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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.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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, Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Trita Parsi from the National Iranian American Council.
That's NIA council.org.
Therefore keeping the peace between Iran and the USA.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
Thanks so much for having me.
Uh, so listen, I really don't know what is going on with Donald Trump in Iran.
Maybe you have some more insight than, than I do about the motivation behind him and his political and military advisors on this issue.
It seems to me like he adopted a line in the campaign that he's just going to be really hard on Iran.
And that way he's going to take the wind out of the sail of any other Republican trying to be Iran tough.
He's just going to be the furthest to the right on that issue, which is smart in a Republican primary and all that.
But it seems like that's really it.
I mean, what other, what else can he really have against them other than he already said so or something?
And especially to such a degree that at least it's looking like maybe they're just playing drunk Nixon games.
I don't know, but it sort of looks like they're going to really ruin the Iran deal, which could lead to a real crisis.
But I don't know what the motive is.
So I guess it's my premise, right?
That the Iran deal is really in danger.
And then secondly, why in the world would they do that?
Well, your premise is right.
The Iran deal really is in danger, not because it's not working, because it actually is working, but because there seems to be this inexplicable desire on the part of Trump to destroy this deal.
And your speculation probably has some merit that at least one important factor here is that he made his promise.
He is really against Obama's legacy and he's targeting almost everything Obama did.
And this is pretty high up on the list because this is one of the biggest achievements of the United States during the Obama years.
But I think there's also a couple of other factors that we have to throw into the mix.
It doesn't mean that they what is happening now is because of one or two reasons alone is probably a pretty complex picture.
And that complex picture, I think, should take into consideration these factors.
Trump went to Saudi Arabia and he essentially just hugged the Saudis and bought into their worldview and their strategic analysis without any reservation whatsoever.
Why he did so, again, we have to speculate.
It may be because of business dealings.
It may be because the Saudis promised to bring in a lot of money into the United States, which then obviously could be helpful for Trump as he wants to kickstart the economy and make sure that he creates more jobs.
But nevertheless, what the Saudis asked for has a price tag.
And what they asked for is for the United States to go back to the policy that existed prior to the deal, which is a policy of the U.S. being completely at odds with Iran, seeking Iran's complete isolation, pushing back against Iran in the region and essentially siding with the Saudis at every given opportunity.
The Saudis have been pushing this line for quite some time.
Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was very frustrated by this.
And in one meeting with his French counterpart, which later on became revealed by WikiLeaks, we found out that he was complaining to the French, saying that the Saudis want to fight the Iranians to the last American.
While Gates had a problem with that, Trump does not seem to have a problem with that.
Well, so, I mean, do you think it's really that bad?
I guess.
So the reporting was that the so-called adults, although they have their own problems, I don't want to give them too much credit the way everybody else does.
But that Tillerson and Mattis and McMaster had said, and I guess Dunford, too, had told Trump, hey, we really like this deal or at least it's better than nothing.
And it's better than not having it and whatever comes next.
And we really should keep the thing.
And I guess I forget which report it was that I'm referring to now, but I know that you read the same one as me.
Maybe it was the Politico thing.
But it said that his real problem, or at least one way to read it, was his real problem was he told Tillerson to bring him options.
And Tillerson, just like McMaster, tried to steer him toward this escalation in Afghanistan.
And he kind of bucked and said, I want more options there.
Here he is.
He was mad at Tillerson.
I want an option to get out of the deal.
And then and Tillerson just kind of shrugged.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's three months later and I didn't carry out your orders, boss.
Sorry about that.
And so that was why he was so mad.
And now he's having his White House staff go ahead and drop the option for him.
But then so are you doing odds on him actually following through with that?
Or maybe he just really wants to keep his options open and keep his staff in line that they better do what the hell he says when he says.
Well, it was something you said in the beginning that I think may not be entirely correct.
I don't think the so-called adults in the room argue that the deal is good and it's working.
Why would you want to do anything against it?
Rather, they seem to have had, you know, either agreed with Trump or not have the courage to question him and instead have not argued whether the deal is good or bad, but rather argued about the best way of getting out of the deal.
So the argument was not don't do this, it was don't do it this way.
Yeah.
And Trump was upset that they hadn't given him other options of how to do it.
And that's where we are when he essentially told them, but actually gave the authority not to the State Department, but what his inner circle of people like Gork and others, the task of coming up with new plans on being able to say that Iran is violating the deal, even though it isn't.
And one of those plans, again, Trump himself seems to have revealed in interviews is to start asking for access to Iran's non-nuclear military site.
According to the deal, since the Iranians are implementing the additional protocol to denounce proliferation treaty, if credible evidence emerges that the Iranians are engaging in some secret nuclear activity somewhere, the IAEA has the right to ask for access to those sites.
Iran can object and then it will go to a commission.
And the way the votes are stacked is that as long as the Europeans and the U.S. are on the same side, the Iranians are going to have to allow those inspections in.
But if the U.S. under Trump's leadership starts asking for access, there is completely unjustified because there is no credible evidence that there is anything suspicious going on there.
The Iranians obviously will say no, because no country just allows foreign inspectors to come into their military sites just like that.
Yeah, well, and then you say that Trump would say the Iranians are.
You mean reasonable to Ali Heinen and even or whatever, because they've already looked at Parchin and they've already looked at, was it Sanjian?
Oh, they've looked at so many different places.
Exactly.
They looked at.
So there's nothing left to look at, right?
Other than if they start making up new stuff.
But and if they do, then obviously the IAEA should be able to go there.
But if any party, including Trump, is fabricating stuff.
Not because we actually want to get access to the sites, but because they want the Iranians to deny access so that they can say, oh, the Iranians are violating the deal and then escalated to a bigger conflict.
If that is the aim here, we have to understand it's not just killing the deal.
It's also killing and undermining the inspections regime, because in order for these inspections to work, there has to be a trusted party that would only go into different places if credible evidence existed.
Well, but then this is why we never even needed a deal in the first place is because they're already a member of the nonproliferation treaty and therefore they already have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which is how we already knew that they weren't making nukes for a decade before this deal ever happened.
Well, what happened in 1991 with Iraq, though, Iraq was in the NPT, but because the NPT only gives you access to declared sites, if a country engages in illegal activities that they are not declaring, a mechanism was needed to be found so that the IAEA could ask for access to sites that had not been declared.
And that's what's part of the additional protocol.
And that's what the Iranians agreed to and are currently implementing as part of the deal, which is a huge win.
But Trump is about to destroy this win by abusing it and using it in order to actually get the deal to collapse altogether.
Well, they're not getting the concrete out of that Iraq reactor, so I don't know.
I mean, this is the thing about it, right, is if they're doing this, this is as ham handed as George W.
Bush times three or something.
I mean, this would be the most transparent conspiracy to sabotage a perfectly decent situation in diplomatic history or something, right?
I mean, this is crazy.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, that's that you're absolutely right.
This is part of the big, big problems here that you're having a scenario in which the.
I mean, never before has anyone really, you know, essentially telegraphed their intent to destroy a deal as clearly as the Trump administration is doing right now, and it's a deal that is working, it's a deal that has a tremendous amount of success thus far.
There's no reason to do this.
And yeah, and they're not even, you know, hiding it.
I mean, it's out in the press that they're going to try to find ways to fabricate evidence to claim the Iranians are out of compliance, when in reality, I have already verified six times now in six different reports that the Iranians actually living up to their end of the bargain.
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Well, you know, the great nuclear physicist and writer for Antiwar dot com, Gordon Prather, used to say that this was always the war party's problem from the dawn of the terror war, which of course had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, was all just about going after Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea.
They're all members in good standing of the nonproliferation treaty.
They all have safeguards agreements.
And so if the lesson of the first Gulf War from the focus groups is you really got to threaten them with an A-bomb to get the Americans to support starting a war, then how are we going to threaten them with an A-bomb when Saddam and the Ayatollah and Kim and Assad are all members of the NPT?
You know, well, huh, I guess.
And then they just started.
They did everything they could to sabotage the agreed framework that the Clinton administration worked out with North Korea and actually got them to make nukes.
And now they painted themselves into the corner on that.
Saddam, I guess they just said, we're going to tell so many lies in such a short amount of time that you're not going to be able to refute them all and we're just going to bulldoze right in there.
They ended up making a deal with Gaddafi for his old AQ Khan garage sale junk, but then stabbed him in the back.
And then the Iranians, though, have been very clever.
They put their hands up and put their books wide open and said, you got nothing on us, man.
We are not making nuclear bombs.
Everybody already knows that.
The Ayatollah issued a religious edict that says you go to hell if you try to make one.
We're not making one.
That's it.
And I don't know if it says you'll go to hell, but it says you better not.
So anyway.
And that's the game that they've played this whole time is to tell the truth that they have a civilian nuclear program.
There is no parallel program.
There is no ability really to put together a nuclear arsenal in any way that the Americans and the Israelis and the Brits and whoever wouldn't have at least a year to get their airstrike plan together.
And the whole thing is a joke.
It's always been a lie.
You know, we've covered it in the sense of what a lie it is, their nuclear threat.
For 10 years and more on this show and anti-war.com, of course, all along.
Gordon Prather has been debunking this since before the axis of evil speech.
You know, all of this hype about all of these countries.
So that's the real background to this is the whole thing is a joke, right?
The whole thing is just a big lie.
They can't figure out what to tell us about Iran to make us hate them enough to want to eventually bomb them and regime change them other than the nuclear thing.
And the Iranians won't cooperate by actually developing weapons.
So they're stuck, unable to start a war.
But I would have to say, though, Scott, I am worried about this situation because Trump has been able to do things that almost no one else has been able to.
I mean, he's breaking rules and norms left and right and he's getting away with it.
And.
The fact that he's been so adamant about this, he's been saying in interviews that he doesn't think they will be certified next time around.
Why would you say something like that?
Because it clearly shows that the certification process then has nothing to do with what the Iranians have done or not done.
It has more to do with whether you want to certify them or not.
And this is extremely worrisome.
I think we should be careful because he is not following the Bush script in the sense of following the same procedure.
Well, let's say he's trying to pressure them on something else.
Is there anything else he'd be pressuring them on?
You know, maybe I'll back off the my my sabotage of the nuclear deal if you guys pull out of Syria or something like that, you know?
No, because the bottom line is that the request from the Saudi side has essentially been you got to cut down Iran inside.
Iran has become too powerful because of American mistakes, everything from invading Iraq to striking this nuclear deal from the Saudi perspective.
And as a result, you got to you got to fix it.
You don't fix it by, you know, striking another compromise with them.
You fix it by pushing back really hard, cutting them down, even though that risks war.
In fact, in my view, most likely will lead to some sort of military confrontation.
We have to remember the adults in the room, many of them actually favor a small military confrontation.
They believe that if the United States had just been a little bit tougher and had a military confrontation with Iran of a smaller size, the Iranians would back off.
Others, of course, believe that if you have a military confrontation, you are not going to be able to control whether it escalates or deescalates, and as a result, you're risking a major regional war.
But some of these adults in the room and in Trump's White House actually believe that you can have a small confrontation.
The Iranians will back down and the United States will have essentially asserted its dominance over the region again.
That's absolutely insane.
I mean, unless they I mean, well, don't get me wrong, right.
If they if they fly SR-71 way over there and they just drop a bunch of 500 pound bombs on the Ayatollah's head and kill him and the you know, the as many of the ruling council in their perfect first day decapitation strike, then I guess I don't know.
I still wouldn't really lead to a regime change.
Right.
The same army would still be in charge.
The plan would be to have confrontation in Syria and elsewhere.
And once the U.S. moves in decisively and just uses his military might to really hit the Iranians over there, the Iranians will back down.
I think history shows a different course of action, which is that the Iranians have been clever.
They know that they're militarily weaker than the United States, but their strength lies in longevity because they're in the region, whereas the United States is not.
And at some point, the American people are going to increasingly ask, why are we in Italy?
Well, and of course, you know, the defense secretary here, let me finish this.
Once there's a direct confrontation that the Iranians know that they can't win, they just move the battlefield to somewhere else.
It doesn't change the conflict, it just moves the conflict from one place to another.
And that's why ultimately, in my view, history shows that this whole theory that they have is not likely going to succeed.
Yeah.
Well, of course, the joke is they don't have SR-71s anymore, which means they'd be able to shoot down anything we try to fly over their country.
It'd be a full-scale war just to take out their anti-aircraft.
Yeah, they have the S-300s that the Russians have given them.
Yeah.
So here's the thing, though, too, is this is all Mattis' fault.
He was the tip of the spear when George Bush invaded Iraq, right?
The 3rd Infantry Division and then whatever his Marine Corps division was called, I forget.
He was the one who sacked Fallujah and helped make the sectarian civil war there that much worse and all these kinds of things.
And how many, you know, minutes per day do you think he spends reflecting on that?
Oh, geez, you know, I'm the reason that Iran is so powerful in the region and that something has to be done about it.
And maybe I should be careful.
I doubt any of them are that honest.
Yeah, if we had that degree of self-reflection, we would be pursuing very different policies right now.
Yeah, that was the winning headline.
I often get asked the question of, you know, why this deal could not possibly have worked because we have not seen the Iranians change their policy or their behavior in the region.
I think that's an interesting question to ask.
I mean, it's only been a year and a half, but already people are complaining that Iran has not turned into Switzerland.
But the question that is not asked is, how has America changed its policies and its behavior in the region?
Why did we have the expectation that as a result of this deal, Iran would transform into something that was unrecognizable, but the United States would stay exactly the same?
If there's anything that we should have learned from the negotiations that took place between 2013 and 2015, is that if we want to see a change in the behavior of the Iranians and their policies, it would have to come hand in hand with a change in American policy.
Hmm.
Well, of course, we can't we can't expect others to change and for us to be so flawlessly amazing that we always remain the same.
Well, even then, I mean, honestly, they could just say right now, look, we've been fighting on the same side in the Iraq war since 2003.
So let's just be friends.
Right.
I mean, we both back the Dawa party.
That's American and Iranian policy.
It has been.
So we're fighting against the Islamic State together.
Just liberated Mosul together hand in hand with the Iranians.
Try to deny it.
They both sides would deny it.
But of course, it's true.
John McCain complained we're flying as their air force.
It's a fact.
Of course, it's John McCain's fault.
Same as it's Mattis's fault.
And it's been that way this whole time.
So it seems like there's a basis for getting along here if they would just be honest about their policy here.
Jafari was their guy, Maliki in a body.
Yeah.
The reason why that basis falls apart, though, Scott, is because, yes, you can have common enemies, you can work together with them.
And that common interest is great.
But it doesn't change that there might be another dimension of the conflict, which is who is the dominant party, who is the dominant power.
That's the and that's where I think Mattis's mindset and others who want to be hegemons in the Middle East who believe that the United States should have a strong hegemony in the Middle East is always going to put the United States at odds with Iranians because the Iranians view themselves as a natural superpower in the region.
Historically, that's oftentimes been true.
And they're never going to accept a foreign power exerting its hegemony over the region.
Even the Shah was very unhappy and managed to convince the United States to essentially allow Iran to be its main ally in the region that would uphold security rather than having U.S. troops there.
So because of that dimension, this desire to be hegemon, that some of these people are looking at what the Iranians are doing in Mosul and they're seeing that the Iranians were effective and they're upset about it because they want that credit to go to the United States because they want the U.S. to be the hegemon and vice versa.
The issue is that we are not having a conversation in the United States, what is the value and what is the cost of having hard hegemony in the Middle East?
What is America getting out of it?
I can understand that the cost benefit analysis may have been a good one 30 years ago.
But today, when the value of the oil has dropped, when the U.S. has its own oil boom and when the region is falling apart, what is the value of being responsible for that value for that region?
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, 20 years ago, 25, the Cato guys did the study, David Henderson.
Yeah, I remember that.
And they all have done these studies over and over again.
And we spend far more on supposedly securing Middle Eastern energy resources than we actually spend on Middle Eastern energy resources.
The amount of effort to dictate to the Persians how they're supposed to be and who's supposed to be in charge over there compared to the cost of the oil we'd ever bought from them in normal circumstances is crazy.
And just so what?
So we can act like the English and go around Boston, everybody around denying them independence when that's supposedly the one heritage we all agree on around here is independence from England, for God's sake.
We don't agree on freedom, that's for sure.
But at least we agree on independence from the English, don't we?
But now we're just them.
All right, I'm going to let you go, you poor guy.
Thank you for coming back on my show, Trita.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
Talk to you soon.
See ya.
All right, you guys, that is Trita Parsi.
His latest book is Losing an Enemy, Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.
Boy, is he going to need a second edition, huh?
All right.
Scott Horton dot org, Libertarian Institute dot org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And yes, the book is coming out this week, I swear.
I mean, even if he fires McMaster or something like that, I'm still putting it out in the current version.
Although he's not going to fire McMaster, so don't worry.
OK.
