The primary diplomat involved in the now-abandoned negotiations between Iran and the U.S. argued shortly after the outbreak of the Iran war that Israel had pulled America into the conflict. He also warned that the U.S. must extract itself and return to diplomatic talks before the war escalates further.
Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who mediated the most recent nuclear talks between Iran and the U.S., wrote in an op-ed published March 18 by The Economist that America has “lost control of its foreign policy to Israel,” allowing itself to be persuaded by the Israelis that Iran was weakened, vulnerable, and unable to fight back.
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He said the hope had been that Iran would quickly surrender after the Feb. 28 attacks, 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.”
Albusaidi said U.S. forces’ strikes on Iran were a “shock,” since the two countries had reportedly finished "substantive talks” on Iran’s nuclear-energy program just hours before. The talks had seemed as though a peace deal was imminent, he wrote, echoing his Feb. 27 statement to CBS’ Margaret Brennan that “a peace deal is within our reach,” as Zeale News previously reported.
“If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before,” Albusaidi said at the time, adding that the Iranians had already agreed “that Iran will never ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb.”
In his op-ed, Albusaidi said the U.S. must seek to extract itself from the conflict, arguing that the U.S. government and the American people “do not see this as their war.” He also highlighted various effects of the war on other countries, pointing out that Gulf states have been put in the path of Iran’s retaliation, endangering the countries and their economies.
The first step to pulling America out of the war, he said, is for “America’s friends” to tell the truth about it.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
Albusaidi said the U.S. must determine what its national interests truly are and take action. If those interests include ending Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, securing reliable energy supply chains, and investing in the region’s growing economy, those ends would be best achieved through peace, he said. He also suggested that talks about shifting toward nuclear energy — rather than relying on carbon — could serve as an incentive for both countries to return to diplomatic negotiations.
“It may be difficult for America to return to the bilateral negotiations from which it was twice diverted by the temptations of war. It will certainly be difficult for the Iranian leadership to return to dialogue with an administration that twice switched abruptly from talks to bombing and assassination,” Albusaidi wrote. “But the path away from war, hard though it may be for both parties to follow it, may have to lie through precisely this resumption.”