03/18/13 – Jamal Abdi – The Scott Horton Show

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Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Jamal Abdi.
He is policy director at the National Iranian American Council.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Going good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Good, good.
You're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
All right.
Now, just in case some right-winger is listening or something and he thinks you're an agent of the Ayatollah, tell me a little bit about the National Iranian American Council for a sec, would you?
Yeah.
So National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, we're a grassroots organization.
We have a national membership across the United States, largest Iranian American grassroots organization.
And, you know, in a nutshell, we're against war with Iran.
We're against sanctions that hurt the wrong people.
We want to see a diplomatic resolution of not just the nuclear issue, but also to resolve the human rights issues inside of Iran and, you know, ensure that we don't go to war and that there's a brighter future for the Iranian people.
Okay.
Good.
Thanks.
All right.
Now, what is Senate Resolution 65?
So this is a resolution that was introduced earlier this month when the national AIPAC conference came to town.
And it's basically a resolution that says if Israel decides that they need to strike Iran, that the United States should commit diplomatic, economic, and military support for such action.
Basically, we view this as a preemptive backing for a preventative war with Iran, determined by when Bibi Netanyahu thinks is the right time to strike.
Yeah.
Boy, you know, it's just like in the Bush years, at least at some times, you know, a peacenik could almost be thankful for the imperial presidency and basically the theft of the war power from the Congress.
Because oftentimes Congress is worse, a lot worse, especially on this issue.
Well, Congress has really shown that they, at least this Congress, is willing to just sort of give a pass to these provocative pro-war efforts and really not do any due diligence to push back on them.
For instance, with this resolution, you know, there are folks who are signing on to this who don't even have the beginnings of the factual information about what's going on regarding negotiations, regarding the sanctions, regarding Iran's enrichment program.
And so you have senators going around saying things about, for instance, about Iran's nuclear program.
Chuck Schumer sent a letter out saying Iran's enriching to weapons grade.
That's why we have to sign on to this resolution.
And that is completely contradicted by the fact that Iran, yes, there are concerns about the nuclear program.
But no, absolutely not are they enriching to weapons grade.
That's the pure falsehood.
And it actually makes the lies and the distortions that the Bush administration was spinning back in 2002, leading up to the Iraq war, it makes them look sophisticated and modest by comparison because this is just a blatant falsehood that is contradicted by all of the intelligence and all of the IAEA inspections data that we have.
Right, like the Iraq stuff, Cheney would say things, as specific as he would get, is we believe they've reconstituted nuclear weapons.
But it's not like Tim Russert asked him a follow-up question and made him answer, are you saying that they're enriching weapons grade uranium in Iraq right now and that you know that to be a fact?
And he never would say that as a specific fact like this.
So you're right, I mean what Schumer is asserting here really makes the Iraq, at least the uranium propaganda, pale by comparison.
I mean all they were willing to claim was that we think he was trying to buy some uranium ore, which, you know, one day if I Dream of Jeannie came to town, they could become a bomb someday.
Yeah, and it's really, you know, it's almost the point that you were making about Congress almost being worse when it comes to the question of war.
It's really, it reflects a sort of passivity or laziness on behalf of, you know, Chuck Schumer and other members of Congress who are really, you know, APAC comes to town, they send a bunch of, you know, people to these offices to lobby for these measures.
And these senators, they don't even do the background research.
They just sign on because of the political pressure.
And the real problem here is that I don't think war with Iran is going to happen through the front door.
I don't think it's going to happen the way it did with Iraq, in which intelligence was being politicized from the inside of the administration and being sold to the American people in this nice, you know, pretty little package.
Instead, we're seeing that the intelligence is being distorted and politicized from the outside, and this campaign is being run by these outside lobby groups like APAC.
And then you have a Congress who is sitting there rubber stamping it and really opening up the possibility for war through the back door, in which something happens, whether it's some accidental conflict, you know, in the Persian Gulf where you have some drone situation, or Israel decides that it's time to go, and they launch, you know, so-called preventative strikes, and the U.S. is forced to go to war.
I really think that's how it's going to happen, and it's going to be because of the lack of due diligence and the politicization that Congress is allowing with regard to the intelligence and just the basic facts around Iran.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because there's just a kind of boy-who-cried-wolf sort of syndrome going on here, but it's not the peaceniks warning against the war.
It's the war hawks who've been, you know, Netanyahu has been crying about how maybe he needs to start a war with Iran.
Well, certainly this whole time that he's been in power, but the neocons and the Likudniks representatives, Ehud Olmert before Netanyahu, threatened strikes from time to time, and their front men threatened strikes from time to time, and it ends up sounding like it's not really a concern, you know.
It's just a bluff.
It's been called.
They obviously don't mean it.
They're afraid to death.
Dempsey on my C-SPAN right now, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he's no dummy.
He knows that a real war with Iran would be a problem, but the thing of it is that that desensitization, I think, can make us miss clues about how, you know, it actually still could happen and trip wires and trap doors that could lead to it where we might not think so.
When I talked with the Leveretts about their new book, Going to Tehran, a couple of weeks ago, I said, you know, come on, Obama, I mean, he's really bad on the Iran issue in a lot of ways, but he doesn't want to march an army in there, which is the only way it could really get regime change.
It would be a full-scale war, you know, two or three times the size of the Iraq war, probably, march on Tehran and all that.
He doesn't want that.
He knows that bombing their nuclear program is just going to turn it into a nuclear weapons program, and it's not one now, et cetera.
And the Leveretts, both of them, I think, you could qualify as very sober and moderate type of people, like political spectrum-wise or whatever.
They're not ideological types, and they're not alarmist types, really.
And they both said basically what you just said, you know, we've got to accidentally get into a war here because we're waging this kind of low-level war against Iran in Syria and really around the region.
There's help by Mossad and the CIA from time to time for Jandala, suicide terrorists, and the MEK, communist terrorist cult, and these other people.
And, of course, as you're saying, the ships floating back and forth next to each other in the Persian Gulf all day, every day, which is actually what Dempsey's speech is about right now, the Persian Gulf.
There could certainly be a war based on the regime change in Syria or any number of these other things going on.
Yeah, and, you know, the real problem here is that the options for preventing a war are being winnowed down.
Every time we make a decision on the basis of, okay, well, we could do the war thing, and nobody wants that, or we could do something, you know, to try to get a breakthrough diplomatically, and politically that's too difficult.
So instead we're just going to go for sanctions, or so instead we're just going to go for some military signaling, or, you know, provocative language, or this or that.
When we do that, we're actually, it's not good enough to just say, okay, well, we're not going to do war.
We have to actually take the tough decisions to prevent that war and find the diplomatic off-ramp from this confrontation.
And that, unfortunately, is what the Obama administration has failed to do.
They've sort of gone for this policy that is compromised.
And, you know, we do diplomacy, but we do it from a very compromised perspective.
We're not willing to, at least up until very recently, we've been unwilling to ease any of the sanctions in exchange for Iranian concessions.
And so in so doing, okay, maybe we're not going to go to war tomorrow, but we're reducing the opportunities to ensure that, you know, in a couple of months, in a couple of years, we don't end up with no options left, and then you have the war crowd saying, well, we told you so.
It didn't work, and now we actually need to, you know, either do these military strikes that are called mowing the lawn because we have to go in and bomb Iran every one or two years in order to delay their program, or do a full-scale invasion that, you know, military folks say would require, you know, 750,000 to a million troops.
And according to former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would require tens of years of occupation.
So I think that there's been a very sort of sophisticated effort to take the peaceful options off the table one by one, sort of delay hopes for a breakthrough while saying, well, look, we're just doing sanctions.
We're not doing war.
So it's better than doing war, and really that's just creating a situation where we're sort of being backed into a war.
Yeah, the status quo is just a slow path to it, but that's at the end of the road here is conflict because I guess the moderates or the moderate position that, hey, let's just work it out, is the enemy, whether it's the moderates inside Iran or the moderate position that they try or seemingly try, I don't know, they at least end up helping to marginalize inside Iran or, you know, in the United States.
I mean, the leverage position, I just, you know, read their 400-page-something book, and what they're saying is, hey, look, just go over there and recognize the independence of Iran.
You don't have to like them.
You don't have to agree with everything, but break the ice and start really working towards, you know, resolving all the outstanding issues, and you can.
All you have to do is want to and try, and yet the first part is recognize their independence, recognize their actual, you know, quote, unquote, at least, legitimacy as a state as much as any other state, and deal with them on that basis, and that is, you know, completely off the table.
They say all options are on the table.
Well, that's not on the table at all for dealing with Iran, so they can either bow down and give up everything that we know they never will and accede to every demand that we know that they'll never do, sanctions relief or not, you know, freeze all uranium enrichment forever and all of these ridiculous demands that they're never going to go along with, that our side knows they're never going to go along with, and so, you know, I don't know.
It's funny because sometimes they act like they really do want to resolve the nuclear issue, but they need the nuclear issue so they can beat Iran over the head all day every day from now on until it ends up leading to a real war.
You know, what I think we're seeing now with this resolution, this unprecedented resolution, it's really, it's actually aimed more at Obama than it is at Iran.
It's aimed more at actually limiting his options because I think there's this real fear that Obama is going to seek a breakthrough on the nuclear issue through diplomacy that is going to ratchet down some of this tension and is going to change the trajectory that I think a lot of these, you know, a lot of the folks who, you know, deep down they really do want a war, they really do think that regime change imposed by the U.S. is the only way to do things, and they don't want to see the tensions resolved or some sort of compromise on the nuclear issue in which Iran does retain some enrichment, but they have, you know, caps placed on that and the sanctions are eased.
And so this resolution comes as Obama is planning to visit Israel later this week, actually on Wednesday, and so the resolution was introduced to really try to put the president in a box and to say some provocative things against Iran and to say, you know, if Israel decides to strike, we have your back and you get to pull the trigger and tell us when it's time to go.
And I don't think that's going to work.
I think the president has done a fairly good job of standing up to some of that pressure, but the real test is going to be actually in these talks that are coming up.
There are negotiations, you know, through the U.N. Security Council that there are some technical talks that are happening today, and then April 4th and 5th, I believe, there's going to be talks with the heads of the delegations from the Security Council states and from Iran.
And what's on the table is actually a pretty good compromise in which Iran suspends some of its most, you know, what are considered the most provocative elements of its nuclear program, so it suspends its 20% enrichment, which is the sort of higher level enrichment that they're doing, and in exchange we actually ease some of the sanctions.
And it's really important to get that deal because that could be, you know, a diplomatic breakthrough.
That could actually show to both sides that there is a possibility to back down from this and that, you know, on the Iranian side they're not moving to build a nuclear weapon, and on the U.S. side we're not moving to impose regime change, that that's not the actual goal, and to deal with some of these trust issues.
And I think that resolutions like this one and some of the sanctions bills that are being offered in both chambers, I think that they're ultimately really designed to try to kill a deal and to make sure that we don't get over this impasse and change the trajectory so that we can continue down this path of confrontation.
And so I think it's really important that these resolutions don't go forward and undermine prospects for resolving this peacefully.
Well, now did you see this piece by Peter Jenkins, the former British diplomat, about Susan Rice's speech?
No, I didn't see that.
Okay, well, he wrote this thing, basically she gave this very provocative speech that went against the tone of, hey, all right, the Omidy talks weren't so bad, and maybe we will be able to work this out, which is there was at least some of that coming from the administration, and at least the way Jenkins interpreted it was that it's not just in Congress, right?
The president or his administration sounds like they're taking it back, any of their positive talk about what they think might be coming down the line as far as success on this issue, sabotaging their own deal again.
There's certainly, you know, the way it's always worked is that when one side's ready to deal, the other side's not ready.
And I think that there's definitely a concern on the U.S. side that with Iran heading into elections, this probably isn't the optimal time to think that they're going to have their house in order to make the tough political decision to make a concession on the nuclear program.
And the reason that the administration thinks that is because, guess what?
We were in the same position just a few months ago back when we were doing talks before our own elections, and it was pretty widely acknowledged that we weren't going to make any concessions heading into an election because the president didn't want to look, you know, quote, unquote, weak on Iran, and so we didn't have our stuff together.
And I think that that's really – that is a concern, and that's why I think that it doesn't want to, you know, put all of its eggs in this one basket for these next talks.
It may be actually looking to – I mean, I hope looking to play a longer game.
And, you know, the Iranian elections are in June.
Hopefully, you know, if we don't get something in these next round of talks, we can at least prolong the talks so that after June, once things are settled down and we have a little bit of a break before the midterms then, you know, are interfering on our side of the table.
But we hopefully can then have a deal sometime this summer where we're actually changing the trajectory of this confrontation.
That remains to be seen.
But I definitely – you know, the New York Times, actually, of all outlets, I mean, heading into this 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war, the New York Times actually was the first sort of mainstream big publication to call out Congress for what it's doing with this SRES-65 backdoor-to-war resolution and the congressional sanctions and how these are really – these are designed to kill the diplomatic process.
Yeah, well, you know, that really is important, too, and it just goes to show I'm not sure how many times the New York Times has ever accused somebody of trying to undermine negotiations like that.
That's going pretty far for them, isn't it?
Oh, definitely.
I think that you hope that people learn the lessons of 2002 and 2003 and learned how this works, how the politicization of intelligence and how, you know, the closing of space for, you know, real solutions to these issues, what the history has been.
And clearly people like Chuck Schumer did not learn that lesson, and they're playing the same old games, a game that he criticized back when it was the Republican leading the charge.
So I'm glad that the New York Times actually stepped up and did this.
I don't know if it's going to be enough, though, because there are now 65 co-sponsors of this measure in the Senate, and in the House side we have sanctions racing forward.
So it remains to be seen if this is actually going to go forward or not.
And you know what?
Let me ask you this, too.
As far as the policy goes, well, and I'll ask you to not care about the people of Iran for a minute, but just, you know, thinking like an imperialist, does it make sense to do this dual track thing where we have all these threats and all these sanctions and all this pressure and we'll deprive your cancer patients of their chemo and whatever else until you do what we say at the same time that we're negotiating?
Or does that just make it that much more difficult for the Iranians to give in on any of their positions?
Well, I think the real problem with the sanctions, other than the humanitarian impact that it's having, is that they're not – the Iranians – there's a trust issue here.
And I think that the Iranian negotiators really have a legitimate concern that the sanctions are not in place on the condition of, you know, addressing the nuclear issue, and that if Iran actually makes concessions, the sanctions will be lifted.
I think there's a real concern that the sanctions are actually there for the intended purpose of toppling the regime and that if any concessions are made, the sanctions are going to stay in place.
And so on Tehran's side, they say, why bother giving in?
And then at the same time, the sanctions are hurting the very people who took part in the 2009 demonstrations, this middle class that has typically been part of this sort of vibrant civil society in Iran.
They're the ones being pressured by the sanctions.
So it's actually weakening the domestic opposition.
But this broader issue of not actually trusting that the sanctions would be lifted, that is something that has to be addressed in the negotiations.
That's why it's so important that the U.S. actually give up these concessions.
And I think the important lesson here is actually, you know, I saw Paul Wolfowitz on, I think, on CNN the other day, and leading up to this 10-year anniversary, I think there's a lot of revisionist history going on about what the lead-up to Iraq actually looked like.
And I would actually encourage your listeners to take a look at an article by Rolf Akeas in Foreign Affairs a few months ago.
He led some of the efforts to do inspections in Iraq throughout the 90s, and he has a pretty blunt assessment of what went wrong with Iraq, and it was that we imposed sanctions through the U.N., we imposed sanctions.
We actually, you know, Saddam played games, but eventually he gave in, and he allowed for this inspections regime to be put in place, which is one of the conditions of getting the sanctions lifted.
And then as soon as some of the U.N. states started saying, okay, we have the inspections in place, now we need to start easing some of the sanctions and make good on our deal, that's when the U.S. came out and said, actually, you know what, our policy is regime change.
We're never going to allow the sanctions to be eased until Saddam is taken out.
And it was at that point that the sanctions stopped being any sort of form of leverage to convince Iraq to allow these inspections and certify that they weren't doing anything on WMD, and the sanctions just became a tool to impose unrelenting pressure designed at toppling that government.
And I think that the Iranians fear that that's the same strategy in place against the government in Tehran.
And unless we're able to actually deal with that concern, which I think is a legitimate concern, we're not going to see sanctions as a useful tool in a diplomatic process.
They're just going to continue to be a tool that prevents Iran from giving up and being on its side because they view this as an unconditional war against them.
Right.
Well, I mean, that argument sure makes sense, like you're saying.
By the way, Andrew Coburn broke the story on this show.
He wrote it, but only after the fact, after saying it on this show for the first time back quite a few years ago now.
That Rolf Eckius actually was about to certify.
He was, I think, on the eve, literally the day before, he was to certify Iraq weapons of mass destruction free.
That was when Madeleine Albright preempted him with the statement that no matter what happens, the sanctions will be lifted or will never be lifted until Saddam is gone, etc. like that.
And so it wasn't just that, you know, they knew he didn't have weapons, so they moved the goalposts.
It was it was about to be declared legally in all capital letters with quotation marks that he has no weapons of mass destruction.
We've successfully eliminated everything but the rounding errors on their tests, you know.
Yeah, right.
Does he address that in the book?
Does he say that in the book?
Yeah, I think that he actually does come out and say that pretty clearly.
That story was broken here on my show by Andrew Coburn.
This is the great journalist who said it, not me.
It was just here that he said it.
That's OK.
Well, yeah, this piece was published just a few months ago in Foreign Affairs.
And oh, that's right.
I was thinking it was a book.
I said it was a book.
But, you know, people don't understand that history.
And so, I mean, a lot of folks who they say they're antiwar, they're supporting these sanctions without realizing sort of the constraints that the sanctions are putting on diplomacy.
And look, if sanctions are going to work a certain way, they are the reality.
They're in place.
Fine.
Let's let's use them.
Let's leverage them to get these concessions that we supposedly want.
But if you look at the way that Congress is addressing this, they're saying if Iran gives anything up, we need to do even more sanctions.
That's not a recipe for resolving this.
That's a recipe to ensure that, you know, maybe it's not this week or this month, but eventually that there's a military confrontation.
We know Scott Ritter wrote a piece back in 2005 saying, you know, they pretend that it's plan A, plan B and plan C for how to get them to stop trying to make nuclear bombs.
Right.
And so first it's have the E3 talk to them and then it's put on a bunch of sanctions and then, I don't know, threaten them one more time and then bomb whatever it was.
And he was saying, no, no, no.
This is step one, two and three.
This is just we have to be able to say, well, we try to negotiate with them and it didn't work.
And we tried strangling them almost to death and that didn't work either.
Now we have no choice left but air war, at least, you know, regime change and that, you know, they're just checking boxes off the list.
But on the other hand, I guess, you know, what you're arguing here is you could turn it back into plan A, B and C and you could leave the war off and just go with plan B.
And and but you've got to prove you really mean it and not just use it as you know, that you would lift the sanctions if you got the results you wanted, that kind of thing.
Right.
Yeah.
I think it's an open question as to whether, you know, Obama, if that is his intention.
I mean, if the sanctions are really being put in place as this bargaining chip, is he still in control of the train or has it gone off the rails?
Is he actually going to be able to turn these sanctions around and prevent Congress from, you know, interfering and basically vetoing some deal that eventually we managed to get?
And I think that that remains to be seen if he if he can pull that off.
If he can, I think it does a lot to change the trajectory.
And I think that we'd be in a much better place.
But the way these things go, you know, the politics sort of get a momentum of their own.
And, you know, right now, the big thing that we hear people talking about is, you know, the sanctions aren't working.
So there needs to be a credible threat of military action.
So we need to be putting the assets in place and really gearing up for war.
But that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to war.
We're just going to be threatening them.
And this is exactly, you know, we this is what we did with Iraq.
This is actually, you know, George Bush, until the day he actually ordered the invasion, was claiming that we were putting these assets in place just as a credible threat to Saddam.
And by the time, you know, there was there was no reverse gear on that, though.
It was, you know, inching us closer and closer to that cliff until it was too late.
We had already fallen over it.
And I think that's really what this credible threat of military force argument is.
It's just getting us closer and closer to the point of no return.
All right.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to leave it there.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much for your time.
Great interview.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Jamal Abdi.
He is policy director at the National Iranian American Council.
That's and I'm sorry, I don't have the address in front of me.
Anyway, it's I think it's just NYAC.org.
Maybe it's something different.
And you can find his latest piece at the Huffington Post.
It's the Senate's 10 year Iraq war anniversary gift.
War with Iran.
Again, that's Jamal Abdi.
Find him at the Huffington Post.
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