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All right, thanks.
Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
The greatest witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army, but we're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name, been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Trita Parsi.
He runs the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
And, well, you know, they work on preventing war between America and Iran, and for very good reasons.
And he's written these great books, Treacherous Alliance, The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, A Single Role that Dyes Obama's Diplomacy with Iran.
That was his first aborted diplomatic moves really chronicled there.
That book came out in 2011.
And then Losing an Enemy about the success of the JCPOA as it was adopted in 2015 and how it all came to be and everything.
He is the expert on this.
And I saw from reading your article that not only can you dish it out, but you can take it too.
How does it feel to be entrapped by some Israeli mercenaries?
Well, you know, at the end of the day, I didn't know about it until other journalists dug it up and revealed it to me.
And to be frank with you, it is a continuation of what already has happened.
I mean, you've seen it yourself.
There's been a campaign for more than 10 years now to try to defame and slander my organization and try to silence us.
And obviously, in the past, we don't have any evidence that it had any foreign intelligence services or firms involved in it, nor, of course, any involvement by the US administration.
So this is definitely an escalation in that sense.
But it's still in the same vein of what has happened in the last 10 years in which those who don't want to hear these voices and these arguments for peace that we're making have been trying to not to defeat our arguments, but to silence our voices.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so we're definitely gonna have opportunity to talk about the point you're really trying to get at.
But in this case, you really are the story.
And there's some real journalism, important journalism here in The Guardian and in The New Yorker and some other places regarding what's happened to you here.
Can you please fill us in on the details?
Because this is a pretty big one.
Yeah.
So essentially, what happened is that I got a call from someone who claimed to be a journalist and wanted to do an interview in regards to my book on the nuclear negotiations, Losing an Enemy.
And I was in the beginning of my book tour, if I remember it correctly.
So I was quite generously giving interviews.
And the interview was pretty normal in the beginning.
Up until towards the end, suddenly, it get a little bit more aggressive.
And he's essentially trying to push me to claim that the Obama administration had financial incentives to strike the nuclear deal and that individuals had their own financial incentives to strike the deal.
And I pushed back pretty hard because, you know, that was not at all compatible with the research that I had done.
And what I had seen, I had been in contact with the administration throughout the negotiations.
And on the contrary, I had seen them being very disinclined to have American businesses, for instance, be helpful or lobby for the deal to go through.
They wanted to keep a distance from them.
So I pushed back hard and I didn't think much more of it because at the end of the day, look, when you have the prime minister of Israel, you know, throwing out conspiracy theories about the deal, when you have the presidential candidate that eventually won the elections, threw out some completely ridiculous conspiracy theories about the nuclear deal, it's not particularly surprising if one or two journalists would call you and ask you strange questions about it.
So I didn't think much more of it until, I think it was two or so weeks ago, I get a phone call from Rowan Farrow, who reads back to me parts of the conversation I had with that gentleman who apparently was working for Black Cube.
And he explains to me what had happened, that this individual had taped it, that this was done for Black Cube and that this was part of a larger effort of them to try to dig up dirt on the nuclear deal, try to find angles to slander both the individuals in the administration that was pushing for the deal, but also people on the outside that they deemed to have been helpful for the securing of this nuclear deal.
And so tell us a little bit about Black Cube here, what you know about it.
Well, Black Cube, I mean, I'll be frank with you, I didn't know much about it until this, but apparently this is the firm that is populated by former Mossad agents that the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, recommended Harvey Weinstein to hire in order to silence the voices of these women who had been sexually abused by him.
And they're essentially offering those type of services.
And they're based, if I'm not mistaken, in London, Paris, and in Israel.
It's funny that, I mean, I don't know, you know, what else they could have done, taking you out to dinner and got you drunk or something, but it seems, you know what I mean?
It doesn't seem like they pushed very hard to, I mean, you're saying they pushed you hard to say this thing that I could see how that could make it into a Republican talking point or right-wing talking point that, you know, Iran peace lobbyist guy says it's all about the money or whatever would be their spin if he'd been able to get you to answer in the affirmative to that.
But it seems like they could have done a lot worse.
Are you looking back now suspicious about anything else that went on around that time?
So you put your finger on something just because it was revealed to us that this is what they've done.
And I actually agree with you.
Pretending to be a journalist and calling you and trying to get you to say something that is not true is not a nice thing to do, but there's a whole list of much worse things that could be done.
But the story here is not that what they did to me is, you know, as bad as it could have been.
The story here is- Yeah, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to let them off the hook or anything.
No, no, no, no, no.
I understand.
But I think it's actually important that you raise this because the real story here is according to the reporting of The Guardian, the people who hired Black Cube to do this were people in the Trump circle, perhaps Trump administration.
That's the thing.
For some of the firm to pretend to be journalists, that's one thing.
But if they're getting paid by the U.S. administration, people in the White House to do this, that is the story.
That is the crime that is completely unacceptable.
And then, I'm sorry, this was taking place in 2015 though, right?
No, no, this is 2017.
This is last year.
Oh, okay.
This is after the deal's already been done for a year and a half or two years.
Yeah, the deal has been done and now these people, I mean, the Trump folks are now in power.
This is not something they were doing when they were out of power, when they were in the campaign.
And it goes back to another thing that you mentioned.
Could they have done other things?
Well, we don't know.
Perhaps there's many other things that they have done that we have not been able to uncover.
What I do know is that during the transition, I got a warning through an intermediary from someone inside the U.S. intelligence who was telling me they're going to come after me, they're going to be targeting me, and that I should watch out, be careful, and that I definitely needed to change my phone, which I ended up doing.
And then, I didn't think that much more of it.
I mean, I'm trying to be regularly careful, but then this happened and the pieces seemed to fit together.
Yeah, well, I mean, other than really committing a crime against you in a bad way to hurt you or something, just keep doing the right thing and you don't have anything to worry about as far as that goes.
Like you said, you know, they came to you in this interview, you know, and you're like, well, yeah, no, I won't say that because that's not right.
You know what I mean?
In other words, just keep doing what you're doing and they're not going to be able to get much on you, it doesn't sound like, but yeah.
Anyway.
I hope so.
I hope so.
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All right.
So look, I mean, the reason we're here is because Trump quit the damn deal.
And so I want to hear what you have to say about that.
I'm sure it's a lot.
Go ahead.
Oh my God.
Where to begin on that one?
What a disaster this is.
People, unfortunately, I don't think I fully appreciated how important this deal was and what a tremendous amount of effort it took to be able to strike a deal like this, to get the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans, all of them to set aside all of their other differences.
But to agree on this point, go through more than 20 months of very painstaking diplomacy, in addition to the previous decade of diplomacy on this issue, and then get a deal and then have an American president come in who kills the deal for no other reason, really, than the fact that this deal had Obama's name on it, was considered part of Obama's foreign policy legacy.
And that was simply unacceptable to Trump.
Now, of course, I do know that there's people in his circle that have other reasons, geopolitical, political, other types of motivations behind what they did.
But for Trump himself, who doesn't seem to understand geopolitics to begin with, the opposition to this, because it was Obama's achievement, seems to have been the main driving force.
Yeah.
Well, and it makes for great Republican politics for a bunch of know-nothings who just want to pick a fight at all times.
So, isn't the bottom line here that the JCPOA took war off the table, because the fake excuse of the threat of Iran's safeguarded civilian nuclear program was basically impossible to continue to make the argument about that with the JCPOA, which doubled and tripled the inspections and severely reduced the scale and scope of the nuclear program itself?
And so that's why they want to get rid of it.
Is there any other reason to get rid of the thing?
Because it's not good enough?
I mean, as you said, this took war off the table.
The fake excuse was gone.
You now had an Iranian nuclear program that is under more inspections, more restrictions than any other nuclear program in the world.
And that's part of the problem.
If you want war, then you don't want a scenario in which this excuse has been taken off the table.
You want it back on the table.
You want the Iranians to restart the program so you can once again go and say, oh, this is an existential threat.
And this is what I'm fearing.
Even if Trump himself may not be looking for war, I think that's a question mark at this point.
I don't think we can rule it out, but we can also not confirm it.
The people around him, like Bolton, and the people pushing him to do this from Israel and from Saudi Arabia, certainly want war.
I mean, they've made that utterly clear.
The WikiLeaks has made that utterly clear.
Bob Gates in his biography made that utterly clear, that the Saudis were pushing him to go to war with Iran and fight the Iranians until the very last American.
So even if Trump is not intending for war, what he is doing is pushing us much, much closer to war.
Yeah.
Well, do you think there's a threat that Israel would start the war, or their position is you and him fight?
Well, the Israelis could very well start a war in the hope that the United States would come in and finish it.
That was the plan earlier on.
They knew very well that they could not take out the nuclear program on their own, but they knew that if they started the attack, the Iranians retaliated, the political pressure on the United States would be so strong that the U.S. would be forced to come in and support the Israeli side.
That calculation could very well still hold today.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, but so here's the thing again, like we already agree, because I know you know, and we already talked about this, that it always was a fake threat anyway.
So without the JCPOA, well, I'm already at step two.
First of all, step one is Iran wants to stay within this agreement with the rest of the world and go on and try to get the Europeans to go along and hope to, you know, come out on the winning side of a fight between the EU and the U.S. about what to do with the future of the sanctions here, something like that.
But so, and you can address that if you want, of course, but also, so if they end up saying, well, when we quit the JCPOA, then if you do, then they're still within the NPT.
Do you think there's a real threat?
They quit the nonproliferation treaty and really kick the inspectors out Kim Jong Il style and go ahead and make nukes?
Well, I know that that's not what they want.
If they wanted to, they could have actually probably built the bomb by now.
I do fear, however, that the manner in which Trump is seeking a deal with the North Koreans, if he strikes a deal, which without a doubt will be a much worse deal than what the Iran deal was, because there's no way that we can get the North Koreans to back their program, you know, to scale down their program to the extent that the Iranians did.
But if that ends up happening in the sense that he gets a much worse deal, but because he has his name on it, obviously, by definition, it's the best deal ever.
The Iranians are going to conclude that their mistake was that they only had enrichment, that they actually didn't go for the bomb.
And that if had they gone for the bomb and built the bomb and then had ballistic missiles that could hit the American homeland, the United States would come and negotiate and also honor the deal instead of killing it two years later.
So I think we have to be very careful not to create an incentive structure in which we actually are incentivizing the Iranians to go for a nuclear weapon, whereas even the US intelligence makes it quite clear since 2003, they have not been seeking a nuclear bomb.
Well, even then all they had was a research project.
And even then it was all a bunch of Israeli forgeries and misinterpreted military intercepts, as Gareth Porter's shown in Manufactured Crisis.
The whole thing was fake anyway.
But yeah, so now I mean, and here's the thing about that, right, is the reason the Israelis had to fake that laptop and all this alleged studies, evidence and everything is because they weren't looking to make nuclear weapons.
And it seems like regardless of, because I got to say, I might take a religious edict seriously if it wasn't coming from a politician.
But yeah.
But supposedly there's a religious edict that says, forget it.
You know, Mohammed says that nuclear weapons are haram.
And so that's the end of the argument.
I don't really necessarily believe in that.
But it does seem that their strategy has been, hey, our hands are up.
Don't shoot.
What the hell?
You can't attack us when your only good excuse to attack is making nuclear bombs.
But we're not making nuclear bombs.
We're proven we can, but we're not making them.
That's been their strategy this whole time.
And frankly, I mean, what is their breakout capability?
It would take them too long to make a bomb and we would attack them first and they know that.
So this is the only strategy that makes sense for them, right?
Right now, as a result of the deal, their breakout capability is one year.
If they go back to what they had before, which they can do very quickly as a result of Trump violating the deal, they can quickly push and they can probably get down to a breakout capability of only a few weeks within the next couple of months.
Obviously, if they were to do that, you will see the Israelis, the Saudis and the Trump people, certainly Bolton, start screaming that this is the end of the world and we need to go to war.
So I think the Iranians are careful recognizing that if they go aggressively forward, even though they have a right to do so at this point, if they go aggressively forward, that may actually be exactly what the people like Bolton and Netanyahu wants them to do.
So they can once again claim that they have a justified cause for war.
But this is, at the end of the day, a dangerous situation because, you know, in order to avoid war now, we have to view the Bolton folks as, you know, completely insisting on going down this path and much faith has to be put on Iranians showing restraints.
And I don't think that's a good situation to be in.
And particularly mindful of the fact that there is a series of provocations.
The Israelis are bombing Iranian positions, apparently inside of Syria, all of these different things.
And I'm worried at some point I fear the Iranians are going to do something to retaliate and then that will be used as a pretext to escalate this wildly and go for a full scale war.
That's certainly what the Israelis were getting at there.
Although I don't know if you saw, I'm not certain about this, but I did see on Twitter an announcement.
It was Liz Sly from the Washington Post, I think, was saying that the Russians had announced that the Iranians are leaving and that the Hezbollah and whatever are leaving, that the SAA, Syrian Arab Army, can take care of what's left of al-Qaeda in the Idlib province.
And the foreigners part of the war is over there as far as their side goes, which makes sense, you know, because only in the ridiculous paranoid fantasies of the war party do we hear that, yeah, Iran is trying to build up in Syria in order to attack Israel from there, which they have no capability to do in a million years unless this is a cartoon world where you can just draw a bunch of transport equipment that they do not possess, you know?
Yeah, I think it's a more likely scenario that rather than that they're building up for a war, that they're doing similar to what they've done in Lebanon, which is that with the retaliation capabilities that Hezbollah has in Lebanon vis-a-vis Israel, Israel doesn't have the capacity to just at will go in and bomb Lebanon the way it currently goes in at will and bomb Syria.
So if the Iranians were to build that up for the Syrians, what it would do is not create another war.
It would certainly not be an invasion of Israel, but it could ensure that Israel's maneuverability in the region in the sense that it can go and bomb countries at will would be reduced.
And this is what Netanyahu wants to avoid rather, but obviously what he's saying, oh, we're under attack, etc.
But if you take a look at what the Iranians have helped Hezbollah build in Lebanon, the Israelis are very worried about it.
It's 100 plus thousand rockets, but there's no Lebanese invasion of Israel.
What it does is making sure that there's a degree of balance of power that ensures that the, you know, the Israelis cannot go in and just bomb Lebanon at will.
And at the same time, of course, the Lebanese don't have the capacity to do any big raids inside of Israel.
Right.
And listen, you know what?
I mean, it might sound to a hawk like you're just spinning for the Ayatollah here or something, but the reality is the reality.
It makes no sense for Iran to build Hezbollah up, never mind the motives of their leadership, Nasrallah and the other leaders of Hezbollah and what they would like.
It makes no sense for Iran to build Hezbollah up into the kind of force that could actually pick a fight with Israel and start a war with Israel that would only cost Iran and gain them nothing.
Right.
Clearly, the whole thing is as much as they've built up Hezbollah and supported them over this whole time since the early 80s or whatever, it clearly has been a matter of getting the Israelis out and then keeping them out and not trying to pose.
Yeah.
Because, yeah.
That's simply just a matter of Iranian national strategy.
You can just tell, right?
I mean, I don't know all the different experts who wrote books about it, but that's obviously what's been going on here and what's still going on here.
I mean, I've heard plenty of Israeli and other military officials say that Hezbollah has a capacity of striking Israel.
They can strike all the way down to Haifa, perhaps down to Tel Aviv.
This is a problem.
This is obviously not something that the Israelis are happy about.
I've never heard them say that because of this capability, Hezbollah can invade Israel.
I've never heard a single one say that.
So as long as this is not that type of a projection of power in which Hezbollah would be able to invade Israel, then it is at the end of the day, a deterrence capability that is being built.
That doesn't mean that it's something that the Israelis will be happy about, of course, but we have to tone down this type of Armageddon, end of the world type of rhetoric, because that's not what this is.
This is actually something that both sides are vying for power.
If you actually truly want to escape that dynamic, you should go down to the negotiating table and start negotiating and try to get a new security architecture for the region in which people can establish their security without having to spend so much money on deterrence, et cetera, but actually by being able to create positive connections with other countries.
Well, and of course, if you take the Trump administration's claims at face value that the deal's not good enough because it doesn't include missiles and because it doesn't include support for Hezbollah and what have you, that if they really meant that, they could say, hey, we could build upon this deal.
Let's send a guy over there and tell the Ayatollah the battle days are over.
Let's shake hands again, like when Ronald Reagan was selling him missiles, and it'll be fine, and we'll work on it.
And I don't want to sound too utopian here or anything, but this same Ayatollah did offer even to stop backing Hezbollah back in 2003 when George Bush told the Swiss ambassador to go to hell for even delivering the message.
So it seems like there's room for negotiation here is all I'm saying.
There certainly is.
There certainly is room for negotiation, but that is not an attractive option for anyone who just wants to achieve security through military domination.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks again for coming on the show and writing all the great stuff you do.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys, that's Trita Parsi.
He's at niacouncil.org, the National Iranian American Council, and the books are Treacherous Alliance, A Single Roll of the Dice, and Losing an Enemy.
Yeah, now I'm getting them back again.
That's my new subtitle for his book.
You get it.niacouncil.org.
All right, so you guys know the deal. foolserun.us for the book, scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthortonshow for all the interviews, 4,500 of them now going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at antiwar.com and at libertarianinstitute.org, and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
