We are suffused with misinformation, falsehood, and lies. Very often, justifications are provided after the event.
The Israeli attack has failed to seriously annihilate the Iranian nuclear programme. So, they changed the entire process and said that regime change was the intention.
Iran and the US had five rounds of nuclear talks. In the first four rounds, the Americans accepted that Iran could do a degree of enrichment. The percentage, however, was not mentioned in the public domain. But in the fifth round in Rome, Americans abruptly insisted on zero enrichment, knowing fully well that the Iranians would reject it. But both the parties still agreed to the sixth round.
That is when Donald Trump went public and said, “I have given them a deal. I've offered it to them. I've given them 60 days. They better make up their mind.”
I feel it will be investigated later on because even the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) allowed a degree of enrichment. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty has also allowed enrichment. This is a highly technical matter.
In the case of the JCPOA, whatever the Iranians had above the prescribed limit had been shipped off to Russia. That's right.
My view is that the Israelis deliberately initiated the conflict so that the sixth round would not take place because they feared a deal. This is more or less now consensual. More and more people are saying this.
What did Trump do? Instead of expressing doubts about the preemptive attack, Trump called it excellent. He gets a charge from the idea of war. He wants to do business. He's a dealmaker. But somehow, war, destruction, killing, and assassinations seem to bring out the Julius Caesar inside him.
Trump loves to strut as a general. You saw that he took the parade and stood there feeling good about himself. He later stated that he had a big plan, and it was not just a ceasefire. He said he wanted the unconditional surrender of a country (Iran) with which his country was not at war. This is farcical.
Now, there is another load of absolute rubbish, and that is that the Iranian people are hostile to their regime. Now, whether anyone is hostile or not, in any country, you have a wide variety of opinions. But the minute you threaten that country, they all come together.
If you remember when the Iraqis attacked Iran in 1980, they were under the impression it was a broken country. The armed forces were broken. The regime had barely taken charge. Their institutions were not in place, and everything was very confusing. The minute the Iraqis crossed the border, the country became one. They were able to hold their own. You could find parallels in the Iraq experience of 1980 to 1988.
Look at the damage that the Iranians suffered, day after day, week after week, and month after month. The entire international community supported Iraq. They allowed them to use chemical weapons. And yet the Iranian did not surrender. It is only right at the end that they agreed to a truce, which he called a bitter challenge. You cannot destroy a regime based on war.
What you are going to do is not a regime change. It is the destruction of Iran that is an end in itself. It would be similar to what Americans did in Iraq. Americans sent them back to the old stone age, literally. Iraq took 20 years to recover.
But do remember that the assault upon Iraq gave birth to Zarqawi and the Islamic State. And that was a scourge. Look at how the American occupation was undermined by the very forces that emerged because of the occupation.
The Iranians have an Islamic Republic. But it is not monochromatic. It has a wide variety of people who have been at its head. They have had people such as Rafsanjani, Khatami, Rouhani and Pezeshkian. I think the current President Pezeshkian was truly committed to changing the scenario at home and having a new diplomatic initiative abroad.
Israel thrives on Iran-US conflict and is a major instigator of it. Indeed, I would say that the Israelis were terrified that Pezeshkian might actually do an outreach to the Americans and just possibly come to an arrangement.
(The author was the Indian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE. Transcribed from his conversation with Neena Gopal on The New Indian Express' Global Express show. Views are personal.)
