Diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran can be successful in facilitating peace in the Middle East, an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations said Wednesday at the University of Oklahoma.

The way to peace will not be easy by any means, said Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council.

"In fact, I will propose to you that it will be very, very difficult," he said, adding, however, that the alternative is an altercation that the U.S. cannot afford right now.

"When you eliminate diplomacy from the table you make conflict inevitable," he told a packed house at the Robert S. Kerr Auditorium at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

Parsi was brought to OU through the International Programs Center, the Center for Middle East Studies and the support of the Farzaneh family.

He in an expert on Middle East politics through his extensive experience on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations. He worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the U.N., serving in the Security Council. He is the author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States."

Parsi spent the first part of his lecture explaining the history of relations between Iran and Israel.

He said the conflict between Iran and Israel is not a deep-seated conflict like that of Israel and Palestine. Instead, he brought up ancient history, citing the case about 2,500 years ago when Persia freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity and financed a return of many of the Jews to ancient Palestine.

Then Parsi moved onto more recent history, saying that Iran and Israel have had peaceful diplomatic ties throughout most of their history.

Israel and Iran maintained diplomatic ties, often in secret and under cover of night, despite the anti-Israeli rhetoric Tehran has spouted for the past several decades, he said. That's because each country needed the other for strategic reasons starting in the 1960s through the 1980s, Parsi said.

Israel needed the assistance of Iran in order to protect itself from its neighboring Arab states as well as to prove that it wasn't isolated in the region, he said. Iran needed American replacement parts for its weapons, and because of U.S. sanctions it was forced to get those from Israel.

Iran still needed to bridge the gulf between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in order to portray itself as a leading country in the region, so Parsi said Tehran continued its anti-Israel rhetoric while maintaining ties with Israel in secret. The rhetoric was heightened after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but the geopolitical context had not changed so neither did its secret diplomatic ties, he said.

What changed between the two countries was the Gulf War and other events of the early 1990s, he said.

Until that point, both countries needed each other for protection against the U.S.S.R. and Iraq as the potential leader of the Arab block of nations, Parsi said. Now, there was a new political context. They were both potential major political powers in the region with no buffer between them, Parsi said.

Iran needed U.S. support at that point, but the U.S. did not respond to its steps toward goodwill, he said. Instead, they responded to Israel's demands that they needed protection from Iran.

Parsi said Iran believed the U.S. and Israel's actions were meant to isolate Iran and build a U.S.-Israel power in the Middle East. The weak link in that plan, however, was the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. So Iran began undermining any efforts at peace in the Middle East in an attempt to block anything that could be perceived to benefit Israel. Israel in its turn, Parsi said, began blocking anything that could possibly benefit Iran. This is one of the sources of conflict in the Middle East, he said.

Parsi concluded that Iran's and Israel's aggressive rhetoric and actions are a result of political exigencies.

"Both sides want to portray it as an ideological battle, but when you scratch the surface you get an entirely different picture," he said. That's good news, he said, because that means the conflict is solvable. It doesn't have to end with one side annihilating the other, Parsi said.

"You can find ways in which to be able to find win-win solutions," he said.

During the question and answer time at the end of Parsi's lecture, OU President David Boren asked him about the internal actions of Iran over the past few weeks and the future role the U.S. should play in Iran's policies. Boren recently was named co-chair of President Barack Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board.

Parsi said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "is almost completely delegitimized," so when he came back to Tehran after talks with the U.S. it was easy for the opposition to refuse any negotiations with the U.S. The problem wasn't with Obama's diplomatic negotiations, it was with the internal political process in Iran.

In the future, Parsi said opposition to Ahmadinejad will continue.

"The Western media may have lost interest in the fight," he said. "Nevertheless, they're still fighting."

The U.S. should continue not to give cause for Tehran to attack American actions. However, Parsi said the U.S. should not shy away from demanding that human rights be respected in Iran.

"Let's not make the U.S. an excuse for the Iranian government to brush aside its very real problems," he said.

Parsi said he believes Iran could be kept from developing a nuclear weapon through diplomatic negotiations and strict regulations and inspections. He said Iranians could have produced nuclear weapons by now if they had wanted to, but instead hope to get as close as possible to nuclear weapons without violating regulations. As a "virtual nuclear power," Parsi said Iran could create the weapon in a short time if a real threat was posed to it.

"Just because they have (uranium) enrichment does not mean we have lost the chance of preventing them having a nuclear weapon," Parsi said.

Julianna Parker Jones 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com