October 17, 2007 (LPAC)--If there's to be peace in Southwest Asia, then all of the powers of the region must be included in any security architecture, and especially both the U.S. and Iran, must recognize realities that they refuse to accept, now. That was the response of Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, and the author of a new book entitled "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the U.S." to a question from LPAC: how to get out of the pattern of balance-of-power politics that has dominated the region for the last 50 years or so? Parsi, speaking at a book event hosted by the American Conservative Defense Alliance in Washington, D.C., said that the U.S. would have to recognize that Iran is a major regional power. Iran would have to accept Israel is a fact, though Iran has come closer to this than the Bush/Cheney regime has come to accepting Iran as a major regional power, as indicated by Iran's 2003 offer of a "grand bargain" to the U.S. that included implicit acceptance of the Saudi peace offer that included the two state solution for the Palestinian- Israel conflict. Parsi warned that if this is not done, "We'll see a continuation of the balance-of-power game that means a war every 7 to 12 years." He said this situation does not exist anywhere else in the world because security architectures elsewhere are all inclusive. "In the Middle East, we've pursued bilateral defense deals with individual states at the expense of other states."

Earlier in his remarks, Parsi traced back the roots of the current situation in the Persian Gulf region to the U.S. excluding Iran from the 1991 peace talks in Madrid. That exclusion, resulting from U.S. hubris after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, allowed the hardliners inside Iran to pursue a policy that the Ayatollah Khomeini had actually prevented them from doing during the 1980's, which was to send soldiers to fight with the Shiites against Israel in Lebanon. "You can't create a stable order by excluding someone," Parsi said. "That gives them the incentive to undermine it."