeah.
Except, I mean, here's the thing of it, especially to the degree to which they've agreed to restrict their program now.
It's going to take them a while if they decide to crank out one bomb and America and or Israel, Saudi will attack them before then.
Right.
Yes.
Although the issue is that if they if the U.S. breaks the deal and the Iranians decide to restart their program, they're going to do it in the dark.
So all of the things I told you about, we're going to know this.
We're going to know that we're not going to go know any of this.
So.
So we're not it's not as possible.
It's possible.
I doubt they could really do a whole secret Manhattan project under a mountain somewhere and not get caught.
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
I think it's not worth finding out.
It's better to keep this deal so we don't ever have to go in this direction.
Well, you know, this is the bottom line here, right?
Is this not just your opinion, my opinion in this and that it's that the case against the deal is completely dishonest and ridiculous.
They just want an excuse for conflict because they can't abide.
In fact, their problem with the deal, quite clearly, is that it was the purpose of Obama doing the deal in the first place, because it takes away their fake costus belli that there's a threat from Iran's nuclear program.
And if if now their program is inspected beyond all reason, then that accusation just falls too flat.
That's why they want to override the thing.
And in a just world, that would be why their attempts to try to destroy it would end up coming to naught, because at the end of the day, adults and more reasonable heads would prevail.
But I'm not so sure now that John Bolton is the adviser to the president for national security affairs.
I think we might have a worse problem than before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think that is, unfortunately, a very reasonable fear.
Man.
All right.
Listen, while I appreciate you doing the hard work on this, as always.
Thank you so much.
I'm sorry to see things turning so badly the other way after such a success here with this deal in the first.
I know.
I know.
I know you're out there.
Thank you so much.
And thank you for having me on.
Oh, yeah.
All right, you guys.
That is Trita Parsi.
He is at the National Iranian American Council with Reza Murashi and a bunch of great guys over there.
All right, Sean, that's been anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I do interviews all week long.
So check the archives at Scott Horton dot org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.
