03/19/15 – Trita Parsi – The Scott Horton Show

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And we can get to our first guest on the show today.
It's Trita Parsi from the National Iranian American Council.
Welcome back to the show.
Trita, how are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Sorry for making you hold on through that ridiculous crap.
So tell me some good news.
That's nothing compared to what I'm dealing with here in D.C.
Yeah.
Tell me some good news about these Iranian nuclear talks.
They're going to get this deal, right?
I'm pretty confident they're going to get a deal, whether they will get it before the March 31st deadline or whether it will have to wait until then remains to be seen.
But they're clearly making progress.
They're clearly super dedicated.
And they're clearly in the last phase of a negotiation in which there's a lot of haggling and a lot of threats walking out and things like that, which paradoxically actually is a good sign.
How's that?
Well, because it means that they've entered the last phase of a negotiation.
That's always what it is.
I mean, you know yourself when you go into a car dealership and you're going to buy a car.
Towards the end, that's when you throw out everything you possibly can.
But you're doing it because you're not really ready to walk away.
You're just trying to get the best possible deal you can.
Right.
So it's just, in other words, it's the very last few outstanding issues that still have to be resolved.
And everybody's pushing as hard as they can on those.
But the rest of the issues are resolved, is what you're saying.
That certainly is the message that is clear from both sides, that they have come a very, very long way.
But the last couple of yards or miles is going to be intense.
It may not be more difficult, but it's going to be intense.
And there's a time pressure right now.
There's pressure from Congress.
There's pressure from Netanyahu.
There's pressure from some Iranian hardliners as well.
But overall, everyone you talk to, including critics of this deal, the consensus is that something is going to come out of this.
And now no more extensions, right?
This is it.
It's going to be extremely difficult to envision an extension.
Now, certainly they actually have a June or July deadline that is the actual deadline for the final deal.
The March deadline is more of an interim deadline for a political framework.
But I cannot see them go beyond July.
And if they manage to get a political framework by end of this month, then I think it's very difficult to foresee that the negotiations over the schedule and details and things like that are going to cause this whole thing to break down.
By that point, I think we're very, very close to having a complete deal.
All right.
Now, it seems like to me, and I could be wrong about this, but it seems like if they got this deal by the end of this month and then Obama was to, well, he wouldn't even have to say it.
If he got the deal, then the politics in Washington, D.C. would shift toward the president to a huge degree.
And it would probably make it much more difficult for the Republicans to get a veto-proof majority on their new sanctions and these kind of things.
However, if they only get a part of a political framework of a deal and they're not quite done and they have to wait until July to finish, then that really leaves the door open for more obstruction inside the U.S. Congress, correct?
Absolutely.
If there is an interim political framework agreed to right now, then that's going to be a huge tool that the administration can use to calm Congress down and to prevent any other additional negative measures coming out of Congress.
And in particular, it will be very clear that any measures that would come out would be partisan measures in the sense that the president may not be able to convince Republicans, who may actually not care about the substance of this issue, but for them it's political.
But also, even for Democrats who may remain skeptical, it's going to be more difficult to side with the Republicans against their own president.
If there isn't any progress, then the president's going to have a very hard time keeping Democrats to his side.
So, in other words, you're saying even if they do just get a political deal, not the final deal, but the political framework done, that's going to really help rather than...
Oh, absolutely.
It's going to be huge because also it's going to help the administration starting to talk about what's actually in the deal.
Part of the reason why this has been very difficult for the administration to defend is because if they reveal the details of the negotiations, they would in and of itself scuttle the talks.
Keeping a very strict discipline about what is leaked and not leaked has been essential to get this far.
If they start leaking and explaining things before they're actually the signature on the paper, they actually jeopardize the talks.
But once there is a political framework, then they can go out and they can have the president in one of his interviews, they can go forward and actually make the case, not only to Congress, but also to the American people, which is something that has been difficult for them to make so far because they've essentially been in the debate with one hand tied behind their back.
Well, and the Republicans really, though, have no argument whatsoever other than, well, full-scale war and occupation and regime change.
I guess I read one thing this morning that said the alternative is not war, the alternative is some covert action and just wait around for the regime to fall like it almost did in 2009.
And I know there have been disagreements about what happened with that election in 2009, but I don't think I ever heard anyone argue credibly that the Ayatollah and the entire state of Iran was in jeopardy of being overthrown.
It was just a disputed election for the presidency, but even the leaders of the Green Movement, they weren't anti-Ayatollah.
They weren't trying to bring down the regime, correct?
There were elements who would like to go further, but, you know, the actual leadership of that opposition were very much from the regime itself, but they wanted the regime to go in a completely different direction.
I think the Republicans or those in the Republican Party who want to portray themselves as some sort of a champion of democratization, a notion that I find quite laughable because wherever they have gone with their militaristic foreign policy, they have not created democracy.
They created chaos, ethnic cleansing, and everything else.
But they still like to pretend as if they are some sort of a champion for that.
But they completely misread.
I mean, in fact, I don't think even they read.
They just imposed on the Green Movement whatever they wanted it to be.
And it's not at all.
I mean, when I did interviews for my second book and I interviewed a lot of the leaders of the Green Movement, they told me that they were just hoping that the United States would be quiet and stay out of this as long as possible because they were afraid that U.S. involvement, statements, et cetera, had a greater likelihood of creating problems for them than creating or than actually helping them.
Yeah, of course.
It just means that everybody, even if they're not CIA, they're walking around with a giant CIA floating over their head if they're in dissent at all.
And meanwhile, the War Party in America says, we should have done more to help them when all that could have done is made things that much harder for them, obviously.
Absolutely.
I mean, and the thing that John McCain, for instance, he went on the floor and said that we should do help them, et cetera.
He did that without ever talking to anyone from that movement that would convey that request.
I mean, it was one thing if they had requested that help.
But the idea that our help is always welcome, that that's not a question mark about that.
It's just an indication of how little they know of the rest of the world.
Well, and still, even then it would have been a dumb move on their part to request help.
It'd be as dumb as if you asked the Iranian government to help finance the National Iranian American Council.
You don't need that baggage.
Exactly.
That's a good comparison, because here's a pro-democracy indigenous movement who took tremendous pride in being indigenous and doing this on their own.
Now, of course, there were some elements that, as the regime became so violent and so repressive, became a bit desperate and may have said things and slogans, et cetera.
But the leadership remained completely constant and consistent on this issue.
They rejected sanctions from the outside world, they rejected involvement, and they really wanted to hold a nationalist card and portray the Ahmadinejad government and the supporters of that as those who truly are selling out the country.
In the midst of that, you cannot request help from any country, and particularly not the United States.
Right.
All right.
Now, well, we're real short on time here, but can you just describe real quick the point of your recent piece about how, for the Iranians, their regime could be in real trouble if they capitulate too far here and give in to the Americans?
Why is that?
Well, I think something that happened for the administration earlier in 2012, late 2012, early 2013, was the realization that the sanctions track that the administration had embarked on that was very, very tough sanctions on Iran actually had a higher likelihood of leading to war than leading to some form of Iranian capitulation.
And part of the reason for that was that Ayatollah Khamenei had become, he had lost a lot of his constituencies of support after the 2009 fraudulent election.
And the ones that he had managed to keep had, of course, then become all the more important for his continued reign.
And they were a very hard line, and they would look very, very negatively on anything that smelled capitulation.
And this led to an incentive structure for Khamenei to actually fear capitulation more than even a military confrontation with the United States, because he knew he could not survive a capitulation because he would lose his last constituency of support.
Whereas with a war, he knew he couldn't win it, but he could survive it.
And that meant that if the U.S. just kept on pushing for more sanctions, which is what some critics of the negotiations right now call for, it would actually lead to a situation in which we would slow walk into a military confrontation because the other side simply was not going to capitulate.
Right.
And now, see, I'm confused about all this, too, about the military confrontation.
I know you got to go real quick, but and I know I was talking with Gareth about this, about how, well, if the deal falls apart, we won't necessarily just go back to the status quo because, you know, we'll be on the other side of a failed deal from here.
But on the other hand, there really is no reason to believe, is there, that none that I've ever heard of, that the Iranian government seeks anything more than this capability that, well, maybe one day if they really thought they had to, they could make nukes, but they don't seem to even want to make nukes at all.
And so it it would take them repudiating the nonproliferation treaty, kicking the inspectors out the way the North Koreans did and announcing now we're going to try to make nukes.
That's really the only thing that could lead to a real American war against Iran.
Otherwise, we go back to just having a safeguarded program.
Right.
What am I missing there?
I'm not so sure.
I think if there is a failure of these talks, and again, I don't think they're going to fail.
I think they're going to succeed.
But if there was a failure of talks, we're not going to go back to the status quo.
Because you see, the reason why the voices for war have tended to be much more quiet in the last year and a half is precisely because there's been an ongoing diplomatic process.
Once that diplomatic process collapses, the voices of war are going to be very, very loud again.
And there's going to be an argument that now we have no choice to go to war because diplomacy has been exhausted and diplomacy did not work.
I personally don't think the current president is particularly keen on taking military action.
But I think the next president in his or her first year would face a tremendous amount of pressure to take military action if this issue isn't resolved diplomatically.
That is completely separate from whether the Iranians actually would try to build a bomb or not.
Iran knew very well that Iran was not seeking a war.
We know now that the Mossad told the Prime Minister of Israel that the Iranians did not have an active weapons program and they were not likely to pursue one in the near future.
He still went to the U.N. and everywhere else and talked about an existential threat.
So what the Iranians do with their nuclear program is not necessarily what will instigate a military confrontation.
Right.
And with that, I know you got to go.
But thank you very much for your time, Trita.
Good talk to you again.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate the work you guys do there.
OK.
Thanks.
That's Trita Parsi, y'all.
He's at the National Iranian American Council.
That's NIACouncil.org.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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