I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at ScottHorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
You guys, on the line, I've got Trita Parsi.
Now, he did found and run the National Iranian American Council, and boy, did they do a lot of good work when he was running that thing.
And now he's, of course, the co-founder and the something fancy title at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and you can read their great website at ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
It's basically like Jim Loeb's blog, only gone big time.
It's awesome.
And so welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
Doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing great, and you understand I'm a Jim Loeb worshiper, so I like what you did.
I see what you're doing there, and I like it.
Now I just need to find the right tab, because I got a lot of tabs open.
You did this really great study, No Clean Hands, here it is, No Clean Hands with Matthew Petty over there at Quincy, the interventions of Middle Eastern powers, 2010 through 2020.
And of course, by Middle Eastern powers, you mean the United States of America and its allies.
But it's great, because you talk all about the different interventions between them all in all different directions, not overly simplified Sunni-Shia divides or things like that, although obviously that's part of it.
But also you guys do this, I guess, PhD stuff where you go through and you just try to quantify it all and say, okay, well, these countries intervened, we'll give them a score of a three for their level of intervention in this year and that year and whatever, try to shake out some data out of the thing.
So I guess my question for you is, what did you learn, Trita?
So what we did, what Matt Petty and I did here is that we put to test this very common, however, rather cartoonish picture that dominates Washington in terms of trying to explain our own failures in the Middle East, which is that we blame all of the instability on a single bad actor, the malign actor.
Iran, mostly.
Yeah.
Iran mostly, but it was Qaddafi for a period of time, it was Saddam for a period of time, it was Hafez al-Assad for a period of time, but for the last 20 years, it's mostly been Iran.
And try to see, you know, is there any truth to this?
So we used an existing scoring system developed by a university in Sweden on how to essentially score the interventions, military interventions of countries.
We made some amendments to it, ran the data for the last 10 years to see if this was true.
And if it was true, you know, Iran would have been an outlier.
It would have been just dramatically more interventionist than everyone else.
And by that, having contributed far more to instability in the region than anyone else.
But lo and behold, that was not the picture.
On the contrary, we saw six countries in the Middle East that are roughly equally interventionist.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and the UAE.
Amongst them, there's essentially two layers, the top and the bottom layer.
Saudi, Qatar, and Israel are a little bit lower.
And then you have Turkey, Iran, and the UAE at the top.
What is perhaps two of the most surprising things in all of this, or at least for those who have been believing the nonsense coming out of the Washington foreign policy establishment, is A, that for the last couple of years, Turkey and the UAE have been more interventionist than the Iranians have.
But that has gone completely unnoticed by the media coverage, because the coverage has almost exclusively focused on Iran.
And secondly, and this is probably the bigger point, five out of the six most interventionist countries in the Middle East are armed and politically supported by the United States.
Their interventions and the instability it causes is the lion's share of the instability in the Middle East.
Now, there's a positive in all of this, which is we actually have leverage over these countries.
And if we truly wanted stability in the region, the low hanging fruit is actually to put pressure on our own security partners who we have leverage over, in order to, at a minimum, first start to get them to stop fighting with each other.
Because that's the other part of the story.
Most of the interventions they're doing is not fighting Iran.
They're fighting each other.
Turkey and the UAE right now are turning Libya into an even worse place than it was after the intervention, because of their power struggle there.
Those are two U.S. security partners.
Turkey is a treaty ally.
But we're not doing that, because we're obsessing over one single actor.
And by doing that, we're missing the larger picture, and we're failing to do what we claim we want to do.
That is not to say that there shouldn't be pressure on Iran, because indeed, Iran is a very interventionist country in the Middle East.
But it's no way, shape, or form alone.
It's not necessarily the worst.
And just addressing Iran will not change the picture in the Middle East.
Now, you know, one thing that you need in here, or maybe you have, is, from the American point of view, a hypocrisy factor, too, right?
So for example, if you say Iran gets four points for all their intervention in Iraq after 2003, and their, you know, heavy support for the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party and the federalism program and all that there, then you also have to turn around and take two points away, because it was the United States of America that did all of that for them.
Just the same as our intervention in Syria was meant to limit Assad's friendship with Iran, and instead made him even more dependent on Iran than ever before, even for his very survival.
And so give Iran a few points for sending their Quds Force to intervene in Syria, and then take a few away since they were only helping defend Syria from al-Qaeda and the CIA.
Right?
So, so let me, let me say this.
If we had included the United States in the data, I have no doubt that it would have been the most interventionist state.
It's involved in almost all of these different arenas.
But we wanted to focus just on the states that are actually situated in the Middle East.
Don't just have military presence there for this study.
I think it would be fascinating to do it bigger.
But on your second point, what we wanted to really avoid is to make judgments as to whether this intervention is good or justified, and that intervention is aggressive and unjustified.
We treated them all the same, just to be able to see who's doing it and who's not doing it.
Then you can go deeper into it, of course, and try to make those judgments.
But I have to say, it's very difficult to make those judgments, because at the end of the day, most of these states, obviously at a minimum, will put forward a defense of saying that their intervention is defensive.
The Iranians will say that they're coming to the aid of the recognized government in Syria.
The Saudis will say that they're doing exactly the same in Yemen, because they're allying with the existing government there.
We wanted to just put away all of that stuff, because at the end of the day, it tends to make it more confusing than clarifying, and just look at who's doing it and who's not doing it.
And unfortunately, as the title of the report says, there are no clean hands in the Middle East.
Yeah.
I mean, it's also really interesting, right, that I guess if you zoom out further, you have pretty much a Sunni bloc, including Turkey and Jordan and Israel, along with the whole GCC and the Arabian Peninsula there, sort of versus Iran.
But then you do have these major splits within the GCC, and including, you know, as you're mentioning Turkey there, too, but you had Saudi and UAE kind of lay siege to Qatar there.
Can you talk about that?
How many points do they get for that on the scale?
Well, they get points for that, without a doubt, because, you know, that's an intervention, and it could have even been worse, because there were Saudi plans to just move in, occupy Qatar and change its regime, and that would have scored even higher.
So all of those different things, all of the interventions have been codified, and there's a variety of them.
Some of them are, you know, training militias.
Some of them are actually moving in troops.
Some of them are actually doing a coup d'etat or doing an occupation.
All of it has already been developed by this university in Sweden.
We used it.
We made some amendments to it and just scored it.
Another thing that I think comes out of this is also very, very important.
This is not in any way, shape, or form trying to defend or justify all of these governments that are doing it.
But it's also important to recognize that a lot of these interventions come as a result of instability, as much as they also drive instability.
So when you have a situation in which there are major demonstrations in Syria, for instance, which early on were indigenous, and you start to see the collapse of the state, that then tends to suck in other countries into it.
I'm not saying it's right.
I'm just saying that it tends to do it.
And then their interventions further exasperate instability.
But oftentimes, it is a bit of instability that ends up being the trigger for it, which to learn them from that, what we should be learning from this is we should not be pursuing policies such as broad-based sanctions that destroy societies and destroy states.
Because as we do that, we just need a little bit of it.
And then suddenly, you have a vacuum that the regional states feel that they have to go in and fill.
They start intervening.
They may think they're doing it defensively to create stability, all that kind of stuff.
But it tends to then attract other interventionists.
And lo and behold, you have what is called a shit show.
Yeah, exactly.
A.K.A. the last 20 years, last 30, last 40 over there.
Man.
All right.
Well, so especially now on Iran, or well, I guess overall, is there you're saying their scores are all within just a couple of points of each other, something there's no one power sticks out as the most interventionist?
There's no power that is really sticking out.
And you know, there's some that obviously can be said that are worse than others.
You know, consistently, Iran has been higher.
So it has been more interventionist.
At the same time, Iran is a much bigger country for a much bigger landmass, has far more neighbors than a country like UAE does.
So for a tiny country like UAE to actually score higher than Iran is quite astonishing, because at the end of the day, we're not factoring in the size and how many neighbors they have and the situation where they're situated.
You know, a more sophisticated model, although it would be difficult, could also take a look at, OK, are you intervening in your immediate countries, I mean, the countries that are adjacent to you, or are you intervening like UAE does in Libya, which is like quite a bit away from the Emiratis.
So these things have not been taken account.
But even if we did, I don't think the picture would change dramatically.
Iran is intervening in Syria that is not adjacent to Iran.
It is intervening in Yemen that is not adjacent to Iran.
So I think overall, the picture would not change dramatically.
The broader conclusion would still stand, which is they're all bad actors.
And to a very large extent, as long as you don't have a security architecture for this region, instability will breed interventions and interventions will breed instability.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things, like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right-hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org, LibertasBella.com.
You guys check it out.
This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years.
And I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
How did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson.
Available now.
Well, you know, even sometimes it's the restrainers who say that this is what's smart, right?
Is keep everybody balanced against each other.
Hey, at least it's better than W. Bush marching the entire 3rd Infantry Division into Mesopotamia, right?
Keep everybody at each other's throats.
Let's then go back to what you said earlier on.
What is the U.S.'s guilt in all of this?
1998, there were five armed conflicts in the Middle East.
By 2019, we had 22 armed conflicts in the Middle East.
In between, you had the most destabilizing act of the Middle East for the last century or half a century at least, and that was the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
What that did in terms of spreading that instability, which then spread more interventions, is explaining a very significant part of as to why we grew from five armed conflicts and a relatively stable, not necessarily a positive stability, but nevertheless a relatively stable Middle East to what we have today.
Now, so there's been some news, and I got to plead guilty, and I mean it.
It's a felony.
I'm totally ignorant about this except just very little I've read, and I really should know everything about it, and that is talks between the Saudis and the Iranians in Iraq, and at least the possibility that you could have ...
I guess even from what I did read, the idea was Biden seems to be backing off of total dominance somewhat, and I guess the Saudis are nervous that maybe we don't have their back as much as before for bullying whoever they want, and so they're racing to Baghdad to talk with the Ayatollahs men, and I wonder what all you know about that, and does that fit in your program here about America throwing its weight around, and then what happens when we stop throwing it around quite so much?
Absolutely.
I think it's one of the points of evidence in support of what we have been saying and doing.
At Quincy, and I know many others as well, of course, who have been arguing for quite some time that our interventions and our military presence is problematic for the region, to say the least.
What I think we have done may go a step further because of some of the new evidence that has emerged, which is as the United States, not just in the last year or in the last month that Biden has been in power, but also under certain episodes during the Trump years, as it signaled that it actually is not going to defend the Saudis, we saw a very different behavior by the Saudis towards Iran in terms of seeking a diplomatic accommodation.
For instance, when the US, when Trump decided last minute not to bomb Iran after the Iranians had shot down an American drone that they say had gone into Iranian airspace, the Saudis and the Emiratis were absolutely terrified and perplexed and very upset, and you had people in Washington saying that Trump is giving up the Carter doctrine, which he should.
What happened was that the Emiratis began their open diplomacy with the Iranians.
They sent their naval attache or someone responsible for naval security to Tehran and negotiations began.
The Saudis began secret negotiations with the Iranians through the government of Iraq, and that kept on going for a couple of months.
Now, guess how it ended.
It ended because Qassem Soleimani was flying to Baghdad to hand over a message to the Iraqis in response to the Saudis, but Trump killed Soleimani at the airport, and that put a stop to that dialogue that was very embryonic at the time, but that dialogue only started precisely because the Saudis recognized that they no longer could hide behind American power.
As long as they could, they had no interest in diplomacy.
Why would they engage in talks with the Iranians and have to agree to all kinds of painful compromises, when they could just hide behind the United States and have American blood and treasure take care of their problems for them?
What they did was not an irrational choice.
What was irrational was that we had offered them that choice.
By stop offering that choice, they adjusted accordingly, and they opted for diplomacy.
Once Trump then went back on the war path, guess what?
The Saudis once again abandoned diplomacy and went back to where they were before.
As Biden got elected, as he signaled that he's leaving Afghanistan, as he in private messages made it very clear to the Saudis that he's sick and tired of them, even though in my view, he hasn't gone far enough, nevertheless, what happened at that point then is that the Iraqis once again began exchanging messages and mediating between the Iraqis and the Iranians.
This has now taken on an even more serious level, because what you've seen now is that the Iraqis are actually calling for a conference in Iraq and Baghdad, I think next month, in which they're inviting the president of Iran, they're inviting senior Saudi officials, senior Emirati officials, and we're going to start seeing this regional dialogue that ultimately is exactly what's going to be needed in order for the region to resolve their own problems and resolve their own, and take care of their own security.
Something that really was prevented as long as we were dominating the region militarily and had all of those bases there, because when we did, they were not incentivized to resolve their problems, they were incentivized to manipulate our power to use it for their own purposes.
Yeah, seems obvious enough, but so now let's talk about this other piece that you wrote recently for Foreign Policy magazine, obviously plays into this whole discussion, how to make Iran trust a new nuclear deal.
Got to tell you, I thought I'm so stupid.
I thought that just because all of the guys in the Biden government are the same guys who negotiated this deal with Iran in the Obama years, that that meant that they would get back into the deal relatively soon.
And sure, they'd have to do a little bit of public relations whining and threatening and whatever on the way, but then they'll sign the deal, and then they didn't sign the deal.
And probably by not signing the deal, they helped the right-wing hardliner get elected in Iran.
So that makes things at least somewhat more difficult, presumably.
Is that right?
I think the administration made a huge mistake early on.
I think Biden made the wrong calculation and decided to wait and try to see if he could win over Menendez and a bunch of other calculations.
And that was a major mistake because about two and a half months were lost.
And by the time the talks began, at which point I think the Biden administration was very serious, but once they began, they were too close to the Iranian election.
So it inevitably got entangled in the Iranian elections.
And now we're stuck in a situation in which what agreement that almost was reached, that was in the views of some only hours from being able to be signed, ended up becoming entangled in this election and is now a toss-up.
And under these circumstances, it's going to be very difficult to see how the administration is going to manage to be able to get this done.
Mindful of the fact that now we have a hardline president who's likely going to drive a much harder bargain because of political incentives and which he essentially senses that he has to outdo and perform better than Rouhani.
Things that could have been avoided if this had just started a little bit earlier.
All right.
Now, the bottom line is, Daya Tolla doesn't have any intention of making nukes.
And as everybody listening to this show should know, but maybe not, but you and I know, and I know you know that they're already a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty.
And even if this thing falls apart, it would take a hell of a provocation for Khamenei to quit the NPT and actually try to start making nukes.
So in other words, this is kind of just a fake controversy in a way, because the deal was superfluous anyway.
It was just for some reason, the NPT wasn't good enough to make hawks be quiet about the danger of Iran's civilian nuclear program.
And so they put another layer of deal on top of it, which did work in muzzling them for a while about the danger of the program.
But it was already safeguarded and they already weren't making nukes.
And the last Ayatollah and the new Ayatollah both have said that Islam, you know, bans the idea of weapons of mass destruction anyway, which I don't know if they really mean that.
Maybe if we push them against the wall, they really would, you know, change their mind about that.
But anyway, I don't know.
It's a it's a fake crisis that could lead to a very real crisis, I guess.
Right.
I think we're past the point of it being a fake crisis leading to a real crisis, because this could, you know, if nothing else had changed, then perhaps the NPT would have been sufficient.
But at this point, after the U.S. withdrawing, after all of the things that have happened, particularly with the manner in which the U.S. conducted itself vis-a-vis Iran and the manner that it conducted itself vis-a-vis North Korea, thinking in Iran has changed.
You know, you mentioned earlier on that by not signing the agreement, he may have, Biden may have contributed to Raisi's election victory.
I actually think that is absolutely the case.
I think what has happened in this situation is that because of the fact that the U.S. pulled out, it is not so that the Raisi supporters felt that, oh, now they're vindicated because the Rouhani government thought it would be impossible for the U.S. to withdraw.
Their argument was this is your fault because you didn't prepare for a plan B. And Iran didn't have a plan B once the U.S. withdrew.
And they've been hammering that point for three years in Iran.
And all they needed to do was not to win over Rouhani supporters to come and vote for a conservative.
That may have happened in a very small number.
But what they really managed to do was to get all of the Rouhani supporters, the reformists and the centrists, to give up on the idea that negotiations with the West is the pathway for Iran to be able to get into a better political and economic situation.
Because when you take a look at the numbers Raisi got in the elections, he got only about a million and a half more votes in 2021 than he did in 2017.
It is the votes of the reformists and the centrists that went from 25 million down to 4 million because they stayed home, because they had lost confidence in the idea that that approach would work.
And the only reason they lost confidence in that is because of what Trump did.
And sorry, not just because of what Trump did, but the fact that Trump did it and then Biden didn't reverse it when he could have.
That was a huge blow.
And after all, right, I mean, Rouhani and I don't know so much Khamenei, but sort or Khamenei or whatever, he, you know, at least implicitly had made a lot of promises that it's worth it to make this deal.
And so for them to then not be able to do anything about it when America broke their side of the deal, you could see how that would be completely humiliating and and would discredit both of them.
In fact, I wonder how bad it's hurt the Ayatollah that he even gave Rouhani the go ahead to do this thing.
And Zarif, for that matter, you know, yeah, he's managed to insulate himself somewhat from it.
But without a doubt, I think the damage that it has done is that it's going to make it much more difficult for him to agree to this ever again.
And that's part of the reason why we wrote the deal, saying that, you know, there's got to be some elements that need to be changed, because the way the deal is written right now is such that if the Iranians were to quit the deal, it would be a high cost for them.
Sanctions would be imposed, isolation, all kinds of things.
If the U.S. quits the deal, the cost is on everyone else, not only Iran.
Even the Europeans pay costs if the U.S. leaves the deal.
But the U.S. itself doesn't pay a deal.
It's too powerful to be politically isolated.
It had no economic interest in the deal, so it doesn't lose any money off of it.
All of those challenges, that asymmetric situation is still in the JCPOA.
So if you want to have a more durable deal, we need to put in mechanisms that spreads the risk and the cost a little bit more than it currently is.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry I was late calling you, but it's the software's fault.
But I got to go to my next one.
Thank you so much for doing the show again, as always, Trita.
Really appreciate it a lot.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, that's Trita Parsi.
He is at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
That is ResponsibleStatecraft.org and also QuincyInst.org.
Check out this great report.
There really is a lot to learn in this thing.
No clean hands.
The interventions of Middle Eastern powers 2010 through 2020 and foreign policy.
How to make Iran trust a new nuclear deal.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
