Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/10/23 Trita Parsi: Biden has Escalated Trump’s Terrible Iran Policy

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Scott is joined by Trita Parsi to talk about Iran. They go over developments with U.S-Israeli relations and the new American troop deployments, both of which Parsi says make war with Iran more likely. They finish with a quick look at the recent U.S-Iran prisoner deal. Discussed on the show: “By caving to Israel, Biden opens the door to war” (Responsible Statecraft) “With Marines on Persian Gulf vessels, is Biden risking war with Iran?” (Responsible Statecraft) 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: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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, author of the book, Pools 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 got trita parcy and he was at the national iranian-american council and then he helped co-found the quincy institute for responsible statecraft and of course he writes there at responsible statecraft but you can also find him in all all kinds of mainstream things too. And, of course, the subject is Iran and the danger of war.

Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Trita? Good to be back. Everybody's so busy keeping track of the war in Eastern Europe and the threat of war in East Asia. And, geez, they said we're pivoting out of the Middle East there. And yet, as long as there's Israel, there's problems with Iran, huh? Well, in this specific case, I don't know if it's just Israel, but obviously with what the administration is trying to do, in my view, I cannot quite wrap my head around why they

are putting so much effort into a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And that is driving them towards reversing a lot of things that we had seen. Those things were not necessarily fully fulfilled, but there were movements in the right direction in terms of bringing troops home, deprioritizing the Middle East. But in order to get this normalization, we're seeing the administration now moving in the opposite direction, including trying to demonstrate to the Saudis who are asking for security guarantees that the U.S. is committed to their security, committed to deterring Iran, and by that actually making moves that risk escalating this whole thing with Iran towards some form of a confrontation.

Yeah. All right. Now, so we got a couple of articles I issue here I want people to look at. By caving to Israel, Biden opens the door to war. And with Marines on Persian Gulf vessels is Biden risking war with Iran. That's really interesting, but that's got to wait a minute. So we got to go back a little bit. Iran's got this civilian nuclear program. They're members of the NPT. They have regular inspections. But that wasn't enough. In the early Obama years especially, 2012, I think was the worst of it. Netanyahu was threatening war. A lot of people in D.C. were really taking him seriously. And so as much as people, including me, hate Barack Obama, all he was really trying to do, Trita, I believe we agreed at the time, was he's just trying to take the threat of war off the table. If the NPT and the Safeguards Agreement inspections aren't enough somehow to quell this issue, then the JCPOA will, because we're going to have an additional protocol of the Safeguards Agreement, and we're going to have expanding inspections and roll back to. their program and then everyone will know they're not making nuclear weapons and they won't even be able to make one within a year if they started to try now and then it was at net and yahoo's insistence as you point out in your article that trump tore that deal up it wasn't a treaty but close

but then joe biden came in instead of saying well crazy old donald trump the aberration Russian agent or whatever fantasy of these Democrats, he did a bad thing by tearing up Barack Obama's great deal. I'm getting right back in it as per the consensus of the American foreign policy establishment and everything. He didn't do that.

And instead he went with Trump's policy. Maximum pressure, maximum sanctions, and a deal with Saudi Arabia? Is that even in the offing? And what is really behind that other than the Israel lobby? Well, I think first of all, I think you're quite

right in the sense that the biggest mistake Biden committed in this specific area is that he didn't go back in right away. Instead, he tried to negotiate a return and by that use Trump's sanctions as leverage, which means that up until today, Trump's sanctions and maximum pressure is still in place. In fact, can I interject here real quick that I know it's not John Kerry, but still it's Blinken and Sullivan and a lot of the same crew from the Obama years. they had to have known that wasn't going to work since they were the ones who had to so delicately finesse this thing to get the deal done in the first place, as we know. I got to tell you, there were different views within that team, and some of the folks that are in more senior positions right now had opinions that Obama should have driven a tougher deal, all of these different things, and also that he should have done things in a different way in order not to alienate Netanyahu, which I think, again, is a non-I just don't understand how that would have been possible. And I think they thought that they were going to essentially outdo Obama and get a better deal.

And I think, you know, they were talking about longer and stronger things of that nature. I think it was this huge mistake. And they should have known better in my view. And some of them I do know we're not necessarily very excited about this approach. But that's the approach the president chose. And as one critical aspect of that maximum pressure that is still left is that the Biden administration has been confiscating and selling oil taken from tankers. that were transporting Iranian oil. It's falling under the rubric of sanctions enforcement,

even though those sanctions are now enforced on international waters where US law does not apply. In response to that, the Iranians have started to target tankers in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere from countries that are abiding by this US policy. And that's created a lot of tensions. And now the Biden administration has been contemplating

putting US Marines on those ships. in order to protect them and deter Iran. But all that really does that really increases the risk of these U.S. Marines getting into the line of fire and then suddenly we'll have a shooting war. Right. And then you and I can already hear it now. Oh, you're on the side of the Iranians that killed our Marines.

Oh, God. And there you go. One scenario that I think is important to think of is that with all the new technology that exists right now, the Iranians could be using an underwater drone to take out the engine of one of those. ships where marines are on wait for that ship to drift into iran waters and then take it at that moment if if the u.s. goes in with more troops and ships and vessels to try to protect those marines i mean then u.s. warships will be

entering iranian territorial waters so i mean you know very dangerous scenarios and incidentally this did in one way happen in 2016 in january just a few days before the the JCPA was supposed to be going into full effect. But that was completely by accident, 10 American sailors drifted into Yvani wars. That ordeal was resolved in 16 hours after five phone calls between John Kerry and Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister. But back then, the US and Yvonne were talking to each other directly. Now we're not.

So if something like this were to happen, it would certainly lead to a crisis, probably the biggest foreign policy crisis of the Biden administration. Yep. 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

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That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's rrbi.co. You'll be glad you did. And listen, I'm guilty of it, too, and I bet you at least some of the listeners. They missed the first part and heard the same. second, right? That the Iranians are boarding ships in the Middle East and doing this and that. But what was the first part? The first part was America was seizing Iranian oil tankers on the high seas, you're saying, right? First. Yes. I mean, this is no secret, even though it's not

emphasizing the reporting. It's almost they're going out of their way to disconnect the connection there, but the connection is very clear. The Iranians are doing this in retaliation. They were not doing this before the U.S. started targeting Iranian oil. Some of that Iranian oil, incidentally, is sitting in Houston right now, but there's no sellers, there's no buyers, because no country wants to buy that oil, because if they do, they're afraid that they're going to be targeted by the Iranians. In what way? Well, I mean, the U.S. is taking that oil, is trying to sell the oil and keep the money

for itself. And if some country comes in and buys that oil, even though it's not America's oil, they they're worried that they're going to be targeted by Iranian warships next time one of the tankers of that country is passing through the Persian Gulf. I see because that's who's being targeted. It's not just random ships. They're targeting ships from countries that are participating in this global dragnet. Exactly. So, for instance, if earlier on there was a Greek ship that was targeted and that was after the Greeks had accepted a request by the U.S. to target an Iranian ship that had entered. the Mediterranean. So the Greeks essentially end up in the middle here getting squeezed by both sides by accepting the American instruction demand. They then ended up paying a price by having

their ships be confiscated by the Iranians in the Persian Gulf. And this was a big problem for the Greeks who rely heavily on their shipping industry. Okay, now give us a thumbnail of these Abraham Accords and where we're out with Saudi Arabia and Israel now. Well, there's a lot of reporting that says that there's been some significant progress made towards achieving a normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And I have to say, I don't fully understand why this has become such a priority for the administration. Because first of all, as we saw the Abram Accords do, it doesn't do anything to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing. On the contrary, it is essentially justifying and normalizing Israel's creeping annexation of Palestinian

territory and eliminating elimination of any prospects for a two-state solution. And there's little to suggest that anything that would happen between Israel and Saudi Arabia would reverse that, particularly mindful of the fact that the government in Israel right now is the most right way and the most explicit in stating its goal of trying to prevent a two-state solution. So under those circumstances to pursue this is really baffling to me. But then when you add the price tag for pursuing it, it becomes even more baffling. Because part of the price tag, at least what the Saudis are demanding, and now it's Israelis as well,

is security guarantees from the United States. The Saudis won a defense pact with the U.S. as strong as NATO's Article 5, which means that Biden would have gone from promising to make Saudi Arabia a pariah to now sending American servicemen and women to die for the dictator of Saudi Arabia. That's the mother of all flip-flops in mind. Yeah. And now we have this breaking report from the New York Times here that the U.S. and Iran have a new deal where the Iranians are going to release some prisoners onto house arrest as sort of a halfway house on the way to them being released to the United States. Sounds like they were arrested for being spies. They're Iranian Americans or American Iranians. And then the Americans, it says, are going to give Iran access, limited access.

access to $6 billion in frozen funds that'll be held in a Qatari account, I think it is, where, you know, and they'll only be able to spend that money on food and medicine. What do you make of that? Is that real progress or just a little bit? It certainly is progress because these Americans that are held in Iran were held on wrongfully held on false charges of espionage. I know some of them quite well. And they were, at least one of them, was supposed to be released many times before, but kept

on being passed over. And finally, after seven years, he's now going to be released. The United States President has a responsibility of making sure that Americans are safe. And by making this deal and bringing them home, he's securing their freedom. And I think that's absolutely correct. It is not connected to these other issues, and in some ways it shouldn't be, because it's been a problem in the past that it kind of has been connected to the nuclear issue, which meant that these poor innocent people were kept in Iran,

not only being prisoned by the Iranians, but also being prisoned by the lack of progress between the US and Iran on the nuclear issue. So sorting that out, meaning disconnecting that issue and allowing them to come home, even though there is no progress on the nuclear front, I think is absolutely the right thing to do. It can create some positive momentum

that potentially could be translated into progress on the nuclear front. But I'm skeptical that the administration is going to choose to do that for the simple reason that they're going to take political heat for simply having done this prisoner swap because Yvonne's own money is going to be released back to it indirectly. There's going to be a lot of attacks on the administration from Republicans. So given that the proximity to the presidential campaign, I find it unlikely that they will take advantage of the momentum that this can create and move forward with the JCPO. If they do, I would strongly welcome it, but I just find it unlikely. Treata Parsi from Quincy. Thank you for your time, sir.

Thank you so much for having me. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.