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Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews
4/16/26 Trita Parsi on the Likeliest Outcome of the Iran Ceasefire
00:37:46
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- [00:06]
Trita Parsi
You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest according to the American people. What's going on in this country?
- [00:13]
Scott Horton
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
- [00:15]
Trita Parsi
This is the Scott Horton Show.
- [00:18]
Scott Horton
Libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
- [00:22]
Trita Parsi
When the president does it, that means that it is not a liberty. We're gonna take out seven countries. They don't know what the they're doing.
- [00:29]
Scott Horton
Negotiate now.
- [00:31]
Trita Parsi
End this war.
- [00:33]
Scott Horton
And now, here's your host, Scott Horton, welcoming again the great treat of Parsi. He is co founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and is of course the author of the Fantastic Treacherous alliance, about the secret history of America, Israel and Iran. He also wrote Losing an Enemy in a Single Roll of the Dice, which I admit I haven't read. Now that I think about how much I love that first book, I really need to read those second two about diplomacy with Iran in the Obama years there. But anyway, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for joining us again.
- [01:12]
Trita Parsi
Trita, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.
- [01:15]
Scott Horton
Okay, so you just tweeted a thing very recently here from Laura Rosen, who is a longtime, you know, State Department and journalist type, very close to like, for example, she did very in depth, even minute by minute coverage of the diplomacy over the jcpoa back in 2015 and so forth. And you tweeted out an article by her quoting informed sources saying, looks like talks are continuing here. We also heard that from Trump. Looks like they're going to be talking. So I also noticed a piece that you had earlier saying that you believe that Trump has the strategic upper hand here in the talks in, in, in getting his way, which is a little bit counterintuitive on the face of it, considering America's strategic failure in the war. But I'm very interested to hear your explanation for that.
- [02:15]
Trita Parsi
All right, So I don't really say that he has a strategic benefit. What I'm saying, though, is that the ceasefire enabled Trump to get the key thing he wanted, which is precisely because his war was such a strategic disaster and defeat and would have become an even worse defeat for Trump if it continued. If the war continued. Getting the ceasefire enabled him to get the key thing that he wanted at this point, which was to just get out of the war. His key objective wasn't any longer the nuclear issue or whatever else it was. You know, he will make up any narrative that he won. That's not his problem. His problem is to actually get out of the war. And prior to the ceasefire, he couldn't get out of the war without Iran's consent, because Iranians would have continued to bomb even if the US Stopped bombing. But because of a ceasefire, now, the Iranians cannot restart the war. Just let's say that you have a scenario in which the US Just walks away. Okay? He doesn't lift sanctions. He doesn't open up the straits. Well, the straits will be open, but it will be under Iranian control. And he just washes his hands of it and says, look, I'm done. I destroyed their military. I'm good. And if the Israelis want to continue the war, that's their issue. But he will just not be in the war any longer, and his base would be very happy with him making that decision. In that scenario, the Iranians cannot restart the war without becoming the aggressors. Right, Right.
- [03:48]
Scott Horton
I see what you're saying. The more he disengages, the more the burden is on them to figure out how to get along with everybody else.
- [03:56]
Trita Parsi
But then the thing is, the key thing the Iranians want is to make sure that they end this with sanctions relief and a permanent end to the war. To get that, they need to have a deal. But the key thing Trump wanted, he already got. He's out of the war. So now the Iranians are in a stronger position of being the ones that have more future gains to lose if there isn't a deal. Whereas Trump already has gained the key thing he wanted. Now, I think it would be better for him and for the United States to strike a deal to make sure that the nuclear issue is pacified, sanctions are lifted, hopefully a different relationship between the two countries. So we're not in this state of constant, Is there going to be war? Is there not going to be a war that would be better for the U.S. but that's going to require something that Trump may not be willing to give, which is not that he's against giving the sanctions relief, but can you imagine how upset Bibi Netanyahu will be if he's not only ending the war, but on top of that, making a deal with Iran that lifts the sanctions on Iran. There's not been a single deal the US has contemplated with Iran that the Israelis have supported or have not opposed. If it entailed sanctions relief. As soon as sanctions relief is included, the Israelis are against it, because sanctions is, in and of itself a way to degrade Iran over time. You can do it faster, with bombings, more intense, more deadly, et cetera, or at least in the short term. But you can also do it by having these strangulating sanctions on the country over the course of decades. And they managed to get some of the strongest sanctions under Obama and later on under Trump, and they will not sit still if Trump is about to lift them. So for Trump, he may end up in a scenario in which he thinks, you know what? I don't want to have that headache with the Israelis. They're pissed off enough that I'm even ending this war. So let me just walk away. I got the key thing I needed. Europeans and the Asian countries are going to be upset about Iran controlling the straits, but the US Is not importing a lot of oil from the Persian Gulf, and the Iranians will not close the streets. They want the straits to be open. They want to make money off of the toll, so they need to let traffic go through. It's just that they're going to insist on collecting the tolls. But the strait will be open. Oil prices will come down, Gas prices will come down in the US And. And sure enough, people will soon forget about this war, because at the end of the day, as bad as it was, it could have become much, much worse if he stayed in the war. So I can see him making that calculation. It will leave the Iranians in a very bad situation because, yes, they control the straits. That's a strategic benefit compared to where they were before. But they need sanctions relief, and they needed an opportunity to meet the US at the negotiating table from a relative position of strength. And for the first time in 47 years, they are actually at the table from a relative position of strength.
- [06:58]
Scott Horton
But not.
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Trita Parsi
They will not get the opportunity to translate that into a new status quo if he just walks away. Right. I see.
- [07:06]
Scott Horton
And as you're saying, he's already halfway away now having.
- [07:11]
Trita Parsi
Yeah, I mean, he just said that we actually have a very good relationship with you on. I don't know if you saw the clip. It just said that like an hour ago.
- [07:17]
Scott Horton
Listen, I mean, this is the very best thing about Donald Trump, is that he can demand unconditional surrender one day and surrender unconditionally the next, and he don't give a damn. Yeah. Flip on any dime.
- [07:28]
Trita Parsi
Oh, the new.
- [07:29]
Scott Horton
Look, I really dislike the guy's father, but the new Ayatollah comedy is fantastic.
- [07:35]
Trita Parsi
Like, what the hell? Why not, dude?
- [07:37]
Scott Horton
You know, you can't think of a reason why not, so that's good enough. I'll tell you what, man, you can get him to flip flop that bad, then thank goodness. Now, you know, I got to wonder, though, whether he's willing to take that win. I mean, in Fact, you know, as even the,
- [08:02]
Trita Parsi
I guess it was the
- [08:03]
Scott Horton
New York Times, right, ran a big piece quoting all Israeli officials just wailing and lamenting the failure of this war to achieve all of that Netanyahu stated objectives here. And in fact they've been tremendously empowered. The Persian Gulf is no longer an American lake. It is again the Persian Gulf in every sense of that term. It's a massive strategic benefit that they've gained there. I don't know if we can even reopen any of those Gulf military bases ever again or what would be the point of trying.
- [08:35]
Trita Parsi
The US could. The question is, okay, lot of these things have taken a lot of not.
- [08:40]
Scott Horton
We did not really change the regime. We did not, you know, somehow uninvent their ability to enrich uranium to whatever percent that they want and etc, etc. We did not force them to abandon Hezbollah and the Houthis and their Shiite militia friend, the PMUs in Iraq. Right? So none of the strategic goals stated
- [09:02]
Trita Parsi
have been achieved at this point, I think. I mean, obviously that's absolutely true. I think it's at the same time important to understand most of those things were never achievable anyways. The only reason why he even pursued them is because the Israelis had essentially called them into believing that he could do these things. And it was clear he couldn't. The US cannot do those different things. So there's a part of me that don't want to begrudge him for not having achieved things that were unachievable that I have written for years are unachievable. I think some credit needs to be given to the fact that he recognized that this was a strategic mistake and as a result found a way out of it and is apparently trying to end it. Whereas most American presidents in the past, when they end up in these debacles, they just keep on going and kick the can down the road and hope that the next president will have to deal with it. And that's how we ended up in these endless wars. And the fact that he didn't do that and he didn't compare where he is to what he said he would achieve, but he compared where he is and what he can achieve to the cost that would be inflicted if he didn't end this war and all of the significant damage that will come after that. To me, it's kind of like imagine if we are in May 22, 2023, sorry, 2003, that's the day before Paul Bremer decided to dismantle and disband the Iraqi army.
- [10:30]
Scott Horton
Right.
- [10:30]
Trita Parsi
Which was one of the most crucial, dangerous decisions that made that really set the stage for the insurgency and everything else. Imagine if on the day before George W. Bush woke up and said, you know what I actually campaigned on no nation building. We got rid of Saddam, but this is the country of the Iraqis, not our country. I'm just going to leave it to them to figure it out. Would he be criticized? Absolutely. Would there have been some instability? No doubt. Would have been a good situation? No, because we shouldn't have gone in there in the first place. But compared to staying for another decade, birthing ISIS and all of that other stuff, it would have been better if he pulled out on May 22. That's kind of what Trump did in this situation, I think.
- [11:13]
Scott Horton
Yeah, well, I sure hope it sticks. I mean, there's so many stories saying he's sending more troops to the region, rearming and getting ready, and if the Iranians don't give in and give up enrichment and all of this, then we're going back to war. I don't know if this is credible, man, but, you know, antiwar.com is running a story a little lower down on the page today from a Turkish paper saying that the Russians had repeatedly offered to take all of Iran's uranium stockpile out of the country and convert it to fuel rods. And then America continues to reject these offers. In other words, they need this pretext to keep fighting. Otherwise, why would they just let the Russians take the damn uranium then, and call then and even use that a basis for ending the war? That There, See, we achieved our objective. The stockpile is gone now, even though, of course, that would have happened under the JCPOA if he just stayed in the jcpoa, that was where they had already agreed to ship all their stock.
- [12:10]
Trita Parsi
Look, the Russians have made that offer several times I've written about it, and again earlier on. The reason why Trump didn't accept it is because the Israelis had convinced him, don't make any deal. Right. You can get rid of this regime. You'll get the best possible deal by simply getting rid of this regime. Why making compromise when you can actually get them to surrender? So he rejected that proposal. He rejected what the Omanis put on the table. All of them far superior to the JCPOA in many aspects. He rejected all of them because he was under the belief that within four days, he would have either have gotten Iran to surrender or for the regime to collapse. And again, completely unachievable. This was never really in the cards. U.S. intelligence said that, but he chose to listen to the Israelis instead of listening to the US Intelligence.
- [12:57]
Scott Horton
Yeah, it's, hey, I don't know about you guys, but I don't even have health insurance anymore. The system is so rigged and the prices are so high. Insurance for just my wife this year cost as much as it did for both of us last year.
- [13:10]
Trita Parsi
Something like that.
- [13:11]
Scott Horton
Pretty close, anyway. And so I've just opted out. I don't even have health insurance right now. But I signed up with Crowd Health and it is a great alternative to health insurance. And what it is is it's just crowdsourcing. You help crowdsource other people's bills and they help crowdsource yours. The more people who sign up, the less any of us have to chip in to help the other guys out. And it just helps drive down costs for everyone. Oftentimes you can negotiate a cash price. If you're not paying with insurance, you can get a good discount from your healthcare providers and then you can crowdsource those bills through CrowdHealth.com it works really great. I was skeptical at first, but Tom woods explained the whole system to me and it's really great. And I do hope that you will look into it. And if you use the promo code Horton when you sign up@crowdhealth.com then you will be charged only.99amonth for the first three months. Get a great discount there@crowdhealth.com use the promo code Horton. It's interesting, that New York Times story, widely cited and I guess credible because you could tell like it was, you know, the highest level principles for the sources for the story, however authorized they were to frame it the way they did. I don't know exactly, but the way I read it, and I should probably reread the thing too, but the way I read it was sort of like in two pieces, right? The first part is Netanyahu came and blew all this smoke about how it's going to be like a magic wish. It's going to be so easy and fun and great. And then when he left the room, everybody said, no, actually, sir, he's really embellishing about how easy it'll be. It won't be that easy to change the regime. But then they did go ahead and reassure him that with military power, we can severely set them back in terms of their missile force and in other ways. And so he seemed to. The way the story read to me treated was that he was launching the war. Not really on Netanyahu's promises, but on General Keynes, that, look, we will be able to degrade their missile force to a substantial enough degree that you might even think of worth it to get started, even at the risk of them retaliating back. And they sort of let him feel like it was okay to do that on a military basis.
- [15:32]
Trita Parsi
Hey, Seth and King, I think something that needs to be remembered is that.
- [15:37]
Scott Horton
But he did say in his. When he launched the war, he announced, like, now's your chance, Iranian people to rise up and all that. So you could tell there was still a bit of that in there.
- [15:46]
Trita Parsi
But, yeah, yeah, because, look, look, the way the military tends to operate is that if the President says, hey, I want to do this, the military has to come up with plans, okay? This is how you can do it, and these are the resources you need. Very rarely do they say, sir, this cannot be done. Yeah, right. So when he asked me of the
- [16:11]
Scott Horton
Joint Chiefs of Staff job, though, by the way, for people who don't know, and I. I know you know this, but he's actually not even in the chain of command. He is not under the Secretary of defense. The secretary talks straight to the chiefs. He is the military advisor to the president. More than any other thing, it's his job to say, sir, this really isn't realistic unless you're really willing to pay this price.
- [16:35]
Trita Parsi
And I don't even remember what's in the New York Times story on that, but people I spoke to throughout this entire period were oftentimes saying, it's not just him, but many others who are very, very skeptical and are not expressing their skepticism as strongly as they want to and as they should, and as they probably could, out of fear for a variety of things. Others who had fell out with Trump and were no longer at the table. There were several people who were very much part of the conversation in June and in May of last year. But because of their opposition to the war, and because Trump thinks that that war was an amazingly successful war, he's not even considering their opinions any longer, despite the fact that they should be at the table, given their titles. This then creates that type of a scenario in which people just don't contradict the President when they see that he really wants to go in a certain direction. And he had really been convinced by the Israelis to go in that direction. And the pushback ended up just being too polite, too soft. One of the things that kept on happening is that the Pentagon kept on saying, well, if you want to do this, you're going to need another aircraft carrier, and you're going to need more of this and more of that. And I'm sure you remember in January, there was this, like, this constant reporting that actually there's a decision to send even more stuff. Part of that is to convince them it's not a good idea to do it right, but it's just not a very effective way of doing it with someone like Trump. Other presidents probably wouldn't understood that. Okay, they're telling me this because they're trying to tell me don't do it right.
- [18:07]
Scott Horton
It's tough, man. You know, I don't know exactly how it went down. I'm sure you remember this story by Joe Klein in Time magazine about the chiefs took, not just the chairman, but they all kind of took Bush to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon in this skiff, and they said, look, we'll do Iraq, we'll do the surge. This is January 07. We'll do the surge, but please don't make us do Iran. We do not want to do Iran, because, yes, ultimately we can defeat them, but they can hit back. And we will not, as they said, that we won't have escalation, dominance. We won't be able to choose every stage of the war. They will also be punching us in the mouth the whole time, too. And so that's why we want to not go. We've got all our troops in Iraq embedded with Shiite forces, by the way, and at risk. And we've got bases all up and down the Gulf and a bazillion dollars worth of economic targets, and Iran can reach out and touch all of them. And so, yes, we could. We're the superpower, and they're not. But can they defend themselves in a effective way that makes the cost for us way too high? Yeah, they can, and that's why we don't want to. And Bush said, okay, boys, forget it. Then. That was it.
- [19:20]
Trita Parsi
And.
- [19:20]
Scott Horton
And they just pushed that spring, trying to pressure him into changing his mind. But his mind was made up in January that the military says, forget it. So forget it.
- [19:30]
Trita Parsi
Exactly. Exactly. And I think the sugar high of Venezuela made Trump even less receptive to any arguments that there's something the US Military cannot achieve. Right. The riots, the protests further intensified a belief on his mind that, wow, this regime is really about to fall. If you remember in December, when the protests first began, they were very small, but already back then, the narrative in the Western media was, oh, my God, is this regime going to fall? I remember talking to one guy in Tehran. I was asking him, like, okay, how widespread are the protests? And this is, you know, the first two or three days of the protest. And he said, I drove around Tehran all day yesterday. I couldn't find them. Now, later on January 8th, they became massive. But the narrative that the regime was on the brink of falling started on December 29, long before the protests actually were that large.
- [20:27]
Scott Horton
It's such an important.
- [20:28]
Trita Parsi
And again, it just. And I don't think that was coincidental, by the way. I think this were things that. In which certain interests are pushing a specific narrative. And they were doing it partly, and I actually wrote about it at the time. They're trying to convince Trump that this is going to be so easy. So they're overstating what actually is happening in Iran. Right?
- [20:46]
Scott Horton
So that's such a crucial point, right? Because the main propaganda about that is, look how horrible they are, that they would kill so many people. And everyone they killed were all peaceful protesters. As Trump said the other day, they killed 45,000 entirely innocent peaceful protesters. And the thing is about that is obviously the main point is to drive outrage among the public that, oh, my God, these guys are so evil. Can we continue to allow them to rule? Tan it would be the way that they get to phrase it. But then the real point is, like you pointing out there, is that this convinced Trump that they had to kill 45,000 people in order to apparently convince the other, I don't know, half a million to go home, otherwise they would have been overthrown right then. And obviously this proves that they cling to power only through violent force and they have no popular support at all. And in fact, I saw when Joe Kent did this interview on Newsmax, which is, you know, boomer, right wing, you know, Fox, pro war mongery, Zionist kind of thing. And the Joe Kent said to the guy, listen, when you bomb a country, you drive up support for the government people. It's called a rally around the flag effect. And that's what's happening in Iran now. And the interviewer, quite sincerely, Trita, he thought, said to Joe Kent, that's not the case here, though, because we saw in January they had to kill 40, 50,000 people just to be able to cling on to power. And that proves that no one in Iran supports them at all. No matter how many regime targets we bomb, that's never going to increase support for people who are essentially just captives of whatever this alien force that is their government. And he totally believed what he was saying there, that the protests proved, never mind popular sovereignty. They had no popular support whatsoever because they had to kill that many people. Which by the way, was like half as many people were slaughtered by Israel's merciless genocidal campaign in Gaza over two years. Right, but whatever you're supposed to just believe that happened in two days, even though we did not see a Dresden style firestorm anywhere in Tehran.
- [23:26]
Trita Parsi
Yeah, no, look, I think that whole thing again was part of the normalization, the manufacturing of consent in favor of the war. And what's fascinating is that it really didn't work outside of the media class and the Blob, because the population in the United States was still overwhelmingly against this war. Now he had his own base, but his own base doesn't pay attention to these issues. They just pay attention to what he says and they tend to trust him and they believe him. But this really reminded me of what happened in 2003, because back then as well, the mainstream media was parading Iraqi Americans on TV begging for their country of birth to be bombed. And now suddenly the same thing happened here. What was fascinating was that there was a campaign going on for about four years prior to this that started which was aimed at discrediting all Iranian American voices that opposed war or opposed sanctions so that they were out of the scene. So by the time this war started, they would be able to fill the airwaves just with these people who are saying, please bomb us, please bomb us, or the Iranian people will cry if you don't bomb them. And they succeeded again in doing that and dominating the airwaves for the first two weeks. But it collapsed very quickly because it became clear that this is not only not a good war, is a disaster, but also it really wasn't supported, not even by the Iranian American community, but by also inside the country at all. That level of support never existed. It was one of these other things that was done to give the impression that this is a good moral war. It's the moral thing. Remember some of these voices said on tv, oh, this is not a war, this is a rescue mission. I mean, these type of things that were being used to convince the American public. I'm actually very impressed to see that the American public never fell for it. I mean, in the beginning of the war, roughly 70%, 75% were against it. And then those numbers have just gone up. So it's very different from Iraq, in which of course, it was like a year of propaganda that started before the beginning of the war. But by the time the war started, 79% of the American public were in favor of the war. I think the American public has become much more savvy. There's also another aspect of it that is very important. Voices like yourself and others, because of the emergence of the alternative media, has made it much, much more easy for Americans to get diverse perspectives on these things and not just fall for the single unitary voice that comes out of most of the mainstream media.
- [26:04]
Scott Horton
Yeah, I mean, the polls show that there's the Fox News watchers versus the rest of the population essentially on this, right?
- [26:11]
Trita Parsi
Yeah, absolutely. And even there, I think if Trump had gone on with this war for another week, he would have lost the Fox News voters, not all of them, but a big portion of them as well, because it was really going towards a disastrous situation.
- [26:24]
Scott Horton
Yeah.
- [26:25]
Trita Parsi
Yay.
- [26:25]
Scott Horton
Guess what everybody. I'm a total twin. Well, actually, no, I'm me, I'm skater Scott. But I meet the total twins down at the local skate park where as you can see, I'm doing a giant slob air. And I hang out with the kids and I teach them all about the foreign and domestic blowback consequences from American intervention in Iran and all the trouble that the US government has caused there since the 1950s. And of course, you know the great Tuttle Twins series by Elijah Stanfield, the great artist, and Connor Boyak, the primary author of all the stuff. And it's these great booklets and major books on history and on all different libertarian subject matter so that your kids don't have to be raised commie by all of the usual child age publications out there. So the Tuttle twins, they just do a really great job and if you have school age kids, then you will absolutely love their stuff and especially now because now I'm in it too. So all you got to do is go to totaltwins.com free magazine, get it totaltwins.com free magazine and they'll send it right to you. And isn't that great? And now. But what about the great Satan, Benjamin Netanyahu? I mean, he can just do whatever the hell he wants here, man. I mean, as we're recording this, they just announced a ceasefire in Lebanon, which makes me suspect that Netanyahu drop an atom bomb on them tomorrow.
- [28:03]
Trita Parsi
I don't know. Well, the Israelis intensified the bombing today and Hezbollah responded as a result of the ceasefire because it's not coming into effect yet. But it will be interesting to see if this actually is a response, a preliminary effort to actually secure a final deal with Iranians because the Iranians are going to insist on Lebanon and actually Gaza to be included in this. Because if I mean, particularly for Lebanon, it's very hard for them. There's already a narrative that Iran betrayed Lebanon in 2024, and the Iranians want to be very careful so they don't do anything that reinforces that narrative. There's also the realization that if the war continues in Lebanon, it will eventually spill over into Iran, as it has already done twice. But most importantly, and this goes back to what we started off talking about, I think from the Iranian side, they look at this as this is a test for the United States. Is the United States capable and willing to rein in Israel? Because if the United States is not capable or unwilling to reign, Israel and Israel can restart these wars and the Israelis can drag the US into these wars. What's the point of an agreement with the United States if the United States is not the decision maker? Why make a deal with the US if the decision maker is sitting somewhere else? Either continue the war or you make a deal with that decision. So I think from the Iranian perspective, they're insisting on this really strongly because it will be a reflection as to whether the rest of the agreement is worth the paper is written on.
- [29:44]
Scott Horton
Yeah, well, it seems just as likely, doesn't it, that the agreement would be between the Lebanese government, every faction but Hezbollah, or at least the most important factions with the Israelis, to let Israel keep bombing Hezbollah, just not other parts of Lebanon, something like that, because they're not even included in the talks. And they probably don't want to quit fighting either, until they've taught Israel a lesson, the same way that the Iranians apparently succeeded in Teaching America 1.
- [30:17]
Trita Parsi
Here, I think if the outcome is one in which, through the pressure of the Iranians, there is a ceasefire in all of Lebanon, Hezbollah will see that as a significant victory because it will essentially mean the disarmament of Hezbollah is not possible by the Israelis, and it's certainly not possible by the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government is essentially propped up by the US in order for it to be strong enough to take on Hezbollah, but not strong enough to deter Israel. But the Lebanese clearly have chosen that between getting bombed by Israel or going towards a civil war, they prefer to get bombed by Israel. That doesn't mean that they don't want to disarm Hezbollah. But it's not about disarming Hezbollah. It's about integrating Hezbollah into a larger Lebanese system, which has to be done by the Lebanese on Lebanon's terms, on Lebanon's time frame, not on Israel or in the United States's time frame. And if this ends up becoming a ceasefire that also includes them, I think they believe that they're much closer towards reaching that goal and it will be a strategic defeat for the Israelis. And this is part of the reason I'm saying it's bad enough for Israel if there is a peace, it's terrible for them if there is sanctions relief. So I think they will do everything they can in their power to sabotage that. And I'm not sure or confident of how effective Trump will be in standing up against that. Now, if he has a really good deal on the table and he can be a historic figure that actually gets a deal that resolves this issue, he may be able to erase the memory of the stupidity of starting the war in the first place.
- [32:07]
Scott Horton
Yeah.
- [32:07]
Trita Parsi
Will he say no to that in order to avoid a conflict with Netanyahu? Remains to be seen.
- [32:13]
Scott Horton
Yeah. Interesting. So, you know what's funny, man, is no one is saying as part of this that Iran has to cut off all support for Hamas in the West Bank. I mean, pardon me, in the Gaza Strip. No one is pretending this week, for whatever reasons, I guess, because trying to end this war is too serious. So they're not going to sit here and pretend that Hamas is the same level of proxy as Hezbollah. And, and Iran is not demanding that Israel cease fire against Hamas even though they have an official ceasefire. Israel bombs Gaza almost every day. They kill, you know, maybe a dozen people a day instead of 120 a day like it was before the so called ceasefire. But it doesn't seem like the Iranians are sticking their neck out for the Palestinians here at all. Right. And demanding a real end to that as part of this deal.
- [33:13]
Trita Parsi
I mean, I think if the Iranians could, from their standpoint, that would be a feather in their cap, if they could make sure that this also ends their campaign in Gaza. But the Iranians have a very different relationship with Hezbollah than they do with Hamas. And so I think they have a much stronger commitment to Hezbollah than they have to Hamas and to Gaza. And I can see that within their own base, I'm not talking about the Iranian population as a whole, but within the base of support for the Islamic Republic inside of Iran, which I think is probably around 15 to 20%. Still, about 18 million people giving up on Hezbollah is probably a red line. I am not so sure if it is a red line of Gaza, particularly if they have an otherwise very attractive deal in front of them.
- [34:13]
Scott Horton
Yeah. And after all, Hezbollah jumped into this fight on Iran's side by launching These missile salvos and.
- [34:19]
Trita Parsi
Exactly, exactly. Whereas Hamas started the attacks on October 7th against Yvonne's wishes and recommendation. Okay, I gotta run.
- [34:31]
Scott Horton
Tell me more about that. Because, you know, I just heard what I knew were false claims to the contrary the other day and I, I just argue that. Well, look, obviously Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis could have all attacked at the same time if they'd been ready, and that didn't happen. But you obviously exactly about it, so please do.
- [34:49]
Trita Parsi
Yeah, no, I mean, there's intelligence that has been revealed that show that Hamas tried to convince the Iranians that this was a good idea. They didn't reveal all the details or the date or anything like that, but the Iranians were not ready. I mean, the Iranians have their own issues to deal with. Same thing with Hezbollah. So they never really joined in, never supported it. And once it happened, it was kind of like Hamas was trying to force their hands. And you saw that both Hezbollah and Iran. Well, I mean, Hezbollah did start some low level attacks to kind of keep the Israelis engaged in the north so they wouldn't turn all of their efforts against Gaza. But it was nothing compared to what a real war would be. Of course, there's always been this ladder of acceptable escalation, if one can call it out, between Israel and, and, and Hezbollah. The Iranians didn't join in at all and you know, pushed very hard for a ceasefire from the outset. So if this actually was coordinated, if this was something they were in on, the golden opportunity would have been to attack immediately after October 7th when the Israelis were in complete disregard. And the Iranians and Hezbollah did absolutely not do that. So I think that in and of itself tells you what's going on.
- [35:58]
Scott Horton
Yeah. In fact, that reminds me, there was a Wall Street Journal story where the CIA was saying that they did not believe that Iran told Hamas to do it or had ordered the.
- [36:06]
Trita Parsi
It was a Wall Street Journal story that said that they were. And it was so badly sourced, it was an embarrassment. Okay. Yeah. And said that, you know, all of it was actually planned, if I'm not mistaken, in Beirut. It was like, it was just so. It was just so ludicrous. He actually got a tremendous amount of pushback and they. I'm so sorry, I gotta run right now.
- [36:29]
Scott Horton
Yeah, and they saw the Iraqis give Muhammad Atta a flask full of anthrax there too.
- [36:34]
Trita Parsi
Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right.
- [36:36]
Scott Horton
Hey, man, thanks.
- [36:37]
Trita Parsi
Talking to you, man.
- [36:38]
Scott Horton
I really appreciate you, man.
- [36:39]
Trita Parsi
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
- [36:41]
Scott Horton
That is Treated Parsi. He's at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's Errand, Enough Already and my latest, Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above@scott Horton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at scothortonshow.com and patreon.com Scott HortonShow Bumpers by Josh Length with music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media Audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y' all next time.
- [37:32]
Trita Parsi
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