There’s an old Persian saying that goes “if either side walks away from a negotiation feeling good, it was a bad negotiation.”
In other words, when negotiating with Iran, the process is usually painful and always long. Whether or not Iran and Israel have actually agreed to a Trump-brokered ceasefire, this is nonetheless well worth bearing in mind.
Years ago I hired a Swedish lawyer to help with a project and in our initial discussion, he told me about a trip to Iran he’d taken for a previous client who’d hired him to get her son back in a custody battle with her Iranian ex.
“Their lawyer kept offering me these goddamn cucumber sandwiches,” he recalled. “Every time I tried to return to the issue at hand, he’d pass me the plate and say ‘have another sandwich.’ It was like he enjoyed the process, and had no intention of getting anything done except frustrating and delaying me.”
It was a foreshowing, you might say, to President Donald Trump’s exasperated outburst yesterday: “They (the Iranians and the Israelis) don’t know what the f@ck they’re doing!”
Washington’s Mr. Cucumber Sandwich has a name and it is Trita Parsi. Formerly the head of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), Parsi is today the executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute, a Soros-backed foreign policy think tank that argues for a shrinking American footprint abroad. His transformation was not accidental.
Recall the argument between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz last week about whether or not AIPAC, the American Israeli Political Action Committee, is in fact Tel Aviv’s lobby group in Washington. Carlson said it is, Sen. Cruz (a trained lawyer) insisted it isn’t.
The very legalistic ambiguity that Cruz embraced in that debate is what allowed NIAC to legally operate in America, and during the Obama administration, they were princes of the realm. Parsi visited the White House at least 33 times between 2013 and 2017.
Keep those dates in mind. That’s when Obama’s signature Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), aka the Iran Deal, was brokered. Afterwards, Parsi went on a victory lap giving speeches — clearly targeted to you know who — on “The Art of the Deal.” Too bad Trump didn’t care how clever Trita thinks he is and shredded the deal anyway.
While Parsi was flitting back and forth between the West Wing and his Tehran-friendly bat-cave in the glory days of Obama, then Secretary of State John Kerry, whose daughter is married to an Iranian, was hunkered down in the Palais Coburg in Vienna getting yelled at by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif until he ceded point after point.
Zarif knew well that if you yell at a New England WASP long enough, they’ll eventually cave and Kerry was no man of steel.
While there is no evidence to suggest cucumber sandwiches were then on the Palais Coburg’s menu, Vienna is an imperial city after all and they could easily have been door-dashed in, but why concern ourselves with little details.
Now I’m being generous in my assessment of Kerry’s weakness, calling it a character flaw resulting from inbreeding rather than outright corruption. But in 2018, then-Senator Marco Rubio wrote a criminal referral of Kerry to the U.S. Department of Justice for potential violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act on behalf of Iran.
(Six months later, I wrote Rubio’s office asking for an update on the referral but never got a response. Hours later on that very day, President Trump ordered a strike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimeni on the Baghdad airport road, which was arguably more impactful than a dead-end referral.)
Once Barack Hussein Obama retired to Martha’s Vineyard (where his cook mysteriously drowned and Kerry famously windsurfed) and his Tehran-born chief policy advisor Valerie Jarrett was back in Chicago vouching for Jussie Smollett, Parsi changed his M.O. and doubled down on his current “think-tank” creds.
In recent days, he has been romancing the mainstream media with “analysis” about how this unfortunate dust-up is all the result Trump allowing himself to be suckered in by the Israelis and adopting their unreasonable ‘zero enrichment’ ultimatum.
Mind you, we’re not allowed to call Trita a “foreign agent,” or he’ll sue us (in addition to terrorist activities, those pallets of cash Obama returned to Tehran pay for a lot of lawyers too), just as he did the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg some years back. But draw your own conclusions, and decide for yourself who benefits most from his “reasonable” arguments.
If Parsi is fighting the zero enrichment line, there’s a very good chance the mullahs back home encouraged him to, but since he remains bizarrely untouchable in The Swamp, I’ll use my words carefully.
On Sunday I asked an Arab nationalist friend in the region what the vibe on the street was. “Is he going to finish the f@cking job or not,” he shot back. Good question.
Given the oppressive heat today, you can bet that cucumber sandwiches are on offer in our nation’s capital. Hopefully cooler heads won’t be distracted by them.
