MUSCAT: A negotiated deal between the United States and Iran to avert war had "appeared really possible" if time was allowed, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al Busaidy, Foreign Minister, who mediated talks between the two sides, said in an article published on Thursday, while blaming Israel for the ongoing conflict.
Writing in ‘The Economist’, Sayyid Badr stated that the superpower has lost control of its foreign policy. “Twice in nine months, the United States and Iran have been on the verge of a real deal on the most difficult issue that divides them: Iran’s nuclear-energy programme and American fears that it could be a weapons programme. So it was a shock but not a surprise when on February 28 — just a few hours after the latest and most substantive talks — Israel and America again launched an unlawful military strike against the peace that had briefly appeared really possible,” Sayyid Badr said.
He stated that Iran’s retaliation against what it claims are American targets on the territory of its neighbours was an inevitable, if deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable, result. “Faced with what both Israel and America described as a war designed to terminate the Islamic Republic, this was probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership,” he said.
“The effects of this retaliation are felt most acutely on the southern side of the Gulf, where Arab countries that had placed their trust in American security cooperation now experience that cooperation as an acute vulnerability, threatening their present security and future prosperity,” Sayyid Badr said.
“For Gulf states, an economic model in which global sport, tourism, aviation and technology were to play an important role is now endangered. Plans to become a global hub for data centres may need to be revised. The effects of Iran’s retaliation are already being felt globally, as maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is severely disrupted, driving up energy prices and threatening a deep recession. If this had not been anticipated by the architects of this war, that was surely a grave miscalculation,” he added.
The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place. “This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it. Hopefully America’s commitment to regime change is just rhetorical, whereas Israel explicitly seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and probably cares little about how the country is governed, or by whom, once this has been achieved,” Sayyid Badr said.
With this objective in mind, Israel’s leadership seems to have persuaded America that Iran had been so weakened by sanctions, internal divisions and the American-Israeli bombings of its nuclear sites last June, that an unconditional surrender would swiftly follow the initial assault and the assassination of the supreme leader. “But it should now be clear that for Israel to achieve its stated objective will require a long military campaign to which America would have to commit troops on the ground, opening a new front in the forever wars which President Donald Trump previously vowed to end. This is not what America’s government wants. Nor do its people, who certainly do not see this as their war,” he said.
The question for friends of America is simple. “What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? First of all, America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth. That begins with the fact that there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it, and that the national interests of both Iran and America lie in the earliest possible end to hostilities. This is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it involves indicating the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy. But it must be told,” he said.
He added that the leadership of the United States will then need to decide where its national interests really lie and act accordingly. “A sober assessment of those interests would indicate that they must include a definitive and decisive end to nuclear-weapons proliferation in the region, secure energy supply chains and renewed investment opportunities in the context of the region’s growing global economic significance. All of these would be best achieved with Iran at peace with its neighbours. They can perhaps be identified as shared objectives for all the countries of the Gulf. How to get there from today’s catastrophe is the challenge,” he said.
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