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All right, you guys, introducing our good friend Reza Murashi.
He is formerly a State Department weenie, but now he's over at the National Iranian American Council, that's NIACouncil.org, over there with Trita Parsi and them.
And always doing great work trying to wage peace between the United States and Iran and put us in a better position to maintain a long-term peaceful relationship with that country and society.
Welcome back to the show, Reza.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Good.
I'm very happy to hear that.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
It's been too long since we've spoken, and there's so much kind of ridiculous and ironic and weird and important stuff going on in American-Iranian relations.
I almost don't know where to begin, but yeah, I do.
The election, the president, Rouhani, was re-elected, what, just last week, right?
Or was it two weeks ago now?
Yeah, May 19th.
May 19th.
Okay.
So, well, who the hell cares?
What does that have to do with anything?
Well, I think the important thing is that it's no secret to any of your listeners that there are a lot of obstacles as it pertains to Iranian elections.
You have an unelected branch of government in Iran, and you have an elected branch, and the unelected branch puts a lot of obstacles in front of the elected branch, as well as Iranian society writ large.
But despite all of those obstacles that are well-known, despite the fact that Iran's government is more authoritarian than its own people would care for, people turned out to the 70th percentile voter turnout.
I believe it was around 73 or 74 percent.
That's unbelievable.
That's unbelievable, and it's significantly higher than voter turnout in the United States for all of our ...
I think our past 12 or 13 presidential elections.
And that's very noteworthy.
But also, they decided to go out and vote despite all of those obstacles and pick the most pragmatic guy that was allowed to run, in the hope that they can bring about indigenous, peaceful, evolutionary change.
I mean, that can be the only takeaway from this.
You can't say anything else, really, because the Iranian people demonstrated that they don't want the kind of regime change that we've seen in Iraq.
They certainly don't want what's happening in Syria or Libya.
They look around the rest of the region, and they say, you know what?
Our situation certainly isn't good, but at least it's not that bad.
And that sends a powerful message, not only to the international community more generally, but I think the Trump administration more specifically.
Right.
All right, so now, President Hassan Rouhani, I guess, really, I don't know that much about him, Reza, other than he signed the nuclear deal.
He and his government signed the great nuclear deal with, well, the major powers of the world, the UN Security Council, including the United States.
And of course, as we've talked about on the show for years, we already had a deal.
Iran was already a member in good standing of the nonproliferation treaty, and the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot anyway.
But Rouhani, I guess, not only did he push this through, he convinced the supreme leader that you got to let me do this.
We got to have this deal with the Americans.
This was the largest fake, but still the largest outstanding issue between the United States, especially, and Iran was their nuclear program and whether or not it could someday be geared toward a bomb and this and that, the way they always tried to frame it.
And he put this thing to bed, which I think ratcheted down, even including Trump replacing Obama.
I still think that that means that tensions have been ratcheted down by what, like seven points on the dial or something by passing that great deal.
And so I must assume, Reza, that his reelection was, you know, in large measure a referendum on that.
Obviously, Iran's relationship with the United States and the UN powers and all of that is really important.
But on the other hand, that's still just one issue.
And this guy's the president of the whole country.
And I know that when Ahmadinejad was the president, the economy was a really big deal and all that kind of thing.
So I wonder what sort of progress, hope, change, whatever it is supposedly that this guy represents in Iran, do people really perceive him as representing?
How much change do we really have here beyond just here's a guy who did the tough work necessary to come to an agreement with the Americans on the nuclear program?
I think Iranians are very clear eyed.
Iranians inside of Iran are very clear eyed about how much Rouhani can accomplish precisely because Rouhani is a quintessential political insider within Iran's political establishment.
And the reason why he was able to get the nuclear deal done, the reason why he's been able to introduce some positive economic reform measures over the past four years, loosen some social restrictions, obviously, there's much left to be desired on all of those fronts.
But the fact remains, he's cultivated decisions being made by consensus, right?
So that way, regardless of whether the Supreme Leader in Iran is in favor of a decision or opposes a decision, every decision that is presented to the leader for final approval, Rouhani can go to him and say, the vast majority of the political establishment supports this decision.
And that kind of forces to some degree, depending on the issue, the leader to back it as well, because he doesn't want to be on an island by himself, opposing something like the nuclear deal, for example, when society is very clearly in favor of it.
And the majority of Iran's political establishment is very much in favor of it.
So things move much slower in any political system, be it Iran, America, or anywhere else, when decisions are made by consensus, because it takes time and political trade-offs to cultivate that consensus.
But fortunately, when decisions are made by consensus, they have a propensity to stick, because you don't really have that many people outside of the tent trying to weaken those consensus-driven decisions.
And so, well, what difference has his presidency really made for Iranians in terms of, well, for example, the sanctions relief that came as part of the nuclear deal?
Did that amount to any real relief?
I mean, did that really help their economy, take the handcuffs off their economy, at least a little bit?
I guess so.
If he was reelected, then he must have shown some results from that, huh?
There are some results.
It's certainly fair to say that the economic benefits that were derived from the nuclear deal have not trickled down to the average Iranian yet.
It was never going to be the case, though.
I mean, Iran was slapped up with the most draconian sanctions regime in the history of the world.
So this idea that getting the nuclear deal done, and then six to 12 months later, or 18 months later, all of the problems pertaining to Iran's economy, whether they're foreign imposed or just domestic mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, and things of that nature, this idea that all of that would be fixed was always fanciful.
So to a certain degree, there was a bit of an oversell on Rouhani's part at home, right?
Which I'm fairly critical of, because I don't think he needed to oversell it.
The society was very much in favor of this before he overselled it.
And that could have created some backlash when he didn't deliver, right?
Well, it did to a certain extent.
I think one of the many reasons why he won was because people trust his stewardship of the economy more than the people that ran against him on the May 19th election.
But also, he's cultivated arguably the most inclusive political coalition since 1979 inside of Iran, right?
Since the revolution happened.
And so now the only people that are outside of his coalition are the most extreme conservatives, the most extreme hardliners in Iran's political system.
And they were the ones who were running a candidate against Rouhani in the election.
So it's fair to say people voted for Rouhani, but perhaps it's even more fair to say that people voted against the guy that was running versus Rouhani, because they knew that all of the improvements that were made under Rouhani would have been reversed in all likelihood, and more hardships would have probably been coming down the pike.
All right, so I don't think it was in your article, and I'm sorry, I didn't say it's the latest is at Huffington Post, with Rouhani, Iran has extended its hand.
Now the world needs to unclench its fist.
Got that right.
But I don't think it was in here.
But I did read somewhere recently, maybe it was Mohammed Sahimi's piece, where he said Rouhani would very much like to be the Supreme Leader himself one day, which raises the question, I guess I hadn't asked anybody this in a while, I hadn't read anything about this in a while, but they said that the Supreme Leader Khamenei has cancer, right?
Is that a big part of the politics of what's going on here?
Sure.
Anytime you have somebody that is the most powerful man in a country, succession is going to be an issue.
We have elections every four years in the United States, and the president is ostensibly the most powerful person in the country, leader of the free world, as they like to call him.
But people are already talking about unseating Trump, and the guy hasn't even been in office for six months, right?
So it never stops, regardless of where you are.
But obviously, when you see pictures of Iran's Supreme Leader in the hospital after, I believe it was prostate surgery, yeah, the conversation about who succeeds him is going to pick up.
But the dirty little secret that most people don't like to admit is that there's literally no way to predict who will succeed him, and frankly, the process that will lead up to picking the person that succeeds him.
I mean, there's so many political networks and factions inside of Iran, all of them are jockeying for position.
So I think all you can really truly assess at this point is the various steps that different individuals and different stakeholders and different power networks are taking to build as many bargaining chips as possible, to build as much leverage as possible for the inevitable day that comes when you've got to pick a new Supreme Leader.
And holding the presidency like Rouhani does now, you can pick a variety of ministers, you can set the tone for economic policy, you play a significant role in formulating foreign policy, and all of that goes a long way toward building up those aforementioned bargaining chips.
But that's all we can assess at this point.
It's really up in the air in terms of what succession would look like in Iran.
All right, let's talk about the regional civil war going on.
George Bush started it.
Everybody loves saying, oh, these people, they've been fighting for thousands of years, blah, blah, blah, like it's not their responsibility.
In fact, it was in 2003 when Bush marched the 3rd Infantry Division, James Mattis marched his Marines right into Baghdad.
They overthrew the minority Sunni, bought this dictatorship there, and then they fought an eight-year civil war on behalf not just of the Shia parties, but the most Iranian-backed Shia parties.
This helped, you know, I mean, all sides bear responsibility for different parts of it.
This was part of what pushed the Sunnis into the arms of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then eventually the Islamic State in the first place.
Now America's still helping them in the same war in pushing the Islamic State out of Raqqa, these Iranian-backed Shiite militias in the Iraqi army, pushing them out of Mosul, and then eventually in Raqqa to smash the Islamic State.
But so we got a real problem here, Reza, and that is that America is on the side of, well, they're attacking ISIS, but overall in the war, they're on the side of the Sunni split versus the Shiite split.
And we saw this when the Sunni side of the split, I'm going to say that again, the Americans are still on the Sunni side, the Saudi side.
Basically what they did in Iraq War II was a big accident.
It wasn't supposed to work out that way.
So now they're trying to make up for that fact by backing the Saudi policy in Syria and around the region.
And at the heart of their argument is that Iran is still the root of all evil and that Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
Now they never finished the sentence because I think they would have to try to cite an example and they can't.
So they would actually, I think at this point, have the American people believe that it's Iran that's behind ISIS and behind al-Qaeda and this kind of thing.
We do hear rumors like that, oh, al-Qaeda, the Iranians have been protecting them.
And James Mattis, our current secretary of defense has said, boy, don't you think it's a strange coincidence that ISIS never attacks Iran when actually the Iranians are killing ISIS guys all day, every day in Iraq.
Right.
So I don't know if that guy's lying or if he's crazy or what his problem is, but they're clearly enemies.
And yet America's policy is very muddled here.
And I don't know exactly what you guys at NIAC, what your position is here.
I mean, my position is we shouldn't be on any side of this thing.
But it seems like we're almost back where we were 10 years ago, where the narrative of the danger of Iran is so great, it's almost impossible maybe for them to climb down from.
They're working toward a confrontation with this world's greatest state sponsor of terrorism, even though it just isn't even true.
The whole framework of the argument is wrong.
And like I said, all the worst stuff that they've done in this century, George Bush did it for them.
So anyway, I don't know, that was a lot of talking with not much of a question.
But I guess so I wanted to kind of make it broad for you.
You know, what do you make of this whole situation?
How can this thing be scaled back down when America's on the side of our enemies against the guys who should be at least our friends, if not our allies?
No, look, it's a great question.
And there's a lot to unpack.
I think two points stand out to me above all else.
I think the first point that I would make is that, you know, a couple of days ago, the AP reported that the Pentagon investigated and found that more than 100 civilians were killed after a US bomb hit a building in Mosul, Iraq this past March.
And you know, I wonder what we would say if some country bombed a building and killed 100 American civilians.
Might we accuse them of terrorism?
So I think the metric is not evenly applied.
And then it speaks to a larger problem of perpetual war and an over application of militarism in our foreign policy and national security policies.
And at what point, for example, there are negotiations with the Taliban taking place, have taken place at various points over the past five, six, seven years.
And they have these one-off meetings, they don't produce immediate success, and people throw their hands in the air and they say diplomacy has failed.
And yet we've been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 16 years.
No metric of success by any objective measure, right?
And because we don't produce success, we got to put in more troops because that's the answer to producing success.
We're more than willing to overly apply military solutions.
There's not a lot of enthusiasm in the D.C. establishment for diplomatic solutions, whether you're applying it to Iran more specifically or the Middle East or the Muslim world more generally.
And I think that's a big problem.
It's a huge problem that's going to continue to come back and bite America in the backside.
So that's one.
The second point that's kind of more specific to Iran, you know, Iran has rejected American hegemony, American dominance of Middle East security since 1979.
And America has really operated on the premise of if you're willing to accept American hegemony, if you're willing to accept American dominance in the Middle East, then, you know, we kind of turned a blind eye to the way you treat your own people.
You know, there's a reason why we don't criticize human rights in Saudi Arabia or the lack of meaningful elections in Saudi Arabia or the fact that women can't drive in Saudi Arabia or the fact that they behead people in Saudi Arabia or the fact that ISIS was using Saudi textbooks until it produced its own fairly recently, right?
The flip side of that, of course, is that Iran or Assad, Syria or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Gaddafi's Libya rejected this idea of American hegemony, American dominance in the Middle East.
They didn't accept the framework or the architecture that the United States set up and any country that does that.
You know, we essentially try and punch you in the face and realign your society.
And Obama tried with varying degree of results, varying degrees of success to move away from that paradigm because it's not sustainable and it's a recipe for perpetual war.
And I think the Trump administration has, I mean, you can't even call it a 180, is it?
It's more than a 180 because the pendulum has swung so far away from Obama that now U.S. policy in the Middle East is what the Saudis and the Israelis have always wanted.
No president before Trump has given the Saudis and the Israelis everything they want.
And it looks right now, barring some kind of change, that that's exactly what the case is going to be.
And that's not putting America first, that's putting Saudi and Israel first, just so it doesn't make sense.
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Let me ask you this.
If it wasn't for America and Saudi's attempt to overthrow or at least have this kind of half-war against Iran's ally Assad in Damascus, in what way does Iran even oppose American policy?
I mean, other than rhetorically.
What do they ever do?
It's not like they close the Straits of Hormuz or overthrow the Sultan of Oman or, you know, what the hell have they even done?
Yeah.
So, I mean, it depends on what, depends on, you know, like the decade you're talking about, right?
Things that are more contemporary really since 9-11 onward.
I think you can make a fair argument that after we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran was surrounded because both of those countries obviously are on Iran's eastern and western border.
The Iranians had reached out to us and engaged us diplomatically in Afghanistan to great success and then they were put in George W. Bush's Axis of Evil and they reached out after we invaded Iraq and offered to negotiate on all points of contention and the Bush administration summarily rejected that offer.
So then the Iranians decided to do everything in their power to destabilize America's efforts in Iraq through IEDs, creation of militias, et cetera, et cetera, right?
And then obviously Iran has a laundry list of gripes regarding America's actions.
Wait, wait.
I got to stop you there.
I actually just had to reject a really great article over this the other day.
You need to go back, my friend, and look.
Every bit of that was a lie that Iran was behind the EFP copper core explosively formed penetrator roadside bombs in Iraq in 2007.
David Petraeus and his people just made that up.
But in 2006, Patrick Coburn was with soldiers when they found one of the factories making these things in Sadr City and if you just search Gareth Porter, of course, and Phil Giraldi and my own name and EFPs, you'll find article after article after article absolutely debunking this and really showing that the military and the Bush government never provided evidence whatsoever of their claims that Iran was behind the EFPs.
The best they could do was imply the Arabs are too stupid to add copper to their bomb.
Only a Persian could be so sophisticated or some crap like that.
So sorry, but I know it's conventional wisdom and everybody thinks that, but no one ever provided a shred of evidence that that was true.
You're more than welcome to push back on anything that I say.
My understanding is that the Iranians provided the know-how and the training for Iraqis to indigenously produce these things.
But I haven't read the articles that you're talking about, but I certainly will after we finish up the interview.
Okay, cool.
Which, even then, that would be, you know, if an Iranian came and said, hey, you guys ought to use some copper, that would still be a far cry from the way that the Bush government portrayed it.
But anyway, I'm sorry, because I was interrupting you on a minor point.
You were making a larger point about, yeah, no, it's up to some no good sometimes.
I mean, the broader point that I was trying to make is that if you imagined the Middle East as this chessboard, right, and you have America on one side and Iran on the other side, they're essentially competing for influence and power.
Iran has a preference that America not dominate the region, because American domination of the region has been predicated on Iranian exclusion, right?
But that premise never works, regardless of what part of the world you're talking about, because you try and create a framework for security or an architecture for security, whether it's in the Middle East, Asia, or anywhere else, and it's predicated on the exclusion of countries you don't like.
All that does is incentivize those countries to destabilize or weaken the framework that you set up that excludes them.
So until there's a process, which Obama tried to start at the very end of his last term, but ran out of time, clock ran out, what he tried to do was get all of the stakeholders that have a say in the region, the Iranians, the Saudis, the Americans, the Turks, the Russians, everybody, to sit down and talk, right?
And until you have that kind of collective security where everybody's invested in the same framework, everybody's invested in the same architecture, there's never truly going to be security in the region.
And so I make the argument- Well, but the problem there is, right, is you can't ever get anybody to do that without a common enemy.
That's the role Iran serves.
You know, Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek in 1996 or 1997, he said, and I don't even think he was being critical, I think he was just saying, these are the facts of life, he said, if Saddam Hussein did not exist in the Middle East, the United States would have to invent him.
He is the linchpin of our policy.
In other words, how do we keep Saudi and everybody else in line with the threat of Saddam?
Well, now America's undone that, so now it's, you know, default.
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But it was one of these things where it seemed a little bit more credible than what you usually hear about how Iran loves Osama and how after the invasion of Afghanistan, you know, I don't know, half fled to half of Al Qaeda fled to Pakistan, the other half fled to Iran.
And now the way I always understood that was the ones who were caught were put on house arrest.
And that, of course, the famous story from Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett about Iran's attempt to negotiate to turn these.
In fact, they did rendition a lot of them to their home countries.
And then they offered to turn over some of these Al Qaeda leadership guys to the U.S. in exchange for some M.E.K., you know, communist terrorist cultist types that were in the custody of the Americans really, in after 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, where they had been working for Saddam.
But anyway, so I wonder if you can kind of clarify that, because of course, as you know, there's a whole right wing narrative that, you know, never mind Sunni Shia, the Iranians are smart and they know that if Al Qaeda can be strengthened to weaken America, then that's in their interest to do, at least in the short term, and they'll deal with other problems later.
And so they were not on house arrest.
These Al Qaeda guys, they were treated like kings.
And Iran really, you know, the Ayatollah could be counted as an Al Qaeda co-conspirator far from, you know, an imprisoner of their men.
He's basically allied with them.
And I wonder.
And you know what?
I'm trying to be like a little bit devil's advocate here, too, that maybe this can't be entirely dismissed.
I don't know that Soleimani seems like a mean and smart guy.
Maybe he would do that.
Reza, I don't know.
What do you think?
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you mentioned the fact that, you know, Iran was looking for a trade.
So, you know, after we started bombarding Afghanistan and a lot of these top Al Qaeda guys had to flee the country and look for refuge somewhere, particularly people in Osama Bin Laden's family.
You know, my understanding is that they said, here's a place that the Americans will never be able to get us, Iran, because, you know, the United States doesn't have a diplomatic or military presence in the country and hasn't since 1979.
So, there was a debate inside of Iran, too.
Some people said, we don't need this kind of trouble.
Let's not let them in.
And others said, look, you know, this is a way to stack up bargaining chips vis-à-vis the United States.
We can try and trade them for MEK people.
And it didn't end up happening that way.
So, then Iran has these people and you kind of back yourself into a corner and you're like, well, what do we do with them?
I mean, I think an article came out fairly recently.
I can't remember where it was.
Maybe it was in the New Yorker or something like that where, you know, there was a long article that talked about how these people were detained in Iran predominantly by the IRGC.
They were not living like kings.
They were essentially in prison.
It wasn't house arrest.
And, you know, eventually they escaped.
So, it's kind of one of those things where the Iranians didn't make a good strategic decision.
I say with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, but I wouldn't have made the decision they made at the time.
But I get why they did it.
They were trying to build up the bargaining chips that they had to try and do a trade with the United States.
But the track record of Al-Qaeda not liking Iran because they're Shia Muslims is crystal clear.
Iran's willingness to fight against Al-Qaeda, crystal clear.
Iran almost went to war with the Taliban because they abducted and killed Iranian diplomats in 1998.
The history, crystal clear.
And, not coincidentally, when the Obama administration removed the U.S. military presence from the Iran-Afghanistan border, Iran's behavior in Afghanistan, as we often like to speak about it here in the United States, improved.
So, there are ways to de-conflict when you acknowledge that other countries actually have interests.
And that doesn't mean that you capitulate to them, but it means that you can engage them in some kind of substantive, sustained fashion to make sure that the worst possible outcome, fighting each other, doesn't end up happening.
And even perhaps there's some overlap of interests where you can cooperate if, in fact, that is the case.
And Afghanistan is a prime example.
Well, yeah, and of course, just like in Iraq, we've been fighting for the Iranian side in Afghanistan.
The Hazaras are a huge part of the Kabul coalition government from the days of the Northern Alliance in 2001, from the start of the war.
We're on their side, even if we won't talk to them and work with them about it.
You know, in fact, there's even been stories where the Americans are complaining from a few years ago that, oh, the Iranians are giving all this money to Hamid Karzai, and we're mad about that.
Well, what does that tell you, other than we're their allies, whether we like it or not?
Yeah, I mean, again, it's one of those things where our policies in the Middle East are becoming increasingly hard to defend.
I would argue they've been very hard to defend for quite some time, particularly since 9-11, but even before 9-11.
We had some pretty dumb policies in the part of the world during Bill Clinton as well.
So, you know, Republicans and Democrats deserve their fair share of criticism, Bush being the top of the criticism pile, in my humble opinion, for starting the Iraq war.
But look, you know, we're in a situation now where we can do one of two things.
We can do one of two things.
We can ratchet up the tension and get bogged down in another war that benefits nobody that's an American, and certainly causes more death and destruction in a region that's already rife with it.
Or we can engage diplomatically with all countries in the region, balance them against one another, and that's a way that actually benefits American interests in a more long-term, sustained fashion.
That's what Obama was trying to do.
The clock ran out.
Sadly, it looks like the Trump administration is moving away from something that was never truly tested in a sustained fashion, and reverting back to something that's been a proven failure over many decades.
All right.
I'm sorry I've kept you too long, but I wanted to go back to one thing that you were saying before about that recording of John Kerry talking about Hezbollah and saying, well, yeah, you know, we're not attacking them because – and, you know, they're fighting al-Qaeda more than ISIS even, I think.
And the al-Qaeda guys are working in the American coalition there in Syria.
But he says, as you say there, the quote is, because they're not attacking the United States.
And yet, back to the beginning of this interview, the premise of the whole discussion of Iran in the world, at least as it takes place in this country, is Iran is the greatest state supporter of terrorism on the planet.
Iran is mother, says Michael Ledeen, causing people to wonder about his relationship with his mother.
And yet, the best argument anybody's got that they back terrorism in the world is they back Hezbollah, which, as you say, the Secretary of State in private will concede, meh, is really not a threat to the United States of America whatsoever.
Hezbollah hasn't attacked America since 1983, and in fact, that was the Amal militia, not Hezbollah.
I firmly believe that the way that America chooses what is and is not a terrorist organization is oftentimes politicized.
And that's unfortunate, because when American lives are at stake, it doesn't make a lot of sense from a policy perspective or a moral perspective to politicize that.
It weakens the concept, it weakens the cause.
So until we can universally apply a set of standards to friend and foe alike when they are supporting organizations that want to engage in terrorism against the United States of America, we're going to continue to have convoluted policy that doesn't make sense, that ends up hurting the country in the long run, and empowers countries that are willing to have more practical policies that are opposing American interests in a non-military fashion.
All right.
Hey, listen, man.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Reza.
Great stuff.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That is Reza Marashi.
He tolerates me.
Occasionally I have him on.
Poor guy sits there and listens to me rant.
Niacouncil.org.
Niacouncil.org.
That is Reza and Trita Parsi and Tyler Cullis and a lot of great guys doing a lot of great work over there for peace between America and Iran.
Niacouncil.org.
And again, his latest in the Huffington Post is called, With Rouhani, Iran has extended its hand.
Now the world needs to unclench its fist.
I'm Scott Horton.
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