In the US president’s reality-challenged view, Israel is an ingrate and a warmonger, while Iran’s mass-murdering leaders are ‘very rational.’ They are indeed all too rational, and he, clearly, is not.
On March 2, the third day of the US-Israel war against Iran, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff gave an interview to Fox News in which he explained why the administration’s efforts to negotiate a deal with the regime in Tehran earlier in the year had failed. He and Jared Kushner, Witkoff recalled, had been tasked with seeking an agreement under which Iran would halt its nuclear program, dismantle its ballistic missile program, cease its support for proxies, and eliminate its navy “so we can have freedom of the seas.”
Far from entertaining a willingness to compromise, despite having been battered in the June 2025 12-day war, said Witkoff, the Iranian negotiators bragged that their obduracy and duplicity had been paying off. On the nuclear front, they gloated, they had amassed 460 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which, Witkoff noted in his interview, could be turned into weapons-grade within 10 days “In that first meeting, both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly — with no shame — that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% [enriched uranium] and that they’re aware that could make 11 nuclear bombs,” Witkoff recalled, aghast. The Iranians, he exclaimed, “were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
They also claimed to have “an inalienable right” to enrich their nuclear fuel,” he noted, saying that he and Kushner had responded, robustly, by declaring “that the president feels we have the inalienable right to stop you dead in your tracks.” Fast-forward three and a half months, and the US will on Friday formally sign a memorandum of understanding with Iran, already signed digitally long-distance, that resolves none of the goals of the war — none of the goals that Witkoff and Kushner attempted to resolve in their negotiated effort to avert the war.
...US sources have vouchsafed in recent days that CIA Director John Ratcliffe has warned Trump and his key officials that the regime is playing a double game. The CIA chief has reportedly explained that evidence gathered by US intelligence agencies raises serious doubts that Iran would be willing to make the nuclear concessions that the US wants in any final deal. “The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one US source told Axios. “Not in line with their commitments.” What magnificent understatement. (Ed note: Please note that this long, complete, and complex article is from the very liberal Times of Israel newspaper. Even the Times doesn't like the MoU.) (Read More)
...US sources have vouchsafed in recent days that CIA Director John Ratcliffe has warned Trump and his key officials that the regime is playing a double game. The CIA chief has reportedly explained that evidence gathered by US intelligence agencies raises serious doubts that Iran would be willing to make the nuclear concessions that the US wants in any final deal. “The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one US source told Axios. “Not in line with their commitments.” What magnificent understatement. (Ed note: Please note that this long, complete, and complex article is from the very liberal Times of Israel newspaper. Even the Times doesn't like the MoU.) (Read More)
