Robinson
You've come back a couple of times in our conversation to the years and the decades leading up to this war. One thing that tends to happen when war breaks out is that everyone forgets everything that happened up until three minutes before the war. One of the most common lines that's been used by the Trump administration and its allies has been "We didn't start the war. The war has been waged by the Islamic Republic for 47 years against the United States." And you point out that whatever hostility there has been by the Iranian government towards the United States, that hostility has been returned more than in kind by the United States. And it's not just sanctions. It was also crippling cyberattacks, for instance.
Parsi
Yes. And look, one of the things that has made it utterly clear that this war is not justified is the constant shifting justifications used by the administration and its supporters to be able to justify the unjustifiable. If they actually had a case, they would stick to it. It's precisely because they don't have a case that they constantly have to grasp at straws and try to come up with whatever argument, case, or claim that they can, including things that are as ridiculous as this. One senator actually said that the Iranians have been at war with the United States, not for 47 years, but since 1947.
Robinson
Okay, so even when we were funneling weapons to the Shah's dictatorship.
Parsi
Exactly. This is preposterous at the end of the day. It's all leading to the fact that this war was a massive mistake. Trump should never have done it. The only winners at this point are the Israelis. The Israelis could not care less if the name of the next Supreme Leader is [Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei]. It doesn't matter. What they were looking for was the degradation of Iran's military, of its power, of its economy, and of its state apparatus, which is being achieved at the end of the day. Once this war ends, Iran will come out of it, in terms of capability, far degraded compared to what it was before the war. And that's what matters to the Israelis, something that shifts the balance of power in their direction. They believe that Iran has been set back 10 years, perhaps longer.
So, in this broader "mowing the lawn" type of strategy that they have vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the Syrians and the Lebanese, they're trying to bring Iran into it as well. This war has ensured that they don't have to do this again for another 10 years, rather than having to do it every two years or every eight months.