Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/15/22 Daniel Larison on the Deteriorating JCPOA Negotiations

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Scott interviews Daniel Larison about his recent article on the Iran Nuclear Deal negotiations. Before getting to that, Scott asks Larison about his reaction to the ceasefire in Yemen. Larison points out that nearly all ceasefires to occur in Yemen so far have actually been excuses for forces to regroup. However, he agrees with Scott that this one appears different. Next Scott and Larison go through the confusing and frustrating lack of progress in the negotiations for the U.S. to reenter the JCPOA. They talk about what’s going on and why, even though neither are concerned about Iran developing and using a nuclear weapon, they believe reentering the deal is the right path forward. The two also tie this topic into a broader conversation about Washington’s Middle East adventurism and the strange political forces shaping America’s Iran policy.   Discussed on the show: “Biden’s Last Chance on the Nuclear Deal” (Antiwar.com) Scott’s interview with Nasser Arrabyee “Yemeni Civil War Unleashes a Plague of Locusts” (Antiwar.com) Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter Daniel Larison is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, contributor at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison or on his blog, Eunomia. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.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 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got antivore.com contributing editor daniel larrison and um well first of all welcome the show daniel how you doing

i'm doing fine scott thanks for having me back on great Happy to have you here. Listen, before I start asking you all about the Iran nuclear deal, I've got good news for you. I think you must know the headlines about the ceasefire that's been achieved in the war in Yemen. But the news that I have for you is that earlier today, I spoke with Nasser Arabi, my reporter friend from Sana'a.

And he says, oh, yeah, man, this is the greatest ceasefire ever compared to all the other ones that all sides have invested. I think I'm almost 90% sure he said, including what he called the Giants Brigade, which is sort of the UAE's euphemism for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their militia there. But then al-Isla, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Southern Socialist secessionists there in aid in the STC, and the Houthis as well have all signed on to the thing. And apparently they really mean there's been no airstrikes. They lifted the blockade at the ports.

working on opening up the Sinai airport and just I've known this guy for seven years now and I never heard him so happy. It seems like real progress breaking out there. So first of all, I just wanted to tell you that. And then second of all, I'm interested in what you think about all that. It is very promising news. The truce does seem to be holding at least for for now. The trouble with every ceasefire up until now in Yemen is that it was usually just cover for forces to regroup and regather their strength and then begin fighting again in just a few weeks. So it looks like a promising pause in the fighting, and there has been some movement politically on the side, on the anti-Houthi side, with the displacement of Hadi, the so-called president,

of the recognized government, and being replaced by, I believe, an eight-person council. Of course, that reflects the divided nature of the anti-Houthi coalition, but it's a promising sign that they are finally realizing that there is no political progress with Hadi as the figurehead. They are, I think, beginning to wake up to some of the political realities in Yemen now. And so, yeah, it's a promising sign. It's one of the first promising signs we've seen in quite a while. so I'm I'm encouraged by it. I hope that it takes hold and leads to a longer-lasting political settlement, but we've been disappointed by developments in Yemen before, so we'll have to see.

That's true, you know, very much so. And that was what he said, too. But it's, you know, as you were mentioning, you know, the previous ceasefires weren't really ceasefires at all, but just time out to regroup fires, you know. And so this seems to be a bit better than that. So we'll just have to take it for what it is, not more. But definitely a hopeful sign there. And I think it shows that the Saudi government in particular is finally realizing

that they're not going to get a respite from attacks on their territory until they start to deal more seriously on the political and diplomatic side. And they had just taken a number of fairly big hits to their way. facilities. They had a big hit on their near Jedi, I believe, a few weeks ago. And I think that we have finally woken them up that they can't keep this up. Yeah, that was what he said, too, was what he thought had changed, was the Houthis. In fact, you know, they had kind of retreated from Mareeb, but still they're getting these attacks right on your money inside the border of Saudi Arabia. They're dealing from a position of strength here.

And the Saudis, come on, they've known all along they're not going to be able to succeed in putting Hadi back on the throne there. So what the hell are they fighting for, much less us? Well, you think they would have realized that a lot sooner. And I think, of course, the UAE recognized that a long time ago. They've been pursuing their own agenda separate from Hadi for a long time. But I think even the Saudis realize how useless Hadi is and what a liability he is. in the eyes a lot of you have many is because he didn't even have legitimacy when he was president so it's it's a real stretch to think that he could ever have any after being put back in power by

some other government and so as he is being pushed out or pushed to the side i think that's very encouraging and a sign that there is at least a possibility of compromise in the near future yeah and listen i'm just throwing this one in here just because I don't know why. I should have tried to interview her at the time. Maybe I still will, if I can remember. But Morgan Hunter wrote a piece for us at anti-war.com maybe two years ago now, or probably a year ago, Daniel, about the locust plague that had hit, especially in Eastern Africa, and how they all came from Yemen. And they figured out finally what causes grasshoppers to turn into locust. It's when they're so overpopulated that the males back. legs rub up against each other and then they start this transformation and it used to be that at i don't know exactly what's called the university of sena or the university in sena whatever it is they had a major department that was devoted to grasshopper annihilation and they would go out there and kill them by the millions call them but then the war canceled that destroy the university cancel the program

and those were the grasshoppers that became the locusts that then flew across the Red Sea and decimated eastern Africa leading to starvation and hunger and God knows what deprivation for all the Horn of Africa region there which lasted for I don't know at least two years and I don't even know that it's over yet

but that was where that came from and she showed direct causation there from the war our war well and the yeah the war have, of course, the war has produced famine conditions in Yemen, and then Somalia has been suffering from famine conditions for a number of reasons, but certainly because of their own conflict as well. And famine is frequently the handmaiden of war. It's frequently the result of war. And famine today is pretty much always man-made, because there is no economic or

technical reason why people can't get enough food. It's typically because of policy decisions made by governments or those groups that are in power to deprive people of the means to obtain food. And we've seen it in Yemen. We're seeing it in Afghanistan. It happens, unfortunately, with increasing frequency in the modern world. And it's all man-made. Well, and the UN is warning that this year they're expecting another. This would be the third major famine in Somalia under the era of America's war. Now America's longest

war, longer than Afghanistan. Head troops there since December 2001 and they're still there fighting in the name of al-Shabaab the problem they created. And so this would be the third major famine there. It's sad to think. Our military interventions in the post-Cold War era

really got started with that that intervention under the elder bush uh sensibly for humanitarian reasons uh to to relieve hunger in simolia uh low 30 plus years ago and um obviously we're not we're not helping very much in that regard anymore no um and you know i need to catch up on that because you know we did cover the famine there in 2012 and 13 and in 2017 and so i need to get out at least can't do anything about it but at least we can you know get the experts on to set the record straight that this is what's happening there and you know i mean we've had you know the sun is to blame right i mean the weather is the weather but the problem is you know they have this

massive drought just as you said massive drought hits the horn of africa well that's eritrea Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, and I don't know, maybe throw in another somewhere. Well, they all had a drought, but Somalia had the famine because that's where the chaos of the war, even where you don't have warlords, you know, monopolizing the food resources, which is exactly what happens. You still just have the chaos of all the violence and, you know, people forced out of their homes. That also means off of their farms. And the fields don't get planted. Nobody's there to work them. Nobody has any money.

The whole thing completely breaks down. And so you have people going hungry across the border, but you have people laying down and dying in Somalia. And you're seeing some of the same things as a result of starvation policies inside Ethiopia now in the Tigray region as part of that conflict. And so it's a recurring problem driven by war. Well, here's our segue to our major topic. The whole reason Barack Obama helped the Saudis and the UAE and al-Qaeda launched this genocide back in 2015

was to, quote, placate the Saudis, as his ministers explained to the New York Times back then at the time. And he had to placate them because they were upset because he was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. And I think I was even saying to people at the time, geez, I do support this. deal, all other things being equal. But then again, I don't know what the Saudis are going to do. Maybe they'll do something horrible. I know I said that to at least somebody interview me around that time. And then, lo and behold, that was the compromise. Okay, you shut up about us signing this nuclear deal and we'll help you kill a few hundred thousand people. And that was the deal Barack Obama made with the devil. Crown Prince Bonesaw over there. Deputy Crown Prince then,

had been Solomon. And, um, and so it was all about getting this nuclear deal done. And then Donald Trump comes in and tears it right up and throws it in the trash can anyway. Now the question is, can we get back in the deal? Uh, I know you wouldn't agree with Madeline Albright. The price was worth it, but the deal itself, do you support the deal? What's so important about it? And what kind of progress is the Biden government making after already delaying a year and a half on getting back into this thing. So, I mean, I certainly supported it. I supported it originally. I still support reentering it on the U.S. side to restore it, to make it function the way it was supposed to function

originally. And the chief reasons for keeping it alive and not letting it fall apart, as many in Washington would like to see happen, is twofold. One is that it does provide real nonproliferation benefits. It keeps Iran's nuclear program verifiably peaceful. It blocks off in significant ways the possibility of their nuclear program being put to military uses to create nuclear weapons. And so that's good in and of itself, and it's also beneficial for regional stability. And also, as an added bonus, it deprives hardliners in this country of a pretext for conflict with Iran, which they have been desiring above all else for at least the last 15 years, really the last, probably the last 30.

And the nuclear issue has become their favorite pretext for that because the prospect of an unfriendly government with nuclear weapons is always something that alarms people, understandably. Even if it is only intended as a deterrent, many people in this country don't see it that way. And so it makes it easier to sell military action against that country. And so if the nuclear issue is set aside, if it is effectively resolved, even for just a few decades, even if not forever, for just a few decades, it would then remove the possibility or certainly reduce the probability of war with Iran. And that is all to the good if we want to get our forces out of the Middle East, and also if we want to avoid more unnecessary wars overseas.

And so certainly there were many things that the Obama administration did in their second term, including backing for the Saudis in the UAE that I strenuously disagreed with that I denounced from the get-go. And I don't really think that that was strictly necessary to get the deal. What they did in securing the nonproliferation agreement itself was worth supporting, and I think should be supported again now. unfortunately the Biden administration doesn't seem to be as much of a believer in

the agreement as some of us are they have dragged their feet for over a year they've taken forever to nail down the particulars to get this agreement revived and now my fear is they're going to allow

it to fail over this sticking point about the FTO designation for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps This is the special branch of Iran's military that's dedicated both to regime protection and also to their national security and it is the main instrument that they use to coordinate their military policy in the region. And so as a result of that, the Trump administration labeled them as a foreign terrorist

organization in 2019. This was part of the broader maximum pressure campaign to try to isolate and pressure Iran into making massive concessions, and also simply to punish them and keep them isolated. Of course, the maximum pressure campaign failed on its own terms, but now it has effectively created a barrier to Biden resuming U.S. involvement in the nuclear deal, because in order to get the Iranians to sign on, the Iranians are saying that they need the IRGC taken off the FTO missed because they find it insulting that a branch of their military is being grouped with the likes of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. And so really, as a matter of face-saving for them, they need

the IRGC taken off the list. The U.S. is reluctant to do that, even though the IRGC would still be sanctioned under different authorities for issues related to terrorism, including being a so-called especially designated global terrorist. So in impractical terms, in terms of the financing of the group, nothing would change if they were taken off the FTO list. What would change is that it would facilitate the resumption of the nuclear deal. And as another important issue, it would remove this stigma of all the Iranian men

who have previously been conscripted into service as, as soldiers in the IRGC, who are then essentially blacklisted as terrorists and unable to travel or work in other countries. So this is, it seems to me, it's a fairly easy fix that the Biden administration could do, but of course they're terrified of being accused of being weak and appeasing the Iranians. And so they're, I think, unwilling to take that step simply because a lot of people in Washington and of course in Israel and Saudi Arabia would throw a fit about it and they would just rather not deal with that. And so I think we're unfortunately on the verge of seeing them walk away from

a deal that they could get simply because they don't want to take that flag. Yeah, give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors. And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office. But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. Easyship.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to Scotthorton.org slash easy ship. Hey, y'all Scott here. You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, fools errand, enough already, and the great Ron Paul. Two by

our executive editor Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And of course, no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute. Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook, edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagon and Brad Hoff and his co-author, Zachary Wingard. That's Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Well, yeah, these cowards, they're terrified.

Someone will call them weak. So they curl up in a ball and do whatever they're told. And Trump's no different. I mean, Trump and Obama and Biden, they're all the same. I guess it's always like this. You're soft on the commies, you're soft on the terrorists, you're soft on the Ayatollah. But it'd be so much easier, I think.

I mean, if it was you and me up there, I'd be like, Daniel, get out there and tell them, I ain't afraid of no Ayatollah. And then that way, we're still USA number one and all these things. And then, but we can deal with the Ayatollah because, frankly, his country has the gross domestic product of northern Florida or something. And so we can deal with that. We don't have to pretend to be afraid of that. We can negotiate with them. And I guess, forget the spirit of the thing.

The point is, for me, is that, Screw the JCPOA because we do have the NPT. And it's true that they could withdraw from the NPT and start making nukes, but doesn't seem like they really want to do that. And I guess my idea about the JCPOA was always that it was superfluous in the sense that it truly was unnecessary, but it was important in the sense that it was kind of necessary anyway, because the lie was essentially that the MPT didn't exist and that the Iranians weren't members of it. Nobody ever heard of a safeguards agreement before. And as far as anyone knows they're

making H-bombs until we get this deal passed. And that narrative was so powerful, it really did take this deal to finally put it to bed. And so it was good for that, even though it shouldn't have been necessary to do that at all. I guess the Ron Paul foreign policy would have been, we're going to lift all the sanctions. We would encourage you to stay within the deal, please. And then that would have been the end of that, and I think that would have been the end of that, right? I told it doesn't want H-bombs anyway, or even A-bombs. Well, it seems like if they had wanted to build them, they could have built them by now. They probably would have built them by now. And so the question we should ask is, if they have the means to do it, or if they have the technical know how to do it, why have they

so far refrained from pursuing it or making the political decision to do it? And I think because they realize that whatever security benefits they might possibly derive from it, it's not worth being treated like the pariah state that they've been treated like. And so they would rather have normal relations and normal trade with most of the world, of course not with us, but with most of the world, rather than continue being treated like a pariah. And I think the only reason that they have even contemplated wanting to have a deterrent, is the fear of being attacked, being invaded again. But if they can get certain reassurances that that's not going to be the main issue,

then they don't really need to even worry about that. In general, I agree the nonproliferation treaty by itself is enough. It's good enough for every other country in the world. And the only country that has gone nuclear or has built, nuclear weapons after being a member of the NPT was North Korea, and they left before they tested their first weapon. And so the NPT works, as you say, and the nuclear deal was, in addition to that, I guess, to make extra sure that Iran's nuclear program really was in compliance.

But they've proven, at least during the brief time when everyone was part of the agreement, that they're willing to comply with those terms, even though they are extra restrictions beyond what other countries have to put up with. And so they've proven that they're willing to do that. And I think we have to bank on that being the case again in the future. And that's where I hope we go. Although we know, unfortunately, if there's another Republican administration a few years from now, they'll probably tear the whole thing up again and start over.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing of it, too, right? I was going to ask you here, is not the Ayatollah asking for some kind of real assurances or is he not saying, well, this has to be a treaty ratified by your Senate or else I just can't believe in it? Because you guys love breaking deals more than you like signing them. Well, I don't know that they make a condition of it being ratified, but they do want some sort of binding commitment that says that a future administration won't go back on it. And it's in the nature of our system that we don't really have the ability to bind later administrations in that way.

Unfortunately, even with a ratified treaty, as we know, if a president decides that a ratified treaty should be thrown out the window, there's remarkably little that anyone seems to be able to do about it. Let me ask you something about that. You know, Jack Kennedy promised the Soviets we would not invade or do a regime change in Cuba. and we get our missiles out of Turkey if they would back down and get their missiles out of Cuba and the Cuban missile crisis and every president since then

has stood by that. They could have invaded or done some kind of CIA coup or whatever it was. I'm pretty sure, aren't I right that all the exploding cigars and all the BS?

That was all before the Cuban missile crisis and the U.S. has essentially stood by that assurance this whole time and even to the USSR that doesn't exist anymore and obviously they still

they're horrible. Cuba policy with their blockade and the rest of it, but the embargo, as they call it. But somehow that one has stuck. I wonder if you could explain, how do we get one of those? You know, a security assurance that somehow is truly meant and that the other presidents do abide by. Well, yeah, I'm not sure because unfortunately there's such a strong anti-Iranian consensus in Washington that there's a strong temptation for presidents of both parties to indulge that consensus and to pursue confrontational policies that don't really make any sense for U.S. security. And of course, we know that that has to do in part with lobbying by weapons manufacturers,

lobbying by UAE and Saudi-sponsored lobbying groups that keep agitating for greater U.S. involvement and more lopsided U.S. involvement against Iran on their behalf. And so it's that that's the core problem. I think we could find some sort of arrangement between our government and the Iranian government provided that our government wasn't being pressured in so many ways by these other forces. And how you fix that, I don't know. Well, Daniel, I just wanted to point out real quick, by the way, that, you know, the common narrative has it that Iran was at least researching how to make nuclear bombs up until 2003, as Seymour Hersch had reported, that they called all that off after America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them. Eh, convenient.

But then, Gareth Porter showed in his book, Manufactured Crisis, that that assertion by U.S. intelligence was essentially based on two things. One, the Israeli forged smoking laptop or laptop of death, which was a hoax. And then secondly, as Gareth put it, honestly misinterpreted intercepts by the DIA, where the Iranians were buying some dual-use items, some special magnets and whatever, that the DIA said, hey, this looks like maybe ingredients of a clandestine program here. But then the IAEA, years later, I guess, tracked all of these orders down in their investigation. under the additional protocols and whatever and found all of these magnets

and the rest of the material being used for civilian purposes at the university, just like in the original claims. So it wasn't cover for a secret program. It just sort of looked like that. And as Gareth Porta, he thought the DIA just made an honest mistake there, but then that was all there was.

So in other words, they have this latent program where they do know how to enrich uranium, can't argue with that, but they don't seem to have ever gone any further than that. The CIA, remember, had to frame them by handing them blueprints, the Operation Merlin, to hand them blueprints with a couple of flaws so that the IAEA could catch them with the blueprints later. But, of course, he just tore it up and threw it in the trash and saw right through the ruse, and that didn't work.

That was as close as they could get to say Iran had a nuclear weapons program, man. They had to frame them. Well, it's always been really, as you say, very thin evidence. there's not a lot to support the contention that they had much of a program then. And obviously, even if you accepted all of that, it has not been the case for almost 20 years now. They haven't been doing any of the things that people might suspect could lead to nuclear weapons. And so the question becomes then how is it when Iran has absolutely not been pursuing these weapons, that so many political forces are determined to cast them as being hell-bent on acquiring one

when they clearly aren't hell-bent on doing that, they're in fact been going out of their way to accept restrictions that other countries don't have to accept that keep them from that path. How many times do they have to say yes before people will actually accept that they are serious that they're not interested in that. And so that's the real political problem for us in the U.S. is that there's tremendous resistance from that anti-Iranian consensus I was talking about to accepting that you can, in fact, make a workable agreement with Iran

and that they will stick to it. As we've seen, the real problem in any agreement between our countries in practice is that our government can't be trusted to keep it. If we can find a way to keep our government on board with these agreements, then they might actually last beyond three or four years. Well, you know, I kind of resent the fact that America keeps fighting on both sides of this stupid sectarian war led by Riyadh and Tehran, you know, for the last 20 years here. So, but I guess, you know, if I worked at a think tank in Washington, I would think that if you paid me enough or something, I would think that, geez, no, we can't leave because then all hell would break loose or whatever. Do you think that that is a reasonable possibility that if somehow America just stopped having a Middle East policy and just let them work it out, that necessarily Saudi Arabia and Iran would go to war against each other? Well, I doubt it very much.

I mean, we've seen what Saudi Arabia's military capabilities are, even against a much poorer and weaker country, going up against a larger country with a fairly sophisticated set of military capabilities. I think they would do very poorly indeed. But the way that a lot of people think about this is funny because we've been deeply engaged, deeply involved, military. in the region for the last 30 years, and it's during those 30 years when the region has gone to hell. I mean, it's not that there haven't been wars prior to that. Of course, there have been. But typically, when there have been wars, there have been wars that have either been

wars that we have given the green light to or that we have accepted at some level. And in the last 30 years, a lot of the chaos has been the result of our policies. So the fear that the region might become unstable if we were to withdraw or to pull back our forces is almost comical. Pulling our forces out may be one of the things that finally allows some stability to take hold. Because I think when we saw, and we even saw some of this when the U.S. refused to respond to attacks on Saudi territory during the Trump administration. There was this expectation that the U.S. would ride to their rescue, or at least they had that expectation, that the U.S. would ride to their rescue and attack Iran on their behalf. And when that didn't happen, they had to recalculate and they had to realize that they needed to mend their offenses with the Iranians instead of taking an extremely hostile approach. And that's when some of these talks between the Saudis and the Iranians first got started.

And so I think what we would see is if we were to withdraw most or all of our forces out of the region and to let them deal with each other with their own devices, they would have to come to some kind of compromise. The Saudis can't afford a war on the scale that they would have to fight if they were actually to fight directly against the Iranians. and I don't think Iran is interested in starting a war like that. So the possibility for some kind of regional balance that is conducive to more peace and stability than we've seen over the last 30 years is a real possibility. And the idea that we're a stabilizing force when we're clearly enabling and egging on regional aggression by the Saudis, by the UAE, by Israel, as well as our own activities, I think it's clear that we're not the key to stability.

We're the obstacle to it. Yep. Sure seems like it. I mean, they've all lived next to each other for thousands of years, and I know it's cliche to say, oh, they've been fighting for thousands of years, but I don't think that's really right, is it? They've been fighting this whole time? Certainly not on sectarian lines.

A lot of modern sectarian conflicts are just that very modern conflicts that stem from current political conditions. And those sectarian divisions can be stoked and inflamed by certain governments for their own purposes. But the idea that these groups are going out of their way to pick fight with each other simply over sectarian identity, I think gets the causality backwards. The sectarian identity becomes a way to mobilize people around conflicts that are already being fought for other reasons. And so that's the way I think people should think about it. And actually, Yemen is a great example of this, because sectarianism in Yemen has not been a particularly pervasive force for much of its history. It's only when the Saudis began actively exporting Wahhabism and pushing their line

into Yemen that you started to see a really nasty sectarian rift opening up. And so that's that's where these things come from. They come from government policies. It's not something that's, it's not like an underlying fault line that just naturally creates these problems. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. There's no taking back 2003, well, and I should say 2003 through 8, when Bush kicked all the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad. That's the first time the Shiites have dominated an Arab capital city for a thousand years. And there's no one doing it.

It took our Army of Marine Corps to make it this way. Hey, you're talking 10 million people moved out or something. Just forget about it. You can fling suicide bombers at Baghdad from now on, and it's going to be ruled by the Bada Brigade. So, you know, I don't know. I guess in that sense, maybe that leads more towards stasis. I don't know.

Probably doubtful, but it's something that, you know, the Iranians have their prize in their very close allies there, and the Saudis are just going to have to learn to suck it up because there's nothing they can do about that now, you know? And the Iranians, the Iranian interest in Iraq is primarily, to ensure that nothing like what happened in the 80s happens to them again. And so they want to keep that border, that their Western border, secure. And so they will want to keep a friendly government in Baghdad.

And so that's what their interest is there. And the current Iraqi government, of course, desires that the U.S. and Iran bury the hatchet because Iraq has served as the battleground between the two of them throughout the last two decades up until now. And so if people want to see peace or at least some more peace in Iraq than we've seen, that relationship has to be put on a sounder footing instead of the constant hostility and incriminations that have characterized it for these 40 years. all right well listen i sure appreciate your time on the show as always and all your great work for us at antiwar dot com daniel thanks a lot scott thanks for having me on all right you guys

that is daniel larrison contributing editor at antiwar dot com his latest is biden's last chance on the nuclear deal before that stop indulging the saudis and the ua e and on like that great stuff there uh original dot antiwar dot com slash daniel underscore larrison The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.