Trump never truly wanted peace with Iran

The attack jointly carried out by Israel and the United States on Iran has been planned for months, but the timing, in the midst of negotiations between Iran and the United States, will reopen the question of whether Washington was ever serious about reaching an agreement with Tehran.

Judging by Donald Trump's statement announcing the start of the war, the United States was not interested in any ingenious plan to prevent Iran from accumulating highly enriched uranium; Trump wanted to get rid of the entire regime, "a vicious group of very difficult, terrible people."

In June last year, Israel, with the subsequent joining of the US, launched a ten-day attack on Iran just three days before the sixth round of negotiations between Iran and the US was due to take place.

So this attack, in the middle of another negotiation process, could sink the chances of the Iranian regime ever taking the American offer of talks seriously again. They've already been fooled twice.

As one Iranian Telegram channel put it: “Once again, the United States attacked while Iran was conducting diplomacy. Once again, diplomacy has been shown not to work with the terrorist state of the United States.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was aware that Trump might reject diplomacy, but he believed that resuming negotiations was a risk worth taking and worth convincing the now-deceased Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to support.

Apparently knowing by the end of last week what the United States had prepared and how close an American military strike was, Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, the country mediating the negotiations, urgently traveled to Washington in a desperate attempt to better portray the progress of the talks.

He even took the unusual step of appearing on CBS, revealing many of the secrets of the agreement that was taking shape. A peace deal was within reach, he said.

But in a sign that the door was closing, Albusaidi was only allowed to meet with Vice President J.D. Vance, to whom he tried to explain that the talks were on the verge of a breakthrough. That deal would be much better than the 2015 agreement, which Trump withdrew from in 2018, he insisted.

He claimed that Iran had agreed to have no stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, that existing stocks of highly enriched uranium within Iran would be diluted (reduced to a lower level of enrichment), and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be given full verification access. He said that US weapons inspectors might even be allowed to enter Iran, along with inspectors from the IAEA, a United Nations body.

Iran would enrich uranium only to the extent it needs for its civilian nuclear program. A final agreement on principles could be signed this week, while agreeing on details on how the verification system will work could take another three months.

There was little or no room on offer for human rights issues, Iran's ballistic missile program, or support for proxy forces in the region.

From the Iranian perspective, the issue of the 1.250-mile (2.000-kilometer) range of their ballistic missiles could be a subject of discussion with the Gulf Cooperation Council, but missiles are fundamentally part of Iran's defense and, as the joint US-Israeli attack demonstrated, a key element of Iran's national security.

Iran's previous foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has always defended its missile program, recalling how helpless Iran was during the war with Iraq. He argued that if the United States stopped selling weapons to Gulf countries, Iran would have less need for its own missile program.

But it was neither the agenda nor the timeline that suited Trump. Moreover, his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, hinted at what the president really wanted when he said Trump was surprised Iran had not yet capitulated. For Albusaidi, the US decision to attack was devastating.

Although Trump has resorted to formal legal justification, claiming that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States and its allies, he has offered no evidence, and his claims have so far not been confirmed by senior United Nations officials or European leaders.

In explaining the attack, Trump did not go into detail about the progress of the negotiations or the differences between the two sides. He simply stated: “Iran’s threatening activities put the United States, its forces and bases abroad, and our allies around the world at risk.”

A debate will soon begin within the United States about whether Albusaidi's assessment of the success of the negotiations was justified. Enriching uranium to the required low level and removing the stockpile of highly enriched material, if indeed offered by Iran, with verification, would prima facie deprive Iran of the means to build a bomb.

If so, Trump, emboldened by Israel and Republican “hawks,” will be accused of knowingly rejecting an agreement that would have peacefully ended the threat that Iran’s nuclear program has posed for the past 30 years.

Others will argue that the very survival of the incorrigible and repressive Iranian regime is a threat to global security.

However, what is remarkable is that Trump himself, before the attack, made almost no attempt to explain and justify his actions or goals to the American public, Congress, or allies.

The text is taken from "The Guardian"

Translation: NB