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Notes -
Third Gulf War Negotiations Thread
As we approach the end of the 5 day pause(?) before the USA ramps up attacks again, reports are coming in that the Trump team has sent Iran a 15 point plan for peace. I don’t think the full text has been credibly made public at this time, as should be expected, but from what I’ve gathered the points can be reduced from redundant and detail points, Iran gives:
— Iran stops funding proxies abroad, especially Hamas and Hezbollah
— Iran pinky promises to never get a nuclear weapon, surrenders nuclear material, agrees to various future restrictions/inspections
— Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz
In exchange Iran gets:
— Full sanctions relief, including removal of the snapback provisions that removed sanctions would go back on Iran immediately if Iran violated the agreement
— American assistance with their civilian nuclear program.
Iran, after denying that negotiations were happening at all, has come back with the following demands:
— Bombing of Iran ends, assassination of Iranian officials ends, guarantees that it won’t start again
— Reparations
— Recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz
— They won’t negotiate with Steve and Jared, only with JD Vance
Trump has delayed bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure for this week, while Iran has let some ships through the strait as a gesture of good faith, or as Trump put it a “very expensive present.”
Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.
But I’m filled with a deep sense of disquiet and defeat. The Iranian regime is rebuilt, reinforced, made more powerful. The Iranian regime is given new credibility, where before my diasporic friends could claim that with a push the rotten structure would collapse, now they know it will not. Iran gets effective, if not formal, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets sanctions relief. Iran gives up more or less nothing, just some fissionable material that is easily enough replaced and a few proxies that have already been degraded. I don’t really credit the promises Iran is making here for much, especially if the snapback provision is removed.
Giving Iran anything after they close the Strait is tantamount to recognizing their sovereignty over it, de facto if not legally. Simply by asking for it, and then making a deal, Iran is going to be perceived as getting sovereignty over the strait. The USA, by accepting Iran's "gift" of letting ships through the strait, is already acknowledging that Iran has control of the strait! And this would be disastrous.
The flip side is that there’s little guarantee that the US would keep its promises in the future, but that doesn’t feel very good to me either. I’m not sure where I see the off-ramp at this point that isn’t a full invasion of Iran.
Another view is that given the conditions, this isn't really the Iran war, it's the Lebanon war and the Iran war is a sideshow and a distraction. The casualties are higher in Lebanon, there are troops on the ground in Lebanon, Israel is considering expanding its territory into Lebanon, occupation will inevitably result in settlements which will not be removed, etc. Perhaps the purpose of the Iran war never had anything to do with Iran herself, which is why the goals against Iran never seemed achievable, but were instead more local to protecting the Israeli homefront against Hezbollah. The USA distracts Iran and forces it to accept Hezbollah's defeat.
I suppose at least we’ll get good pistachios and saffron now? I’d love to see sanctions relief on a personal level, and I think sanctions are a wildly ineffective method of international relations, but on a geopolitical level this seems like the US admitting defeat.
I think it would be great for mankind if Iran winds up controlling the strait, as this would constitute a powerful deterrence against future powers that plot unjustified wars without regard for humanitarian consequences. If this deterrence is permanently inked into history, then it could save millions of lives in the future when leaders read about the aggression of America and Israel against the underdog Iran. This would be good for Americans in America, because we will not be top dog forever; in a century or two we may find ourselves in Iran’s place with a more powerful China attempting to oppress us and conquer us. Giving Iran the strait would be a great reparative act for a country that does not deserve the families of its scientists blown up and its economy placed under crippling sanctions just because their civilization makes Israelis and Zionists uncomfortable and envious.
Ultimately there is nothing more important than justice and securing peace, at least not if you’re a member of the Christian West called to be peacemakers. If this reduces our power and prosperity, then that’s an adequate sacrifice for twenty years of mistakes we refuse to learn from. So perhaps we can learn from this one and boot the warmongers out of power. Obviously, we did not learn anything from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Palestine. So maybe those who worship power will learn something from a decline in American power, and maybe Israelis will learn something from relentless missile strikes on their cities. I’m doubtful, but it’s possible.
I think this is disingenuous. There's room for legitimate disagreement over whether the US should be starting wars in defense of Israel, but calling Iran's funding of Hamas "making Israel uncomfortable" is rather understating the situation.
I agree, it’s disingenuous when people suggest Israel started the conflict with Iran. A core objective of the Islamic revolution is the destruction of the “Zionist entity”, not partially but wholly and absolutely, a raison d’etre of the modern Iranian state is Israel’s destruction, even at colossal political and economic cost (as we’ve seen). Since the neutering of Iraq in 2003 and Saddam’s replacement with a quasi democratic largely Shia government, no foreign power or group realistically wants to annex major parts of Iranian territory (other than perhaps the Kurds, but nobody else including Turkey would want that, and it won’t happen).
Israel’s hostility to Iran isn’t ethnic or national or irredentist or religious, like the hostility to the Palestinians. Iran is far away and Israel doesn’t claim any of it. It’s solely downstream from the Islamic revolution.
Just to add to @coffee_enjoyer's comment, it's disingenuous to suggest that Israel actually starting both wars does not constitute Israel starting the war with Iran. You simply have the ground truth that both wars started with Israel launching surprise attacks on Iran.
It's more disingenuous to suggest coarse propaganda slogans constitutes a start of a war. And by that standard, you would also have to consider the Jewish religion itself, which is an esoteric war-cry against its enemies including Iran. Jews to this day publicly celebrate Purim, the mass slaughter of Persian civilians on the basis of a "pre-emptive strike" dubiously similar to the narrative Israel is using to justify its own surprise attacks and aggressive war on Iran. Passover is publicly celebrated, which is the celebration of a mass slaughter of the first born sons of the Gentiles in Egypt. Israeli society has identified its war on Iran as a holy war on Aamalek, and that's not a new association.
The Jewish Synagogue, although slightly more esoteric than "Death to Israel", is a much more profound and esoteric war-cry than Iran's slogans, and a more indispensable raison d’etre for the entire religion itself which is why we have Israel in the first place causing so much war in the region. The religion is a war cry.
Quite awhile back, you argued that none of Israel's enemies in the region could defeat it even without US help. I countered that they wouldn't need to militarily defeat Israel, they would just need to cause enough insecurity and instability to threaten the colonial project. Not only has that proven more true than ever, but I think this war given the enormous investment by the US military shows that Israel could not have fought Iran without US help. And in fact a Iran/Hezbolahh/Houthis scenario against Israel with US neutrality very well may have resulted in the actual military defeat of Israel.
And that's the real reason for this war, going back to the "New Strategy for Securing the Realm." There was a balance of power between Iran and Israel, which is good for the US but bad highly threatening for Israel. Israel is starting this war to disrupt the balance of power, so they are hegemonic in the region.
To say Israel didn't start the wars is disingenuous in every respect.
This war and Israel itself would not exist without its religion. The Jewish religion has brought that region to this exact point, it is a religious hostility.
This is a response to a generic argument but not the specific one. Iran and Israel were not historic enemies. Historically, Jews were sometime treated poorly in Persia and sometimes well, but that was true in many places. Israel doesn’t have any territorial claims on Iran. Even the most fantastical, maximalist Zionist claims disavowed even by most religious zionists end in Western Iraq, nowhere near Iran, and would require conquering other nations to reach. Israel and Iran had a coldly neutral or allied relationship for most of the Cold War.
It is disingenuous to pretend that what changed was not the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power in Iran a theocratic government let by a clerical leadership that considered the destruction of Israel its central and absolute foreign policy goal (not the only goal, of course, it also sought to export the revolution to Iraq and Sunni states, but the central goal, yes). This government was not threatened by Israel, which has neither the population nor any economic or political reason, independently, to rule over an Iran that is not hostile toward it. Iranians have no ethnic and scant religious relations (other than those they imagine themselves) with the Palestinians, Sunni Arabs who have themselves fought wars against them for centuries (millennia, Iran being Muslim because the Gulf Arab conquerors destroyed the Persian Sassanids, of course) and today - Hamas fighters fighting against Assad in Syria for example.
The sole reason for Israeli hostility toward Iran for the last 45 years has been the revolutionary mission of the Islamic Republic, which seeks to destroy it. Or ask yourself a simple question - if the Islamic Revolution had never occurred, do you think Israel would care to fight a war against Iran?
So the Jews create their colony in the middle of the Muslim world on the basis of superstitious, cult nonsense, and now Muslim religious hostility is cited as the justification for Israel launching these surprise attacks on its neighbors and conquering their territory and displacing the Muslims and destabilizing the region and most likely world economy. The raison d'etre for Israel is far more religious in nature than the Islamic regime in Iran.
The regimes of Assad and Saddam Hussein were not marked by rote Islamic fanaticism towards Israel, yet they were targeted by Israel for the exact same reasons I suggested. In Sryia the new regime is more Islamic than the Assad, accomplished with the support of Israel. A colonial project does not survive given a balance of power with enemies who are surrounding you. It results in colonists leaving. The US colonial project did not thrive on the basis of a balance of power with the Indians, nor the Spanish colonial project.
To answer your question, it would depend on the political objectives of the Shah. The threat of Pan-Arabism is actually what Israel has been trying to nip in the bud for all these years, preventing the political alliance of actually more secular leaders like Assad, Hussein, Nasser, and since the fall of Iraq Iran is the greatest threat of providing a basis for greater political unity and cooperation among Arabs. That is the 100x greater threat to Israel than Islamic fundamentalism- Israel's policy does not reduce to Muslim hostility, it's about making Israel the regional hegemon to secure its colonial project.
Iran is hostile to pan-Arabism, its people aren’t Arabs, and a pan-Arabist state that incorporated Assad, Hussein and Nasser’s states would become (regardless of who was in charge of Iran) a huge threat to Iran militarily and civilizationally. Israel didn’t bring war to a region that was beset with countless sectarian and ethnic divides long before it was founded.
Not necessarily a state but an Alliance, Iraqi militias are cooperating with Iran and inflicting huge damage on US assets in Iraq for example.
The point was that secular cooperation among Arabs (with Persians potentially at the helm) is what actually keeps Israeli planners up at night, sectarian fundamentalist slogans are what they point to as a pretext and they actually benefit from it and exploit it. Israel is not pursuing the policy it is because of "Death to Israel" chants, it's doing so for the reasons laid out in the Clean Break Memo, which directly plans on using sectarian fundamentalism to destabilize hostile and relatively secular regimes like Syria to prevent that type of cooperation.
In the counterfactual with the Shah, it would depend on whether he were more of an Assad figure or King of Jordan figure. But it doesn't reduce to the Islamic Revolution.
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