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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.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say 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 Trita Parsi.
He is the president of the National Iranian American Council.
They work on peace between our country and that of the Persians.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
Thank you so much for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you here as always.
So tell me, what do you think about Trump's big tweet last night?
Well, I think he's revealing and taking away any doubt that people may have had that his ultimate objective is confrontation with Iran.
And this is a policy that definitely is being pushed by both the government in Saudi Arabia and the Netanyahu government in Israel that actually took credit on video for having convinced Trump to kill the nuclear deal.
So this is a very dangerous moment.
And I know some people are saying, hey, but this looks similar to what he did with North Korea.
He was talking about fire and fury, and then he went back to the negotiating table.
True.
But in the case of North Korea, the countries around North Korea, allies of the United States as well as competitors, opposed war and favored diplomacy and pushed hard for diplomacy.
In the case of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE want to see the United States to go to war with Iran, and they are dead set against any diplomacy.
And they have enough influence in this town, in Washington, D.C., to sabotage any unlikely pivot by Trump towards diplomatic negotiations.
Well, I mean, and that's presuming that he even really is playing that bad cop game with himself in the first place here.
But yeah, it sure doesn't look like it.
We already had a deal, the JCPOA.
Exactly.
We didn't have one with Korea because Bush ruined that.
What he's doing right now is not helping get a new one.
Yeah.
So but now, on the other hand, the war with Iran is just, man, we've been talking about this forever.
Everybody knows this.
General James Mattis knows this.
You can't have a war with Iran without, well, as Rouhani put it, the mother of all wars.
It'll make Iraq look like nothing.
Certainly.
But reality is that Mattis seems to be on his way out.
And rumors are that he's going to be replaced by Tom Cotton.
And with someone like Tom Cotton, rest assured, we'll have a war, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the cost, regardless of anything else.
God, can you imagine Tom Cotton as the Secretary of Defense?
I mean, if that happens, I'm moving to Mexico, you know.
Pompeo at State, Cotton at Defense, and then you, of course, have Bolton as NSC, and then you have the clueless Trump at the center of all of this.
Yes, under those circumstances, and we're already very close to it, it is far more dangerous to underestimate the risk of war than to overestimate it.
Yeah.
Boy, and you know, Tom Cotton, especially when he fought for Iran in Iraq War II, and now he's mad at himself for it and wants to take it out on them.
Yeah.
Tired of these hawks pretending that this isn't all their fault in the first place.
Why, Trita, look, Iran has expanded their power and influence all the way to Baghdad somehow.
Aren't you upset at them?
I mean, and to talk about the conversation here in Washington, when people are saying Iran's influence is too big, or the way they talk about Iran's influence is as if, how dare the Iranians have influence?
Why should they even have any?
Which is a completely bizarre outlook.
You can be opposed to Iran's negative influence and try to manage it, but to try to eliminate a country as large as Iran's influence in the region is a complete pipe dream, and it's a recipe for endless war, not just war, endless war.
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Well, and you know, a big part of this, like you're saying, um, Trump is obviously just so ignorant and so impatient and surrounded by hawks that he doesn't have anyone to explain to him that, look, the Ayatollah hates Ayman al-Zawahiri, so who's side are you on, pal?
Or something like that.
He doesn't know.
And then, you know, Pompeo, for a right-wing lunatic hawk friend of Frank Gaffney, seems kind of grown up compared to Tom Cotton and John Bolton.
But God, you get all these guys together, man.
There's not anyone in the room to say, well, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, that's part of the problem.
And, you know, the balancing voices inside the administration are more or less all chased out.
Congress clearly is not playing that role and may not be able to play that role next year either, unless there is a change in the makeup of Congress.
This is a very dangerous moment.
It is not at all the way it was with North Korea, in which there were exit ramps and there were pressures from allies and competitors to pursue diplomacy rather than war.
Well, and by the way, we didn't say, but at the beginning here, the tweet last night, the statement from the president was, to Iranian President Rouhani, and then all caps, NEVER EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.
Yeah, pretty tough talk.
It certainly doesn't come across as a strategy for diplomacy.
All right.
Well, so what's anybody going to do about it?
And what are we going to do?
Well, people have to organize.
I think they have to make sure that this is a top issue when they go to the elections in November, that they really make clear that they're not looking for any other wars in the Middle East.
In fact, I think a lot of folks that supported Trump did so precisely because they did believe that he is going to be more restrained in his foreign policy than Hillary Clinton was going to be.
Now we know that even if that may, even if Hillary had hawkish tendency, that Trump is extremely reckless in the way that he is pursuing foreign policy and that he is extremely transactional.
He has given the Israelis and the Saudis far more influence on his policy than any previous administration that I'm aware of.
Yeah, I mean, for the record, Bush and Obama both told the Israelis, no.
Yeah.
We're not doing this.
Exactly.
I mean, the Israelis were pushing very hard in 2060, 2008.
And even with Dick Cheney in the White House echoing their arguments, Bush still said no.
And he said no, because he realized what a disaster it would be.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the problem is, too, is if the Democrats do real well in the midterms, that won't be interpreted as the Americans are against war with Iran.
That'll be interpreted as a big victory for the Russia hawks.
It certainly could be.
But this is where the public needs to make sure that they're very vocal about this and making sure that they do say that this is an important issue for them.
If that is vocalized, then I think people will correctly interpret it as it is a rejection of Trump's reckless foreign policy.
Yeah.
I mean, but the problem is, you know, we got the spin on NBC and CNN will be the American people obviously disapprove of his attempt to negotiate with Kim and with Putin and that what we need is, you know, good right wing Democrat hawks to protect us.
There is a risk that the correction to Trump will be some form of an overcorrection, particularly on Russia, in which Washington will compete with itself by who can be most anti-Moscow.
There certainly is a risk for that.
But I would say that, again, if people are vocalizing this the right way, I think people will draw the right conclusion and the pundits will draw the right conclusion that saying no to Trump is not a rejection with diplomacy with Russia.
It's the rejection of endless war in the Middle East.
Well, you know, it's funny, man.
We talked about this back then.
Obama's policy as he's making the JCPOA and working on the JCPOA, he's and he said in plain English to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic why he was backing al-Qaeda in Syria against Bashar al-Assad.
It's to help take Iran down a peg because Bashar al-Assad in Syria was an ally of Iran and helps Iran arm Hezbollah.
And so as he's ratcheting down tensions with Iran over their nuclear program, their civilian safeguarded nuclear program, he's doing this, you know, hardcore anti-Iranian policy in Syria.
Now, Trump comes in and says, well, I don't want to overthrow Assad.
He calls off CIA support for the al-Qaeda suicide bomber headchopper terrorists a year ago.
But then he's 10 times worse on Iran and gets out of the JCPOA.
I wonder, I mean, is there any consistency with any of these people?
Or it's just, well, we have to let this faction win on this policy debate and we have to let this faction win on this policy debate.
And so it all comes out completely incoherent or what?
It is.
Incoherence is the only coherence that is taking place right now.
There's a lot of incoherence.
But if you scratch the surface, you do see that the trajectory of this is exactly what the Saudis and the Israelis have been pushing for, which is to drive matters towards a confrontation with Iran.
Yeah, I got Iran right now.
Okay, good deal.
Thanks, appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Trita Parsi.
He's at NIAC, the National Iranian American Council, seeking peace between the U.S. and Iran.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
