07/20/12 – Trita Parsi – The Scott Horton Show

For KPFK, July 20th, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is www.scotthortonshow.com.
I have all the archives, my interviews, more than 2,500 of them now going back to 2003 there at www.scotthortonshow.com.
Coming up later on the show, Matthew Harwood will be on to talk about new proposals for conscription in America.
First, we're going to be speaking with Dr. Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
Welcome to the show.
Trita, how are you doing?
Good, good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us here tonight.
My pleasure.
I should have mentioned Treacherous Alliance, the secret dealings of Iran, Israel, and the United States was the first book.
The latest one is a single roll of the dice, Obama's diplomacy with Iran.
I guess they're at their second roll of the dice, if you can call it that.
Maybe we'll have a minute to talk about that.
First, your piece today at the Daily Beast, From Iran to Bulgaria.
There was a bombing, of course, of an Israeli tour bus in Bulgaria.
As you say here, Benjamin Netanyahu, although going off half-cocked without any real information, may well be right, that Hezbollah, working as a proxy for Iran, are behind this attack.
You think so?
What I say in the piece is, I'm not saying it is Iran, I'm not saying it is, in fact, I don't even mention Hezbollah.
I'm saying that if it is, then the likely explanation as to why and the context behind it is that there has been an ongoing intelligence war, a dirty war between Israel and Iran for quite some time.
In the last two years, the Israelis have significantly escalated that war with assassinations of Iranian scientists, about 18 very suspicious bombings in Iran last year, as well as computer viruses targeting both their nuclear program and their oil industry.
And as a result of that, the Israelis have been expecting retaliation.
They have reported that there have been attempts at retaliation that they have managed to thwart.
There have been some retaliatory efforts made with Iranian fingerprints on them, the cases of India and Thailand, that failed.
And as a result, perhaps the Iranians have shifted their strategy towards softer targets that are not as protected.
But I make it very clear in the piece as well that there is no evidence at this point.
We don't know for certain.
But if it is, it's not coming out of nowhere.
There is a long context of hostilities between these two countries that unfortunately may be getting out of control.
So far, as far as I know, the latest headlines I read on it, the Bulgarians had initially said, well, it was this Swedish guy who apparently was fighting with al-Qaeda and the Taliban at Tora Bora or something, back when he was taken to Guantanamo.
And then the Bulgarians said that, then the Swedes denied it.
And nobody really seems to know who this guy is, the last I heard.
Do you know better?
We don't know at all.
We have very little information.
It was very interesting, because the news of this Swedish-Algerian guy came out yesterday.
And the Swedes were very quick to deny that, without giving any details, except for saying that they've located the guy, and as a result, they categorically exclude him.
And since then, the speculation about him being behind it has essentially died down.
The U.S. government has come out with a very interesting statement, essentially also adding their belief that this is something that likely was done by Iran or Hezbollah, and then describing it as part of the tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran, meaning, again, that this was in response to the attacks that the Israelis have conducted.
Right.
You know what?
I knew I read that, but then I couldn't find it again.
Was that the New York Times piece?
That was the New York Times piece, yes.
Right.
And now, it's interesting, Glenn Greenwald does a great job of contrasting today how, in that New York Times piece, they completely take the government's word for it, as though, I guess, just having the two sources means it's absolutely a known fact.
If the Americans agree with the Israelis that it must be Iran, without explaining why they believe it or anything, and Greenwald compares it to the Washington Post piece that says, yeah, but nobody knows yet, so we're still waiting to find out, and in fact, they go further and say, they talk to people at the CIA who say they're still working diligently on it, and they'll let you know as soon as they have a conclusion.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
It's very important on these moments, precisely because of the tense situation in the region.
I mean, it's a powder keg.
It's about to explode any time right now.
Acting on unfounded conclusions, on assumptions, rather than acting on fact, can literally be lethal under these circumstances.
Just recall that two days before this bombing, there was an American Navy ship in the Persian Gulf that shot at an Indian fisher boat, killing one of the Indians and sinking the boat, and immediately there was speculation that this had something to do with Iran.
Perhaps it was an Iranian ship.
The U.S. government was very quick in going out and saying that this had no connection to Iran, and the reason was, of course, because they didn't want to see an affliction of this, and they didn't want to see any further speculation about that, but the reason why they were tense and so trigger-happy at the end of the day, because the Indian side of the story is that they did not receive any warnings before being shot at, is precisely because of the nervousness about the tense situation in the region.
Yeah, well, you know, thanks for saying all that, because I'm a bit puzzled.
By all the brinksmanship, it doesn't seem like, well, it does seem like, if you're going to play a game like that, all this escalation of the naval presence in the Gulf, for example, all these sanctions, it seems like you have to give them a way out, too, or are they just waiting to try to bait them somehow into doing something terrible enough that we can say they're the ones who started the war?
Because it seems like they have this giant build-up, and then they have these meetings, I guess you could call them, they're not really negotiations, where they come in and negotiate and say, no matter what you do, we'll never lift the sanctions, and you have to close down your facility, and all these things that they know they can't get, which are dishonest in the extreme, obviously dishonest, even for a CNN viewer, dishonest, the negotiations.
So what's the strategy here?
What are they even trying to do?
I actually have a piece in the Diplomata that came out today, in which I'm questioning this increasingly common belief that we are actually seeing an inevitable war, meaning that the war between the United States and Iran is an inevitability, and it always has been.
And I'm pointing to the fact that it's actually not because the other side has a grand strategy and driving it towards this, but because both sides are escalating, miscalculating each other's side, always assuming the worst about the intentions of the other side, and by that, trapping themselves in an escalatory cycle that is now spinning out of control.
But from the outset, there was nothing inevitable about this.
This is still a resolvable issue, but not if we are acting on untested assumptions.
I mean, within the paradigm of enmity that exists between the United States and Iran, assumptions and conclusions are the same, and a theory trumps reality.
If we have a theory of why the Iranians are doing X, Y, and Z, or if the Iranians have a theory as to why the U.S. is doing X, Y, and Z, even if contradictory evidence shows up, it doesn't register, because theory is more important than reality.
Alright, it is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Trita Parsi from the National Iranian American Council, niacouncil.org.
And now, when you talk about the American diplomats insisting on unreality, it seems like one example of this would be the demand that the Iranians close down the Fordow facility, the secondary uranium enrichment facility that they've built under a mountain, obviously to protect it from airstrikes.
The Americans and the Israelis are saying they absolutely have to just close that thing down, not, well, we want an inspector living there 24 hours a day, or please just don't enrich up to 20% there, do your 20% at Natanz, or something where they could maybe work something out.
They're saying, close it.
Yep.
Which is meant to, correct me if I'm wrong, that's just meant to get the Iranians to say, well, forget you then, and then that's the end of that.
They don't go anywhere, they don't negotiate anything.
It could be.
It sounds like a poison pill, that's what they call it in the Texas State Legislature, right?
You tack your amendment on there that the other side won't possibly be able to go along with, and then it dies.
Sure, sure.
That is one plausible or possible explanation, but another possible explanation is also that they're driving an extremely hard bargain, and because they're going to be in it for the long run, they're not going to give up easily, they're not going to soften their position until much, much later.
I think we should be careful not to draw a conclusion on either side.
The one conclusion that we can draw, perhaps, is to say, this is clearly not a strategy that's going to have a high likelihood of success, particularly not under these election, silly season that we have in Washington right now.
I wrote a piece for Open Line at Daily Beast a couple of weeks ago, right after the Moscow talks, and I draw the conclusion that the administration essentially had come to the view that success in Moscow, meaning if they struck a deal in Moscow, would translate into failure in Washington, because they would be so criticized for the deal, because they would have obviously had to give something to get a deal.
They would have to give some incentive to the Iranians.
As a result, they would be attacked by Congress, by various interest groups, etc., etc., and as a result, they chose to go for a very hard bargain, not get a deal, but make sure that the talks didn't break down completely.
If that was the view in the White House, I think we can also say that, at least in the short run, the political folks in the White House who came to that conclusion were right, because there was a failure in Moscow, which means success in Washington, and you did not have a single person of any political weight from the establishment complain about the fact that Obama didn't get a deal in Moscow, that he didn't compromise.
There was no complaint.
But you can rest assured that if he had gotten a deal, if he had made a reasonable compromise, he would have been attacked viciously for having done so.
And because it's election season, it seems to me that they have now put off any reasonable exchange, any reasonable compromise, until at least after the election.
Yeah, but then again, they just turn around and paint him as naive for even trying to negotiate with these C, obviously, un-negotiatable people.
They're so crazy, those crazy imams over there, and so that just makes Obama naive and a fool for even trying.
You're absolutely right.
And meanwhile, he could say, you know what, I faced down your Republican opposition, I did the right thing, and I made a peace deal, and the world's better off for it, and how do you like that?
And he'd look like a tough guy.
Exactly.
I actually make that argument towards the end of the piece, even if this is a calculation that may have worked out in the short run.
In the long run, it's not going to work out, because he's going to get attacked anyways, and he has nothing to show for.
But if he had a small deal, even if it's just a small deal, he could say, well, look, we actually achieved something.
What have you achieved?
Right.
That's what's so frustrating about all this, is that here he put all this weight at the very beginning.
It's the same thing with the situation in Palestine, but for now just with the focus on Iran.
He came into office with these big promises and so little follow through, when as you said, the basis of the deal is obvious.
I mean, maybe I'm not the world's best diplomat, but we promise not to bomb you.
We'll lift some sanctions as long as you promise to never enrich above 20 percent, maybe adopt the additional protocol to the safeguards agreement, blah, blah, and shake hands.
No problem, right?
The basis is right there, and he just won't do it.
And so I wonder why spend all the political capital making such a big deal about rolling the dice when he's not even really trying.
Yeah, I agree, and it's very frustrating, because again, politics is trumping national security here.
Yeah, for sure.
And like you say, I totally agree with you.
I don't think he wants to get us into a war with Iran, but he just might, accidentally anyway, just might box us into that corner, create a situation, as you say, where tensions are high enough that the dang thing starts.
That's how things are sometimes.
Yeah.
I mean, we saw that just this week, that a terror bombing or the shooting down of that ship, all of these things can spark a major conflict right now because of the tenseness of the situation.
Just like that fatal shot on June 28th, 1914, started World War I.
Hey, to follow the regime in Damascus.
How about that for getting the next phase of this war going?
Thank you very much, Dr. Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council.
That's niacouncil.org.
I really appreciate it, Trita.
Thank you, Scott.