Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/25/25 Trita Parsi on how Israel’s War with Iran Made Everything Worse

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Trita Parsi joins the show to discuss the fallout and likely near-term consequences of the Israeli-US air war on Iran. Parsi explains that the Iranians are now a lot more likely to make a serious go at building a nuclear bomb and, thanks to Netanyahu and Trump, it will now be a lot harder to stop them.  Discussed on the show: Iran’s Nuke Program is Intact w/ MIT Prof Ted Postol & Lt Col Daniel Davis Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated; Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY 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, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003. And follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton's show.

Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great treat of Parsi. Of course, he formerly was at the National Iranian American Council and he is the co-founder of the Quincy Institute and writes regularly, of course, at responsiblestakecraft.com which is their great

website full of articles. And all it is is guys from the American Conservative and Jim Loeb's blog plus their best friends I guess but man it's all really great foreign policy stuff there at Responsible Statecraft and of course the wonderful and very close friend

of me in the show Kelly Vlahos is editor over there and it's just great but welcome back oh and I didn't say but I needed to he wrote treacherous alliance also some other books but treacherous alliance is such a huge and important book and I really hope you'll all read it's the whole way better history than enough

already of what happened over there between Israel, Iraq and Iran over all those years and all of that. And he's a big part of why I know so much. Welcome back to the show. How you doing? Thanks so much for having me against God. And happy April Glasby Day.

You can attack anybody you want. All right, good. I got a little chuckle there. Yeah, it's July 25th, the day that America told Iraq, go ahead and invade Kuwait if you feel like it. So how about that Iran war? What do you think? In every sense of the world, I think we are in.

a worse situation than before. First of all, a couple of things that need to be clarified because the mainstream media's coverage of this is lacking scrutiny as always. And it's fully understandable that the Israelis are giving the impression that they won the war. I mean, anyone and the Iranians do as well, and they didn't win the war either. The bottom line is that this was extremely costly for both sides and led to a scenario in which both sides essentially lied for seized fire. The Iranian missile strikes against Israel was far more successful than have been reported

and caused significant damage while at the same time the Israelis were fast running out of anti-missile interceptors. They couldn't be replenished that fast enough. There's not enough of the stockpile. Saw a report yesterday that 14% of the THAAD interceptors were consumed in this 12-day period and it will take the United States three to five years to replenish it.

They're far more expensive than the missiles themselves. The Iranians have, by the intelligence estimations, about 1,600 long-range missiles left. And towards the end, by the way, they were getting really successful. I believe the last day they shot about 30 missiles and 19 of them went through. Part of the reason why we know so little about the damage that was done, et cetera, is because of the Israeli military censorship. That does not allow us to know these things. And to a certain extent that censorship is understandable

from the Israeli perspective, what is not understandable is that every mainstream media story about this should make that very clear to the reader. What we know is what the Israelis allow us to know and a few cell phone videos on top of that. But other than that, there's a huge dark number here because of the censorship. And it's only like one out of a hundred stories that actually makes that clear to the reader.

Yeah, I mean, this has always been a thing about defensive missiles. In a real crisis, you can use them. But in terms of cost ratio, it takes a lot more to shoot a bullet down than just to shoot a bullet off in the first place, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. And over time, the air defense systems of the Israelis start to wear down. Many of them were taken out. At the same time, of course, the Iranians suffered huge for those, particularly the intelligence coup that Israelis pulled off in the first 12 to 18 hours. I mean, Iran was in a state of panic and complete disarray, but it regrouped very quickly, much faster than the Israelis expected.

Israelis were going for decapitation, which suggests that they probably consumed at least 80% of their intelligence assets. Iran. A lot of the things they did are not things that they can repeat. And mindful of the fact that they were going for decapitation, there's no reason to believe that they would be holding off on, you know, saving 50% of those assets for some other day. If you're going for decapitation, you're giving it essentially your all. And if that assumption is true, then it means that the next order will happen. I mean, I think everyone on both sides are essentially saying that it's 90% and chance that it will happen perhaps as early as end of August, it most likely is such of the Israelis cannot start off that war with a major intelligence coup in the manner that they

did in this war. So in some ways, even if they think that it was a victory for them, it may have ended up becoming a Pyrrhic victory, because a lot of the math is actually on the Iranian side. And if you then pull the U.S. out of the equation, mindful of the fact, again, 14% of the fat arsenal was consumed in 12 days for a war. that Israel started, you know, as a war of choice that Israelis started. If you pull the U.S. out of this equation, you know, the Israelis cannot pull this up for more than a day or two.

Now, quick damage assessment. I got a thing from Ted Postal, the MIT missile and nuclear bomb scientist guy that I was looking at here. I don't think I got as far as the conclusion, but it looks like the point is overall that there was limited damage to Natanz and Fordo. They still have centrifuges. I think their conversion facility has been sufficiently damaged to prevent conversion from metal to gas and back to metal again and that kind of thing, at least for now. I don't know how long would take that, take them to replicate that in another place. So obviously their nuclear program has been set back severely. now it doesn't seem like they're saying aha now we're building nukes but they are saying aha now we're still keeping on exactly what we were doing before and we are going to continue enriching uranium and you can't stop us and we will not stop and that's a precondition for any new talks all those bunker buster bombs notwithstanding which sounds to me like all we have now is not even really a ceasefire but just a time out.

and that once they start spinning centrifuges again, then we're going to start bombing them again. Let me add a couple of things, Scott. What Israelis wanted to achieve here, sort of decapitation was to make sure that they turned Iran into the next Lebanon or Syria, a country that Israel can bomb at will without American involvement and with complete impunity. Throughout the last decade, we've seen how the Israelis

whenever they wanted, bombed Damascus or anywhere else in Syria and Lebanon. And there was nothing that those countries essentially could do. This is what they want to achieve with Iran and make sure that they can do it without American involvement. As part of the larger security strategy of the Israelis, which is security through complete military hegemony and domination. This is why they are very inclined to start the war again, and they want to do so before the political window in one. Washington closes. And the Iranians are in a position in which they have to prevent this from being able to be successful.

Because if it ends up becoming successful, that means that that's a new plateau. The Iranian will have a tremendous difficulty getting out of that. Because the minute they start rebuilding air defense systems or anything else, the Israelis will come in and bomb it. Which then suggests that the next war will be much larger than the first war. the Iranians will give it, will not show any of the restraint that they showed in the last 12-day war. Because it's very clear, they were going for a long confrontation. And as a result, they were not consuming everything they had at an early or a fast pace. But for the next war,

they're probably going to go all in right away to completely dispel any notion in Israel that they can turn Iran into the next suit. But they probably have less comprehensive. than 100%, obviously, that they can succeed. No one knows whether the Israelis will have learned faster than the Iranians, whether they will be able to replenish their arsenal faster than the Iranians, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a complete uncertainty who will win that battle. And if you are not confident that you will win the battle, you recognize that there's a likelihood that you won't,

then you're looking at your deterrence. You see that you don't have the nuclear deterrence left. You don't have missiles left in case you fail, and you don't have the various groups in the axis of resistance left, which then suggests that if they fail, they will have lost all deterrence. And in that scenario, it seems to me extremely likely that they will, right now, in parallel, start pursuing a nuclear weapon, because they cannot have all of their deterrence just riding on the idea that their missiles will be successful in the next war. Yeah.

And war that may happen four weeks from now. Well, the problem is, I mean, and look, I think it was always fair to characterize it this way, right? I mean, Iran always said, hey, it's just a civilian nuclear program. But clearly, the insistence on enrichment capability is the preservation of a latent nuclear deterrent. So one day, the Ayatollah could decide that God has changed his mind and we can build nukes after all. And, in fact, we better.

and he could decide that any day and so the thing is what he was saying was don't make me choose that and we were inferring I was I'm not speaking for you I was inferring a lot of that but that seemed to be clearly

the case just like with Japan and Brazil and Germany that we all know they could make nukes but they're not right now so let's not anyone start trying their patience kind of a thing or you know push it too far and make them feel like they have to

that's a better way to put it there but so now their bluff has been called and Israel and or the United States have air dominance over their country. Their anti-aircraft was much less than we thought or Americas and Israel's capabilities were increased, you know, quite a bit over the last decade or a decade and a half or so since the last time Sentcom vetoed this thing.

And so as you're saying, there's the balance of power in Iran's ability to hit Israel with missiles, but as far as shooting their planes out of the sky with missiles, apparently they can't and so the Israelis and certainly the Americans apparently just have the run of the place and so if they break out now now that we've called their bluff we can still just bomb that and at some point and I'm not certain that that's true that like you know I've had people tell me that comes down to it they can just bury it deep enough that there's just absolutely nothing we can do about it although you know it seems like we just bury them alive down there somehow or something you know what I mean I don't know

Yeah, well, I mean, there's so many unknowns here, but one thing I think it's worth pointing out is no one knows whether they held the stockpile at Fordo or if they had at least moved some of it out. And whatever they built in other facilities, they probably had some redundancy kept elsewhere, not as a part of a major program, but as part of production. It's important to understand that when you're producing nuclear fuel for civilian uses, you actually need rather large plants, a large number of centrifuges. When you're building a weapon, particularly a crude weapon, you don't need a big facility at all, and you don't need a large number of centrifuge. The Brits built their first nuclear weapon with 20 centrifuge. So if they actually move in that direction, which they hadn't done, at least up until

they were bombed, then I think detecting it will become much, much more difficult. And now they have a perfect excuse of not letting the IEA back in. I mean, first of all, the IEA left itself because it was too unsafe for them to be there while the Israelis and the U.S. was bombing. Right. And given many other challenges that the IEA has now in confidence building with Iran, the Iranians are convinced that the IEA provided a list of Iranian nuclear scientists to to the Israelis and that the Israelis used it to identify, to find them and assassinate them.

And they assassinated around 30 Iranian scientists during this period. And that's not counting the one that they've assassinated early on. Moreover, they believe that the unnecessarily harsh wording in the IEA report at the Board of Governors meeting right before the Israeli attack provided a false sense of legitimacy for the attack and actually encourage Israelis to go forward. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the Israelis were going to do this regardless, but it was helpful.

But under these circumstances, Iran's nuclear program, for all purposes right now, is a black box. And if they were to build a bomb, they're not going to do it at the same declared facilities that the US bombed. It's just not the way things work. But now after they have been bombed, they actually have a right of all right

of also leaving the NPT, the Nonproliferation Treaty, but there's no reason for them to do so until they're actually ready to have the bomb. So I don't expect them to leave any time soon. But I do think, and you've heard me on this several times saying, I don't think the Iranians were building a bomb, and I stand by that. I don't think they were.

I've changed my position now, because given what the circumstances are right now, after them having been bombed, and non-nuclear power being bombed by two nuclear weapons states in the midst of negotiations, I think we just have to be very frank and recognize that it is a very likely scenario that they will go in that direction

and that the capacity of the world of being able to prevent or even detect that is significantly damaged by the water that Israeli started with the help of Donald Trump. Yep. Hey, y'all, if you run a business or a side hustle and want to keep more of your money out of the IRS's hands,

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Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe get all the war lies by me for free and then you'll never have to believe them again i totally agree with you and not only because that's what i've been warning about for the last 20 years in a row but because it only makes sense and as you're saying

with the iaea no longer there and they can't verify the non-diversion at some point they lose tracks like a cop in a chase we lost them you know what i mean they're At some point, they're out running and you don't know exactly how much they have anymore. They could show you the same quantity you were expecting, but you don't know about the other quantity that they developed while you weren't looking. And so, yeah, and then I guess that's okay with Netanyahu too because that would then just justify a nuclear war, which might be more fun. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, and look what the neocons in Washington are saying immediately after they thought that they had least managed, not to defeat Iran, certainly I don't think they're content with the situation, but they're content with the fact that they finally managed to get the United States into war with Iran. Bibi has fought to get that for more than 25 years. He obviously thought that it was going to be longer. He didn't think that it would be a one-off.

I think we can say that Trump doesn't like war, but he loves military action. And this is one of those examples. He did military action, but made sure that it was just, just a one-off, essentially. I don't think the next time he does that against Yvani, he will be successful. I think next time the Iranians will probably strike back much, much harder.

But given that scenario where the Israelis now have managed to get the U.S. into this war, as soon as that happened, what did they start to do? Started bombing Syria again. I started saying that Turkey is now the next threat. So in a scenario in which the Iranians actually are defeated, rest assured, the next problem is going to be Erdogan, and you're going to see all of those neocons pushing the line that the United States needs to go to war with Turkey, despite the fact that Turkey is a NATO power. Because at the end of the day, it's about making sure that there's no one in the

region that has the capacity, forget about whether they have the intent or not, that have the capacity of posing a challenge to Israel. Complete military domination in order for the Israelis to feel safe as you're conducting a genocide. And that is, would you go back to the Odegianan plan of 1981, I think that's where that comes from? Or it always was like that. No, no, I think it comes from early on. I mean, this is part of the reason why they pushed the United States to adopt laws that says that the U.S. law guarantees what is called Israel's strategic military edge.

We can never sell weapons to any country in the region that are on part with the weapons that we sell to Israelis, for instance. And these Israelis, I mean, David, you may remember that passage in the book. that we did read a legendary Israeli Air Force General and who one of one of the pilots in the Osirac attack in 1981 explained it to me that from the Israeli standpoint, it has to be able to outgone every country in the region and every combination of countries in the region.

And as soon as Iran is done, then they're going to go after the next one. And Turkey is the next one. And the Egyptians are very worried right now because they feel that they're on the line as well. And this, I think, has started to dawn on the folks in the GCC, the Saudis and others and thought that they can make peace with Israel and starting to realize, hmm, that may actually not be necessary because Israel is completely unhinged

and the United States appears completely unwilling to restrain. Yeah, it sure does seem that way. Now, so here was the question that Tucker Carlson asked Ted Cruz. He says, well, what's the ethnic makeup of Iran? And he goes, oh, I don't know. I mean some of them are Shiite Persians or something and then so that raised the question of like let's say that there was a bombing campaign large enough to destabilize the regime enough that it fell that there was one group or another in there powerful enough to take advantage what might it look like I mean I don't I'm not even going to pretend to be dumb enough as a devil's advocate to say you think the monarchy could be restored because that's just completely insane. But I could see a giant civil war and them trying it,

and then the Civil War is the result of them trying it. I know that there are still bin Ladenite groups like Jandala, and I know there are Kurds like Pijack who are already armed and ready to fight for their own interests. You know, I don't know. What do you think of the aftermath of a real regime change? I think what we saw on this war is that... It was much harder for the Israelis to decapitate the regime and to even disrupt its command and control for more than 12, 18 hours.

They never lost control over any of the territory in the sense of any uprising. They are very worried that one of the things that the Israelis will try to do is to pour weapons into Kurdish areas or into other areas and try to take control over a small portion of the country. and then through that start some sort of a civil war or ethnic secessionist war. Rezapalati, I think, is just a tool that is being used by the Israelis in order to give the impression that there is an Iranian face for what they're doing, that this is some sort of a liberation war. I don't think they have the slightest faith in him. His movement, of course, doesn't have any weapons, doesn't know how to use any weapons.

All they know is how to attack people on Twitter and be rude. but they do serve a purpose for the Israelis, which is, how do we kill Iranians while pretending that Iranians love being killed? Well, Reza Pahlavi is your answer. He can go on air and essentially function as an IDF spokesperson, just as much as they're going on air and explaining away every war crime they're committing in Gaza, he was on the air waves, explaining away every war crime Israelis were committing in Iran by saying, well, this is not their intent.

These Israelis are trying to be nice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's his function. I don't think the Israelis have the slightest belief that he will ever take power in the country. But for the limited use of giving the impression of Ivanian support for this, then he fulfills that role. But nothing more than that. Yeah. Well, maybe they fly in the MECA from their base in Albania.

What do you think? They have used the MECA in the past for intelligence operations inside the country. I wouldn't be surprised if they are right now. Yvanians believe that they have been using a lot of office. Afghans in the country and have been collaborating with the Taliban. And I don't find that implausible at all that such a scenario could be taking place. Now, the Iranis are overreacting to this and I think have by now kicked out about half a million Afghan refugees from the country.

Most of them, folks that arrived in the last couple of years after the U.S. left Afghanistan. Scott, I got to run right now. Sorry. Okay, good times. Thank you, Trude. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

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