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All right kiddos, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Now, Trita Parsi is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and he's the author of Treacherous Alliance, the secret dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States.
Welcome to the show, Trita.
How are you?
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us here today.
And you know what?
I'm just kicking myself for not having read this book.
It's been sitting on my shelf for more than a year.
Well, in my pile of books to read that I haven't gotten to yet.
And I promise to move it back up toward the top of the pile, especially because I had a two-part conversation with Gareth Porter last week.
And in his new analysis of what's going on with the push for war with Iran, he cited your work and the telling of the history of the mid-90s and Benjamin Netanyahu's first term in power as Prime Minister of Israel there.
And how at one point he had called off the propaganda campaign about, oh, no, Iran is an existential threat and all this obvious nonsense for tactical reasons and that then they turned it back on again.
But that what this revealed was that Benjamin Netanyahu is just bluffing.
He knows he's a reasonable person, even though many times we disagree with what he would do.
He's not crazy and he's not stupid and that he's playing a game here and that therefore, thank goodness, that hopefully seemingly means that actually having a war with Iran is less likely than some of the neocons are trying to make us believe, which, of course, they want us to see it as inevitable.
So now I'll be quiet and let you talk about things.
Well, I think you're quite right in the sense that the perception of a credible threat of Israel taking military action is needed from their perspective for many different reasons.
A, partly because they believe that that's needed to get the Iranians to respond, but mainly because they believe it's needed in order to pressure to get the administration to do things that it otherwise would not do.
But beyond that, I think right now, which has not always been the case, but right now there is a third, perhaps even more important reason, which is that this is a very effective way of portraying the President Obama as being weak and incapable of handling this issue by saying that diplomacy has failed, sanctions have failed, now military action is the only one left, and Israel is ready to do it, but the U.S. is better off to do it itself.
But if Obama then doesn't do it, then he's coming across as if he's not capable of handling these issues, and then to utilize that in order to get rid of him in the next election.
And after that, whichever president were to come in after that, it would be a much higher risk that there would actually be military action taken.
Let me ask you this.
What's this about anyway?
Because, of course, all of us who deal outside of war party talking points know that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran that anybody can point to.
There is no existential threat to Israel, which is armed with as many as 600 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs and submarines that enable them to get a second strike off, no matter what happens, and everything else.
Why all this propaganda?
Why do the neocons, why does the Likud party want a war with Iran so bad, and what can they possibly hope to achieve from the air?
Certainly not a regime change, right?
Well, I don't think actually regime change is something that they're actively looking for.
On the contrary, if you look what happened last year before the Iranian elections, you actually had quite a few Israeli officials and diplomats who privately and then at times publicly made it clear that they actually prefer Ahmadinejad to be there, because it's easier to deal with an Ahmadinejad who is using this crazy language, everything else, rather than dealing with a more reasonable person inside of Iran, because that's going to make it more difficult to actually convince other states to sanction Iran, to contain Iran, to bomb Iran.
But isn't that just, that sounds like an intermediate step, right?
The moderates are the enemies for now, because they rather have a Hitler face to point or something in the face of Ahmadinejad, but ultimately because they want an excuse, they don't want to settle for the green movement, they want a new Shah or something like that.
Well, I think the bottom line is this, that from the Israeli perspective, they're seeing that the balance of power in the region is shifting, and it's shifting quite dramatically, mainly because of the many mistakes the United States have committed in the region, including what's happening in Iraq.
And they're very fearful of this shift, because the Israeli security doctrine is based on Israel having a strategic qualitative edge over all countries and all combination of countries in the region.
That qualitative edge is increasingly difficult to maintain, as the US keeps on getting weaker, and whereas countries like Iran continue to be on the rise.
Now, how do you deal with that situation?
Well, Israel isn't well equipped of dealing with Iran, a country of 70 million people on its own.
It has been able to deal with Syria, with Lebanon, Jordan, the countries on its immediate borders.
But Iran is just a completely different task.
And as a result, fearing that if the US doesn't take military action, US would rather instead than go and do, find a political agreement with Iran, an agreement that would legitimize part of Iran's rise, would make Iran more of a legitimate player in the region, which means that the US wouldn't automatically be opposed to Iran on every issue.
That would mean that Israel, in essence, would have been abandoned, as they call it in Israel, meaning that Israel would be left alone to deal with their fears of Iran because of the way Iran would limit Israeli maneuverability in the region.
As a result, there has been a campaign for quite some time.
It's now in a more intense phase of it, to take, to convince the United States to take action against Iran, to convince the United States to not genuinely pursue diplomacy with Iran in order to make sure that the shift in the balance of power gets reversed rather than having the shift in the balance of power being accepted.
Well, here's what I don't understand.
How come the Israelis and the Americans can't just have a new treacherous alliance with Iran?
What's the big deal?
If they can sell missiles with Michael Ladeen and Manitour Gorbanfar to the Ayatollah Khomeini, certainly they can sit down at a table with the Ayatollah Khomeini and make a deal with him, give him a security guarantee and say, you know, I don't know, whatever.
We all know the story about how Iran, after September 11th, tried to kiss up to the United States and work with us in as many ways as they could.
We can make a deal with them.
Well, this is a very interesting thing that has changed since then, and that is that back in the 1980s, when the Israelis were lobbying the U.S. to talk to Iran and sell arms to Iran and not to pay attention to Iranian rhetoric, Iran and Israel actually shared common threats.
They were still threatened by the Soviet Union and Soviet penetration of the Middle East.
And Iran, of course, was in a very, very brutal war with Iraq, a major Arab power at the time that was also very aggressive towards Israel.
These common threats no longer exist.
And the absence of those common threats have also put on the question the utility of Israel towards the United States.
What value does Israel have to the United States and the region in this new security environment?
Well, and especially the way they're acting when, as you're saying, this whole thing is about manipulating American policy to be against our interests and for Israel's interests.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
It's like the Israelis are deliberately making themselves an albatross around America's neck, when if they would be willing to deal with Iran and accept America being willing to deal with Iran, then it wouldn't have to be a switch in favor from Israel to Iran.
We can all be friends.
What's the big, you know, you understand what I mean?
Well, first of all, you know, countries manipulate each other's foreign policies all the time.
So there's no significant difference there.
I guess what one could say is that Israel has perhaps been a little bit more successful, at least when it comes to dealing with the U.S. and Iran.
But I think what the Israelis fear is that they wouldn't be able for them, it wouldn't be a situation in which they actually could return to, because they believe, and I don't think they're wrong in this, that an Iran that would be rising and that would be recognized as a leader in the region would be responsive not to U.S. demands of what should be done in the region, but to the demands of the Arab streak, which means that Iran would constantly be pushed towards having a position that is hostile towards Israel.
Such a state the Israelis do not want to see be legitimized by the United States.
That's part of the reason why they're very fearful of U.S. diplomacy.
My argument with Israeli officials in this regard is that unfortunately, while I can understand the logic of how they're thinking, I think it's a lost cause.
These shifts in the balance are not reversible.
And ultimately, Israel will have to find a way to live in peace with some of its neighbors rather than thinking that it can indefinitely balance them, because that's just going to be too costly and inevitably it's going to fail.
In the case of Iran, there is more of a chance of being able to neutralize Iran's potential of being a threat to Israel through diplomacy, through American diplomacy, than there is through American military.
All right everybody, go read a campaign for War With Iran Begins at Salon.com.
It's Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
