Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they 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, on the line, I got Trita Parsi at the National Iranian American Council.
And did you know he is a professor at Georgetown?
Me either.
He's still a good guy, though.
You can trust him.
He's not CIA.
And listen, he wrote these very important books.
Treacherous Alliance, The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S., which I'm reading right now.
So there's an interview coming up sometime all about that.
Of course, you guys all know that Israel stayed friends with Iran after the Iranian Revolution for years and years, right?
Islamic extremism notwithstanding.
And then there's a single roll of the dice, Obama's diplomacy with Iran and losing an enemy.
Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, the great JCPOA deal that helped turn down the enmity between America and Iran based on the fake threat of their nuclear program, which is double extra lockdown and made everybody happy until Trump ruined it.
So I guess that'll be your next book.
Trump ruined it.
But anyway, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
Thanks so much for having me.
Really appreciate having you here.
And I don't know about you, but for me, this is the only thing Obama ever did that I liked.
I guess he did instruct his Justice Department to back off the states on medical pot issues.
And he did open up Cuba a little bit.
Cuba is important.
Cuba is important.
But other than that, I mean, the guy's absolutely horrible and everything.
Could have been worse on some things, but that's still not good.
But on this, I definitely got to give him credit because it was the right thing to do, but it didn't work out.
But anyway, so now here we are and things are blowing up in Iran.
It didn't work out until someone else sabotaged it.
I mean, that's an important distinction.
It actually worked perfectly fine up until someone decided to ruin it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know what?
Let's get back to that in just one second, because first we got to talk about things are blowing up and what's going on with that.
And that's your recent article.
But then also there's actually good news on this, right, where the European Union is trying to work with Iran and they're not going along with Trump on this.
This is part of George Bush blowing America's entire wad in Iraq and the massive decline in American influence ever since then.
And thank God for that.
So, but first of all, just take a look at what happened at the U.N. Security Council today.
I mean, Trump put this meeting together thinking that, you know, it would be a moment for him to shine.
Instead, every other member of the Security Council blasted the U.S. for pulling out of the Iran deal.
And no one really agreed with him on his Iran analysis.
You know what?
I missed that.
I saw him yesterday, but I missed the U.N. meeting today.
So that's good to hear.
You want to elaborate more?
I'll listen.
It was just astonishing because, I mean, I don't even understand what they were thinking doing this.
They first said that this meeting would be about Iran.
Then they changed it because if it was about Iran, Iran would have had the right to request to speak.
And clearly, you know, Trump doesn't have the guts to go up against the Iranian foreign minister.
So they changed it and pretended it would be about nonproliferation.
But in essence, what he was mostly focusing on was Iran.
And then the responses were overwhelming.
Other nations, including close allies of the United States, saying that they are against this unilateralism.
They're in favor of a rules-based international system.
They support the JCPOA.
Many of them praised Iran for continuing to implement it despite what the U.S. was doing.
And, I mean, frankly, it was just embarrassing.
I just do not understand why Trump thought that this was a good idea for him.
Yeah.
You know, as part of his just being such a shallow person and such a poorly educated person, it's just a travesty.
I'm sure you probably looked at this book, or I don't know if you have or not, but the new Woodward book.
It really portrays his thinking that, which sounds right.
I don't know.
Bob Woodward is Bob Woodward.
What are you going to do?
But it sounds right to me that in his thinking, the JCPOA, this one shining, great, awesome thing, even for somebody like me who doesn't have much use for all this international law at all, in this case was really staving off a major unnecessary crisis here.
And this one good thing to him was the kind of poster child for this evil globalism that threatens American sovereignty and all this stuff, when it totally is not.
This is the one best one that he ought to be able to get behind in every way.
Yeah, we locked down their nuclear program.
He could have spun it that way.
But instead, this kind of became the symbol of America getting screwed by these international agreements, in his mind, in just the dumbest of ways.
It's just in the most nonsensical way and ultimately tragic, I guess.
Certainly, without a doubt.
I mean, that's why the reason my book is called Losing an Enemy, the triumph of diplomacy.
This was a major victory for American diplomacy, for multilateralism, of not giving up sovereignty, but on the other hand, actually working with other countries to resolve common problems.
And much better to do so diplomatically than to do it through military means, which is the way that the George W. Bush administration, the neocons, and now increasingly Trump is doing.
Yeah.
That is so stupid.
Well, and I guess it serves plenty of great agendas, right?
Because what a great red herring.
And as we've talked about before, improvement to the nth degree, and Gareth Porter wrote a whole book about it and everything, and everybody knows they never were making nukes in the first place.
The whole thing really was a red herring.
All Obama did was really put the red herring away and say, you know what?
You're not going to be able to lie about Iran's nuclear program anymore after this.
It's going to be so clear that they are not diverting to any military purpose here, that your lie will fall flat and you'll have to abandon it.
That was basically the only purpose for the whole thing because otherwise they were with the NPT anyway.
Part of the reason why the Israelis and the Saudis are so upset because they lost the ability to make Iran an enemy based on the nuclear pretext.
Now, instead, if you listen to them, they're talking more and more about regional stuff because the nuclear issue essentially was taken off the table by this deal.
All right, you guys.
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Well, and of course, the regional stuff just means George Bush got rid of Saddam for them.
And not only that, but he fought a five-year civil war on behalf of their closest friends in the Sikiri and Dawa party.
But anyway, we all know that.
So let's talk about who blew up this – did this Avaaz attack in – you have this great article in MiddleEastEye.net about it.
This took place in Iran.
Was it on Saturday?
I'm sorry, Sunday?
Saturday, I believe, yeah.
29 people killed.
And so I just spoke with Phil Jarali.
We talked about how the Islamic State's claim of responsibility was not credible.
He wondered whether maybe MEK did it.
But so what do you think is going on here?
I do believe that these Arab separatists who are a minority in Khuzestan and frankly do have some legitimate grievances.
I mean, this is pretty close to me since I'm from Avaaz and my family still lives there.
So I'm well familiar with some of those problems.
But those grievances in no way justify terrorism, of course, particularly mindful of the fact that this did not look as if it was actually homegrown.
This definitely looked as if it was part of this larger effort by some states in the region to escalate matters.
Now, the Iranians would immediately make that accusation and even accusing the U.S.
And it's easy to dismiss that under normal circumstances in the absence of evidence.
But this time around, there were a lot of at least circumstantial evidence that makes it much more difficult to dismiss.
So, for instance, you have the crown prince of Saudi Arabia saying last year that he's going to take the fight into inside of Iran.
You had a senior advisor to the crown prince of the UAE who praised the attack on Twitter, said this is not terrorism, that this is the stated policy.
And that we will see more of this coming.
This is not a private individual.
This is someone who is an advisor to the UAE crown prince.
You have, of course, the Bolton memo from last year in which Bolton says that part of the policy on Iran should be to provide assistance to these Ahwazi Arab separatists.
He specifically mentioned them.
And then, of course, you have two U.S. officials admitting to Reuters three months ago that the policy of the Trump administration is to foment unrest in Iran.
Now, mindful of these statements, mindful of what has been done, it is much more difficult to say that, oh, this was just something that came from inside of Iran and the Iranians are being paranoid by blaming the outside world for doing it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so I understand a lot of motives and all that.
And I guess they could, you know, just try to destabilize Iran as part of a real, driving a real hard bargain, if that's their point of view on some kind of deal.
But they would be wrong.
No, I don't think.
This is not aimed at getting- I'm sorry?
Huh?
I don't think they're destabilizing Iran in order to get a deal.
They're destabilizing Iran because their hope is that they will be able to keep it destabilized and as a result weak, which means that the balance of power in the region will shift away from Iran and in favor of Saudi Arabia and Israel.
So they would like to keep it this way.
I mean, this is a cheaper option.
So that does answer where I was going with that, which was regime change ain't going to work here.
And they've got to recognize that, that they're not going to be able to overthrow the mullahs.
If they assassinated the supreme leader, the Iranians would appoint another one, you know?
Yeah, it's a system.
So it's not like with Qaddafi's regime in which you take out Qaddafi and the system more or less collapses.
This is much trickier.
And it's also costlier if you do regime change.
So what you're saying though is they recognize that at this point.
And so they're not destabilizing in an attempt to recreate 1953 necessarily, but they just want to keep them busy and bogged down with this kind of thing.
I think they've settled for that.
I think their ideal situation would be actually a war.
But they've settled for the idea that, you know what?
We can still achieve our geopolitical objectives if we just destabilize Iran, keep it in a Syria type of a situation.
That will take Iran off of the geopolitical chessboard as a player.
And that's what they want.
You can achieve that through war.
You could potentially achieve it by regime change if you could install a client regime.
But you can also achieve it by destabilizing the country, fomenting unrest, and potentially sparking a civil war.
Now, these separatist groups, you're saying there's some kind of legit Arab militiamen there who might do something like this.
But it does look to you like they would have had support or what?
No, no.
I'm not saying that they're legit.
I'm saying that there are legitimate grievances amongst many.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I don't mean legitimate like you agree with everything they do and say, but just legitimate in the sense that they do exist.
They're not just sock puppets of foreign jihadists sent in or something like that, that these groups do exist.
Yes and no.
They do exist, but they're so small.
So, for instance, if you were to talk about Iranian Kurdistan, we're talking about a region in which there has been a long history of one segment of that population wanting to establish their own state and having engaged in a violent and nonviolent struggle for that.
That is not the case for Khuzestan.
That is, you know, you don't have like a continuous struggle for it.
You have very small groups, very fringe groups, most of them based in Europe, most of them funded by Saudi Arabia one way or another.
So, it is not at all the same type of a thing that you can say, look, there is a people there.
They have a longstanding struggle for independence.
That is not the case in Khuzestan.
But you have an ethnic minority that have grievances.
You have ethnic minorities in the United States that have grievances.
No one here would say that, well, those grievances justify terrorism.
I am stunned to see how openly many of these advocates for Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. on Twitter were essentially saying, well, this is what you get when there's discrimination, essentially justifying terrorism as a result of discrimination.
Well, I mean, in the official Trump administration position, just like when Islamic State attacked inside Iran last year in Tehran, they said this is what you get.
Violence begets violence.
It's the blowback theory of terrorism when it comes to it being inflicted against our enemies.
Their enemies, not mine, but yeah.
And so, yeah, but so these groups are so small then that you're not saying you could prove it or whatever, but you do think that this really does look like it has Saudi or UAE intelligence agency.
Well, we do know that in the past, some of these groups have been funded by some of the states in the GCC, primarily Saudi Arabia.
So that in and of itself is not a secret.
This time around, one of those groups claimed credit for the attack right before it happened.
I mean, they said something on Twitter just a couple of hours before.
They were the first ones to take credit for it.
They actually had a pretty expansive media strategy in which they were very quick to coordinate and reach out to media to take credit for it, even offer interviews, giving interviews.
And then they praised themselves on Twitter out of these European capitals where they were based on how good they were at both doing the terrorism and managing the media campaign around it.
So which is quite stunning.
I mean, they're doing it in the open in Europe.
So that's part of the reason why the Iranians filed some complaints with the Europeans because they're operating on European territory.
Yeah.
Well, this kind of thing could certainly get worse.
You know, you get the wrong kind of reaction here and there.
Next thing you know, you have the Mattis attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Persian Gulf of Tonkin.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry.
I know you're in a hurry today and I kept you over here, Trita.
No problem.
Great talking to you.
All right.
Thanks.
Take care.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
And I forgot my last question.
I had one, but oh well.
That's the great Trita Parsi, National Iranian American Council.
And check out his latest book.
It's called Losing an Enemy, Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
