The Bush Policy Failure in the Middle
East

Bio

Trita Parsi was born in Iran
and grew up in Sweden.
He earned a Master's Degree in International Relations at Uppsala University,
a second Master's Degree in Economics at Stockholm School of Economics and a PhD
in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He has served as
an adviser to Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH18) on Middle East
issues and is a co-founder and current President of the National Iranian
American Council (www.niacouncil.org). Dr. Parsi is the author of Treacherous
Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel
and the United States
(Yale University Press, 2007). He has followed Middle East
politics for more than a decade, both through work in the field, and through
extensive experience on Capitol Hill and the United Nations.

Transcript

PEPE ESCOBAR, ANALYST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: The latest report by Seymour
Hersh in The New Yorker confirmed that the US is involved in counterinsurgency
and black ops inside Iranian territory. But what does it really mean to attack
a country of 70 million people? To get a perspective on how Iran would
react and how Iranian public opinion would react, I spoke to Trita Parsi,
president of the National Iranian American Council.

~~~

ESCOBAR: Trita, it's all about demonizing Iran from the McCain camp,
apparently. He said in his speech to AIPAC a nuclear-armed Iran is a
danger we cannot allow. Iran
poses an existential threat to the State of Israel. And he has a series of
proposals as well, apart from saying that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by
the end of 2009. So he recommends sanctions on foreign companies involved with Iran, the oil and gas industry, an international
effort to curtail Iran's
import of gasoline and refined petroleum products. And he also says that Iran is going to have ICBMs capable of reaching
the US.
What do you make of all this?

TRITA PARSI, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL IRANIAN AMERICAN COUNCIL: Well, it's a
continuation of a failed policy, because at the end of the day, the sanctions
that have been put on Iran
have cost the Iranian government a lot, and it has definitely imposed a
significant cost on the Iranian people. However, it has not translated into a
change in Iranian policies, which should be the aim of the sanctions. So we've
seen over the last ten years in which US
sanctions have been intensifying on Iran
that Iranian influence in the Middle East has grown, that its nuclear program
has advanced, and that its foreign policy has not altered in the fashion that
the United States
wanted. So intensifying an already failed policy will only bring more failure,
I fear. And as a result, it doesn't seem to be the right way to go about it.
It's particularly not accurate, in my view, to argue that the sanctions
constitute economic diplomacy. Sanctions are economic warfare, not economic
diplomacy.

ESCOBAR: And the sanctions are not biting the regime in Tehran, basically. Are they biting the
bazaarists, for instance, merchant classes? Are they biting the middle class in
Iran?

PARSI: It's biting the middle class more than it's biting the regime itself. I
certainly believe, though, that the sanctions have been problematic for the
Iranian government, but so has previous sanctions as well. Iran has been
under US sanctions for more than 12 years, and initially they are always very,
very costly. Then they find a way around it. The problem is, though, to make
sure that you have a policy that causes the Iranian policies to change.
Sanctions have so far failed at doing so. And I think part of the reason why
it's failed is because the leverage that the United States can have through the
sanctions, which actually is considerable, can only be utilized in the context
of a negotiation, in which the United States can say, "Well, we can lift
some of these sanctions in return for changes in Iranian foreign policy on
these specific areas." But as long as we refuse to go to the table, the
leverage that you have gained through your sanctions cannot be utilized. And
McCain is very clear on this—he does not want to negotiate.

ESCOBAR: He will never go to the table.

PARSI: He will never go to the table. Thus he can never utilize the leverage of
the sanctions.

ESCOBAR: Are you having any echoes from Iran that with a possible
Democratic presidency maybe the United States [inaudible] table?

PARSI: There seems to be an excitement—it's certainly here in the United States—about
Obama's new approach. The argument "Do you talk to your enemies or
not?" I think has been clearly won by the Obama camp, in the sense that
people are very much turned off by the policies of the last eight years. And I
think in Tehran
as well there is a mystery around Obama, there is a mystery that the next
president of the United States may not only be African-American, but may also
have a Muslim father and a Hussein as his middle name. And that actually can
give the United States
significant political capital that it can again utilize in the Middle East, but only in the context of negotiations.

ESCOBAR: Meanwhile, at the AIPAC conference, there was a lot of [inaudible]
talk. Do they really represent the Jewish-American community [inaudible]?

PARSI: Well, various polls have shown that support for a military attack
against Iran
seems to be quite low in the Jewish-American community, less than 20 percent. And
even on the issue of Obama, 62 percent of the Jewish-American community,
according to some polls, support Obama. So this more hardline tone that one
hears at this conference does not necessarily seem to be representative of the
larger Jewish-American community. But one has to remember also that this is
politics, and in the American political system, if you're well organized, then
you have more power. And AIPAC is the best-organized Jewish-American
organization in the United
States right now, and as a result, it does
have considerable clout.

ESCOBAR: Tell me about your organization, the National Iranian American
Council. What can you do to counteract what can largely be conceived as AIPAC
militaristic propaganda?

PARSI: Well, our approach is not necessarily to counter anyone in particular.
Our approach is that our community believes, as does the majority of the United States
population, that war would have tremendously negative consequences, and that it
would be un-American to even vote for a military solution prior to having
exhausted all other options. And when it comes to diplomacy, it has not even
begun to be utilized. And I think the Iran-American community stands in a
strong position to be able to point out that no other people in the United
States have suffered as much as the Iranian-American community from the
policies of the government in Iran. Almost every Iranian-American in the United States
has or had a relative that has suffered by this regime. But the majority of the
community recognizes that the policy of threatening war and economic sanctions
know diplomacy has not improved the situation, has not advanced American
interests, has not helped pro-democracy activists in Iran, has not helped the
cause for human rights in Iran, and as a result a new policy is needed.

ESCOBAR: Hypothetical terms: in the horrific event of a US attack on Iran, would you say that the
majority of the population would rally behind the theocratic regime?

PARSI: The historical pattern in Iran has been that when attacked,
people rally around the flag. We saw that in 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. This was
at a time when Iran
was in great chaos: the revolutionary regime had executed a large number of
people from the Iranian military; Khomeini's grip on power was not as strong;
he was in a very intense power struggle. But then Saddam invaded, thinking that
Iran
was weak, thinking that the Iranians would not unify, and within weeks you had
100,000 volunteers rushing to Khuzistan region in order to expel the invaders. And
a lot of historians argue that the Khomeini government did not survive in spite
of Saddam's attack; he survived because of Saddam's attack. And if history were
to repeat itself, which it so often does, then an attack on Iran would not weaken the government in Iran; it would
strengthen it. An attack on Iran
would not help the pro-democracy forces in Iran; it would kill it. An attack
on Iran
would not prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb; it will probably cause it to rush
towards a nuclear bomb.

The Real News Network