Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff greet Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Hamad Al Busaidi ahead of Iran talks
Did you know that just hours before Donald Trump launched his illegal Middle East war that Iranian negotiators offered him a better deal on nuclear materials than Barack Obama’s administration negotiated in 2015?
The Iranians agreed to lower levels of enriching nuclear fuels, keeping them far below weapons grade, and other major concessions just so Trump could boast that he was a better negotiator than Obama.
From Trump’s point of view this could have been a major win, maybe even enough to make his name as the “peace president.”
From Tehran’s perspective it supported their claim that they would never build or use nuclear weapons because they are unholy.
What happened next provided Tehran with irrefutable proof that the American government is run by incompetents and liars who cannot be trusted.
After all, if you give the Trump administration what it says publicly it wants—verifiable guarantees that Iran will not build or have the capacity to build nuclear bombs—and the response is to kill your head of state what else would any rational, or even irrational, regime conclude?
Broken Promise
The illegal war on Iran violates Trump’s endless promises on the campaign trail that if returned to the White House he would guarantee no more “endless wars” in the Middle East or anywhere else.
Trump, campaigning to get back to the White House in 2023 and 2024, declared again and again that he would never go to war with Iran. The reason, he emphasized, was that he had superior and effective negotiating skills unlike, he said, Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Once again, the appallingly ignorant tyrant in the White House showed the “poor educated” MAGA who embrace him that they are fools, lacking the discernment to spot the devil in front of their faux Christian eyes.
The rest of us know that only Congress can declare war, making Trump’s attacks properly impeachable offenses. But only educated fools believe the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill will act to stop the madman from Queens.
Trump asserted that Biden, and later Harris, would bring us to “the brink of world War III.”
Indeed, in 2011 Trump declared that Obama would start a war with Iran because it was the only way he could win re-election in 2012.
Source Named
News that Iran offered Trump more than it gave Obama 11 years ago comes from the man who mediated indirect nuclear talks in Geneva between Tehran and Washington: the foreign minister of Oman, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi.
Badr shuttled between the Iranian delegation in one room and another, occupied by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump emissary Steve Witkoff with messages aimed at avoiding military action by the U.S. and Israel.
When the nuclear talks broke off Friday in Switzerland, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr flew directly to Washington. There Badr gave interviews, informal and on camera, to David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and my former colleague at the New York Times and later Reuters. Rohde, who spent seven months as a Taliban captive, has shown time and again how deeply and solidly he knows the Middle East. He now covers national security issues for MS Now.
Amateur Diplomats
Kushner and Witkoff are amateurs, both from real estate families with no formal training in diplomacy and no education in the centuries of mind-numbingly complex political, religious, and economic issues in the region from Egypt east to India that was largely controlled by the British in the 1800s and has been called “the Middle East” since at least 1902 (and by some since the 1850s).
Their public statements and official remarks make clear that Kushner and Witkoff aren’t equal to the best high school debaters in understanding geopolitical conflicts. Their track records in Gaza, Ukraine, and now Iran show why experience and education matter in diplomatic talks.
On Ukraine, they push a version of the Kremlin line, advancing the Trumpian credo that might makes right.
On Gaza, they talk to Israel and oil-rich Arabs—except for Palestinians, who are also Arab.
On Iran, they received valuable Iranian concessions, but didn’t persuade America’s conmander-in-chief to take the win and brag about what he got. Had Trump taken their offer, which include included allowing American oil companies to operate in Iran, it would have helped strengthen his oft-repeated 2016 claim that he would be the “peace president.”
Money Wasted
American taxpayers poured vast sums of money, especially since the end of World War II, into developing an extraordinarily sophisticated diplomatic corps that among other accomplishments got us past the Cold War without a nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. There’s plenty to criticize about our State Department, but the fact remains that diplomacy is always preferable, and cheaper, than war.
But from this seat-of-the-pants administration, run by amateurs and sycophants, many of them filled with hate, violence is embraced. Donald Trump has been public about how murderous desires since 1989 when he took out full page ads calling for the summary executions of five young men in a Central Park rape case. When evidence showed the five had been falsely accused—released after years in prison, the real perpetrator convicted— Trump doubled down on his call to murder the five.
Official violence is Trumpism in action, be it against American citizens shot to death or grabbed by ICE or an illegal Trump-directed war that on Saturday dropped a bomb on an Iranian school, killing more than 160 girls, teachers and staff.
We should remember that “ACTION IS CHARACTER,” as the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the manuscript for his final novel, The Last Tycoon.
Trump’s lifelong actions violating the law tell you exactly who he is.
Attacking civilians, as American servicemen did this weekend, is the Russian style of warfare, a style that dates at least to the era of the boyars, as Russian aristocrats were called in the old Czarist era. Under the modern Czar, Vladimir Putin, Russia has repeatedly launched missiles against Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and other civilian facilitates that no civilized nation, no democratic nation, should or would tolerate from its leaders.
But America, for more than a year, has been not a democracy but a de facto dictatorship run by a convicted career felon who falsely claims that our Constitution empowers him to “do anything I want.”
Indeed, the question on the line now is whether America is indeed a civilized society anymore or just a land of cowards who will tolerate any injustice, any cruelty, and indulge the murderous rage flows from the addled brain of Donald Trump.
Who are we, America?
Reprinted with permission from DCReport
David Cay Johnston, a former columnist for The National Memo, co-founded DCReport. He is a best-selling author, investigative journalist and former reporter for The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He teaches law and journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology.
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