Trita Parsi has had close working relationship with Javad Zarif, when he was Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In a deposition, Parsi stated he only communicated in 2006 with Zarif in order to “interview him.” But this is not true.
Emails made public demonstrate that Parsi and Zarif collaborated on numerous political issues. Parsi publicly distributed an Iranian regime document to influence US policy. He made arrangements for the ambassador to participate in a conference on Capitol Hill and to meet members of Congress, and sought the ambassador’s council regarding the feasibility of a new Persian Gulf security arrangement.
About the collusion between Parsi and Zarif, a former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI said Parsi should have been registered as a foreign agent of Iran. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl contacted the US Justice Department, urging an investigation of Parsi.
Noun: dead·line
- a date or time when something must be finished : the last day, hour, or minute that something will be accepted
“Deadline schmedline, I’m still not worried.”
- Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, in tweet from Vienna
Apparently Parsi, chief cheerleader and lobbyist for the Iran regime, has a slightly different view of deadlines than the foreign ministers of six countries negotiating with regime, but not so different from his mullah masters in Tehran since Iran has now blown past five self-imposed deadlines to reach a nuclear deal over the past two years.
The new, new deadline is today to meet a deadline set in legislation granting Congress 30 days to review any deal instead of a 60 day period; the logic being having a longer review period would allow opposition to a Iranian nuclear more time to lobby Congress.
In fact, Iran’s mullahs care little about deadlines since what they seem most interested in is taking verbal potshots at their opposite numbers, especially the U.S. as evidenced by heated exchanges from regime foreign minister Javad Zarif who chastised P5+1 negotiators for taking exception to regime’s latest demand to lift embargoes against the conventional arms trade.
Parsi was almost crowing about Zarif’s verbal explosion by tweeting out how well received it would be back in Iran by the mullahs. All of which makes it plain Parsi could really care less about a deal as long as the regime gets to play the rest of the world as fools.
In each case as a new deadline approached, the regime has sabotaged the hope of any agreement by issuing new, aggressive demands; typically through a public rant by top mullah Ali Khamenei or more recently by issuing his very own infographic of “red lines” the regime would not cross in concessions.
And Parsi has faithfully sought to provide cover for the mullahs in his media interviews and social media tweets even though he probably knows what he is saying is either false or contradicted by the very mullahs he’s trying to make excuses for.
Take for example his tweet the other day chastising the amount of money spent by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states as part of their overall military budgets. He lists Iran’s military spending at only $10.6 billion which is patently false since the regime halted public reporting of its military expenditures since 2009 when the mullahs stole the presidential election and spurred massive protests by the Iranian people which were brutally put down.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute tracks global military spending but has no data for Iran past 2009 and the data it did have before then did not include regime spending for paramilitary forces such as the Revolutionary Guards Corps and Quds Force, nor did it take into account aid given to terror groups such as Hezbollah or proxies such as Shiite militias in Iraq or Houthi rebels in Yemen.
But Parsi is by no means the only apologist for the regime. His colleague Reza Marashi has been just as busy in trying to explain why the mullahs keep heaping on demand after demand even after a so-called interim agreement was reached and only “technical” details had to be worked out.
His contention in the Los Angeles Times was that the mullahs worry the “White House will use administrative authority to temporarily lift U.S. sanctions on Iran but that Congress won’t follow through to permanently remove sanctions that were enacted into law.”
It is an odd position to take since the lifting of sanctions was agreed upon in the interim agreement only after verifying the regime had lived up to the conditions of a deal, including verification and reductions in enriched uranium stockpiles; both conditions repudiated by the regime since last April’s agreement.
But the truth doesn’t seem to faze Parsi and his cohorts and neither it seem do deadlines.
By Michael Tomlinson