07/14/15 – Reza Marashi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Again, joined on the phone from Vienna, Austria, by Reza Mirashi.
He is research director at the National Iranian-American Council, and for that, he spent years in the US State Department, working in the Office of Iranian Affairs there.
How you doing, Reza?
I'm doing well, how about yourself?
I'm doing good.
Congratulations, celebrations.
I hope you're not too drunk already from partying over there, or maybe you don't drink.
I appreciate the kind words.
I think that, you know, most people here are in a good mood because they've seen something historic and unprecedented happen, but we're also clear-eyed about the challenges that lie ahead, so it's not a matter of resting on your laurels, it's a matter of acknowledging the success that's happened so far, and making sure you can see that success through to its completion.
All right, so lots to tackle here, but first of all, is there anything, as far as you know, or I don't know if you've had a chance to read very much of it, or the whole thing yet, or what, if you guys kind of divided up the task or whatever, but anyway, is there anything in there that's substantially different or really notable compared to the last round of celebrations when they announced the framework for the final deal a couple months ago?
Yeah, well, we got a pretty good idea of the various technical limitations that Iran will make to its nuclear program when it comes to the actual facilities that it has, and will have going into the future, when the Lausanne framework in early April was announced, but now we have a much better idea about just how intrusive and how, and the depth and the scope of inspections and verifications will be for Iran's nuclear program.
Dare I say it's unprecedented in the history of the world, and Iran will be the most heavily inspected nuclear program in the history of the world, so that's a good thing.
We've also learned a little bit about how Iran is going to emerge from the shackles of UN Security Council resolutions.
There is a process for it, and what's notable about that is that Iran is going to be the first country that was under Chapter 7 to emerge without having been bombed, and I think lawyers from both the Iranian side and the American side deserve a ton of credit for literally creating a pathway that did not exist prior to this negotiation.
And then, of course, last but not least, at the risk of rambling, there was a very specific detail provided about the kind of tangible sanctions relief that Iran will receive over the duration of this deal that wasn't fleshed out when the framework was agreed upon in Lausanne.
So there was a lot of heavy lifting that was done, and a beast of a document has been released, the comprehensive deal.
It's available on the Internet, and the amount of granularity and detail that they go into is actually quite impressive.
All right, now I admit I only had a chance to briefly skim over the very beginning of it this morning so far, but so now a few things there.
When you talk about the amount of detail there, I'm seeing a tweet by a guy named James Acton from the Carnegie Endowment, and he calls himself a nuclear nerd or some kind of nuclear expert, and he's saying about the annex regarding the Arak reactor, that's A-R-A-K, the Arak reactor, that, holy cow, this is detailed.
But that brings up another aspect of this, which is the scaling back of the nuclear program in Iran as it exists at present.
Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what difference does it make, Arak pre-agreement versus now?
Yeah, I think the Arak facility is essentially going to be reconfigured as a joint project between the U.S. and Iran so that it's not going to produce the kind of heavy water that you would have previously seen it produce had the deal not been struck, and that reduces the overall proliferation risk.
That's the most important thing that I think emerges from that aspect of it.
But I think even more important than, well, not more important than reducing the proliferation risk, but equally important, is this idea of joint U.S.-Iran collaboration, and also this idea of two sides that had been talking for over 30 years, finding ways to produce mutually acceptable solutions.
That's not something that really had happened at any point in time, short of in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
So when you combine all of these things together, the political side and the technical side, it's pretty impressive.
Yeah, that is impressive.
What you're saying is they could have said, okay, well you and the Russians reconfigure Arak, but what they agreed instead was the Americans would work with them on it.
American scientists would go over to, and it's conversion to a light water facility, is that right?
That's right.
So in other words, it produces plutonium as waste, but very, very polluted plutonium that they don't even have a facility to reprocess to make weapons fuel out of it.
So in other words, the pretension of danger of Arak will be lifted now.
That's right.
That's right.
And not only because of the actual limitations that are made, by the way, but because of, like the tweet that you mentioned, it goes into painstaking detail about what each side has to do, because neither side wanted to leave anything open to interpretation.
Neither side wanted to leave any ambiguities.
And in the event that an unanticipated ambiguity pops up, they have joint adjudication mechanisms and commissions that can resolve this kind of stuff.
So again, in ways that we really haven't seen with other agreements in the past pertaining to nuclear programs generally, or U.S.-Iran more specifically, the details here are absolutely tremendous and exhaustive.
All right.
Now, so if I saw criticism of it, that wasn't just boo-hoo, Bill Kristol saying, well, whoever said they were a nuclear threat?
And these guys, I don't know what these guys are talking about.
But anyway, the credible, seemingly possibly credible criticism I saw this morning, the one standing alone, was regarding one of those commissions that you talked about.
And it was about the inspections of military facilities, so-called suspected ones, although I think that's being generous.
But anyway, we'll give them that.
And they say, well, if they want to inspect a place and Iran says no, then it gets kicked back to this commission.
And then the commission votes, and then they have this many days to go ahead and respond and obey the new commission ruling and this kind of thing.
And you add it all up, it's 25 days.
And that's enough for the Iranians to do a test of some kind and then stonewall for, you know, almost a month while they skedaddle all the important stuff out the back door.
And so I wonder whether you think that that's a real risk.
No, I think that that risk is overstated because no activity that Iran could take could remove criminalizing traces of radiation.
So if Iran conducts some kind of violation, it can be detected.
And, you know, I think that that's just the reality of how these things work at the end of the day.
I think we should be intellectually honest about that.
I would go a step further and say that when people present these kinds of criticisms, they don't present viable alternatives.
They criticize what's in front of them, and they don't do it in the most honest way.
But they also don't say we should do this instead.
The reality of the situation is that anytime, anywhere inspections was never going to be a viable scenario.
And you've seen the P5-plus-1 members, including the United States, come out and say that very openly.
Sovereignty issues, national security issues, and espionage concerns were all treated as legitimate on the part of what Iran considered to be in its interests and what Iran considered to be its concerns.
Taking that into account, what we do have as a result of this deal is managed access.
If there's reason to believe on the part of the international community that a particular site inside of Iran needs to be inspected, the Iranians are approached together with the IAEA.
The process is worked through.
And frankly, at this point, both sides have an interest in making sure that this process goes smoothly, because neither side wants this process to collapse, given the tremendous political investment that's been made.
So again, if people are going to criticize what has been constructed in this deal, they should give you as detailed of an explanation of why it's bad as I just gave you of why it's good.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that nobody has been able to do that thus far.
Yeah, no, and again, that's the one, you know, even substantive criticism I found trolling around the right-wing complaints on Twitter today.
Instead, it's all just hyperbole.
I mean, I won't even trouble you with Lindsey Graham's comments here.
But, you know, for example, Tom Cotton, the hawkish freshman senator, says it's a dangerous mistake and it's going to pave the path for Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
And that, just like you're saying there, is glaringly deficient of details.
What is he talking about?
We're going from what to what here.
We're going from more centrifuges to less.
We're going from plenty of inspections to unheard of inspections.
And so, yeah, again, he doesn't have to say what he's talking about.
He just bloviates it.
Whoops.
And I talked right up into the break.
Hang on one second, Reza.
We'll be right back.
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Alright guys, welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
So today's the big day.
They did it.
They've announced the Iran deal.
There's a lot to it, a lot to be happy about in that, and a lot still to come, still to be fought for, as Reza Marashi says.
Again, he's at the National Iranian American Council, that's niacouncil.org, and they've done so much to push for this de facto peace deal.
After all, this is the gigantic, fake, but still gigantic, outstanding issue between the United States and Iran, the the strawman excuse for our Cold War, and now it's coming to an end.
And so, you know, there's a possibility of a lot better future here if this thing is seen through.
Now, so where we left off, we're talking about the the inspections of the military sites, and you know, the way that this is spun is, oh my god, they must be hiding something here, there, the other thing.
And so I wanted to mention that, first of all, there's every reason to believe, including from the analysis of former very high-level IAEA, American IAEA officials, that all the accusations about what supposedly happened at Parchin are ridiculous, and the IAEA has even been there and inspected already before.
The IAEA was invited to inspect out at Maravan, where there were some accusations, and they declined to even go to look at what apparently they don't believe they'll find out there.
There's really kind of no reason to really think that that's credible.
But then, secondly, I also wanted to raise, because I'm sure this is something that you probably wouldn't put it this way, but I think it's important for people to think about this, is what if, you know, Russia, China, France, Britain, and the United Nations and Iran were all insisting that UN inspectors get to go to American military bases whenever they want to inspect whatever they want?
I mean, never mind the Army, the American people would not tolerate that, would not allow it to happen, right?
One way or the other, that would that would be an absolutely intolerable violation of our independence, and so it's pretty easy when you think of it that way, to see it from their point of view, that look, you can inspect our bases, but we got to have an agreement to do so.
And again, as you said Reza, all of the inertia here is for everybody to get along and see this deal through, not for the Iranians to screw it up over one little military base, or for that matter, for the Americans to either, right?
Yeah, I mean, nothing about this deal is predicated on trust.
We know where all of Iran's nuclear facilities are, and we are monitoring the entire production and supply chain of every single aspect of this program.
So, if Iran were to cheat, it would have to be one of two ways.
They would either cheat in facilities that they currently have, their track record of getting caught doing that is damn near 100%, if not 100%, or they would have to create a completely brand new parallel nuclear program with all new facilities, all new infrastructure.
It's taken them this long to construct a Rube Goldberg type piecemeal nuclear program with various parts assembled from all over the world.
It doesn't even work properly.
That's why such a big deal of the, that's why such a big part of this deal is nuclear safety, right?
So, the idea that they could do this all over again, on their own, with the most rigorous inspections regime in the history of the world, monitoring what they do, and the entire intelligence community of every major global power in the world honing in on them, kind of stretches the limits of believability.
Right.
Nothing in life is 100%, but in my humble opinion, this is pretty damn close.
All right, now, so here's the thing about this.
You know, of course, I completely agree with that.
We're going from a safeguarded program to an additionally protocoled safeguarded program, and then some scaled back and doubly inspected and all these things.
No question about that.
But, is that going to stop the war party?
Because they haven't been relying on the truth for their arguments this whole time.
So, what difference does it really make?
And they're willing to shift the goalposts around, change definitions of words, and do whatever they want.
So, you know, the narrative that Iran is the great Satan is still far from, you know, debunked and extinguished in Washington, DC.
Well, I think that the majority, not everybody, but the majority of people who opposed this deal didn't fully oppose it on the grounds of Iran shouldn't have a nuclear program.
Because the majority of people that opposed this program opposed it before Iran was spinning a single centrifuge.
If you look back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same people that were calling for sanctions on Iran back then, the same people that pushed for sanctions in Congress in 1995, when Iran wasn't spinning any centrifuges, didn't cite a nuclear program as the reason for sanctions.
They cited a whole different set of reasons of why Iran's behavior is objectionable.
So, what does that mean at the end of the day?
It means some people think Iran's behavior is objectionable, some people don't.
But even now that the nuclear issue has the potential to be solved and put to rest once and for all, they're raising a whole nother set of issues.
So, the reality is they just don't like the regime.
And that's fine, you're entitled to not like the regime, but if you don't like the regime and you want to get rid of the regime, then you need a viable plan to do so.
And it's not a coincidence that nobody in the United States or anywhere else in the world has that viable plan, because if it existed they would have done it by now.
All right, now I feel like I have to mention this today just because there's a chance you didn't see it and you might want to laugh.
Bill Kristol quotes Aaron David Miller on CNN saying they will get money for dropping a weapon they never had and access to more weapons to spend the money on.
So, of course, get money he means the sanctions will be lifted, they'll get their own money, not that they're being put on the dole like Egypt or Israel or something like that.
Just that we'll stop stealing from them so much is what he means by get money.
And then dropping a weapon they never had he means, I guess, dropping a weapons program they never had.
Stop doing what they weren't doing is what was just negotiated.
And of course that's what we've been arguing all along, is that they're not even making nuclear weapons anyway and now Bill Kristol agrees in order to make his argument that the whole thing is for nothing and that, oh no, now we're dropping sanctions and all we're getting is that their civilian nuclear program is going to remain safeguarded.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of rich that somebody like Bill Kristol would complain that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon because he oftentimes cited that as one of his primary concerns.
But that's neither here nor there.
When it comes to the sanctions issue and the amount of money that Iran will get, we need to be honest about not just the amount, which will be slightly over 100 billion dollars, but how they will receive that money, which will be in phases, not one lump sum, because not even the Iranian government wants to try and absorb 100 billion dollars in one fellow swoop.
The kind of impact that that has on an economy, any economy, would be disastrous.
So it'll probably be broken into multiple payments, four or five, maybe six.
I'm not entirely sure yet but I have to double check.
So it's important to point out that this 100 billion dollars has already been allocated and budgeted in the Iranian, in this year's and in future years Iranian government budget, for domestic purposes.
Now, there's no guarantee that what Iran plans for domestic purposes now, they'll adhere to going into the future.
But for all these proponents of sanctions, wouldn't one think that if Iran starts doing things that we don't like, if it has objectionable behavior that we don't like, whether it's related to its nuclear program or support for terrorism in the region or anything else for that matter, that those sanctions that they love so much can be used as tools to try and deter such behavior.
So they can't have it both ways.
You have to pick and choose.
And it would make everything a lot easier if more people were like Bill Kristol and they just said they wanted war.
Because then it's easy to have the argument of people who want it and people who don't.
When you make arguments that are intellectually dishonest, by saying sanctions work, but then they didn't work.
Iran wants a bomb, but they don't have a bomb.
Make up your mind.
Which one is it?
The American people deserve an honest conversation.
Right.
Yeah, they're so crazy nuclear war can't deter them.
But a little bit more time with the sanctions will completely break them to our will.
Okay.
Well, there's not a lot of evidence in the history of the world.
There's just not a lot of evidence.
You know what?
Never mind the fact that there's not a lot of evidence.
Secretary Kerry said something very compelling at the podium today.
He essentially called people naive if they believed that sanctions would force Iranian capitulation.
Now, I think that's remarkable because two short years ago, the talking point of the US government was the sanctions are working, the sanctions have forced the Iranians back to the table, and the sanctions will continue if the Iranians don't negotiate in good faith.
Which one is it?
If sanctions can't force the Iranians or any other country into capitulation, then all really sanctions can do is give you leverage so that when you come to the negotiating table, you can bargain the sanctions away.
If you don't bargain the sanctions away, they become like a blunt instrument.
Pretend you're holding a baseball bat and you just start whacking a country over and over again.
Is that country going to sit there and just take it?
Or are they going to fight back?
Well, in the case of Iran, as Secretary Kerry acknowledged today, they fought back.
And that escalated the conflict to the point where both sides got close to a war.
Neither side wanted a war.
And in my humble opinion, fortunately, they stepped back from the brink and cooler heads prevail.
Well, the way you said on the show the other day really rang true to me and some listeners, too, who responded about this when you said that it was the Iranian expansion of their nuclear program that brought America to the table.
And in fact, this is something that Gareth Porter had said on the show for years when it came to enrichment up to 20% and the Ford OCOM facility, that basically all of that they were doing, I mean, they had domestic needs for it, but it was really a big fat bargaining chip.
Here's a giant thing that now we've done that we could give up as something to negotiate because they really didn't need it, you know, not that much anyway.
So tell me if I'm right, that now Congress would have to successfully vote this down.
They don't have to ratify it for it to be a real thing in the Senate with two-thirds or anything like that.
They would have to vote it down in order to kill it, but they would have to really be able to override the president's veto and they don't really stand a chance of doing that, right?
Yeah, Congress can, you know, they can vote for, they can vote against, or they can abstain, and right now, according to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, they don't have the votes.
That's what they've told the Prime Minister of Israel directly.
Prime Minister of Israel has directed or told or suggested, depending on who you talk to, that AIPAC proceed anyway.
So there will be a fight on the Hill, and it's not just going to be AIPAC, there's going to be others as well, and I think that it's a fight that the president can win because he's going to fight this fight the same way that he fought the Obamacare fight.
He's going to appeal to the national interest of the United States as opposed to the individual political interest of politicians, and I think that's going to be enough when you have military validators, intel validators, former statesmen, current statesmen validators coming out, and by the way, the majority of the international community and all of the global powers coming to Washington and being validated as well.
It's going to be a pretty powerful case that's going to be made on the Hill, and Secretary Kerry said it great at the podium today here in Vienna.
He said it would be a shame if Congress made the United States unable to fulfill our commitments according to this deal because that would be Congress turning its back on the international community.
Those are really powerful words.
Well, and also, as you mentioned on the show before, it'd be backstabbing the American people that want this deal.
And so really, regardless of what the French say...
Yes, I think the American people, yeah.
All right, anyway, hey man, great work, and congratulations because you do have a part in this, and to Trita and the rest of you guys, too, and thanks very much again for your time.
Cool, thanks man.
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