I watched some of the press conference today about the deal with Iran and was sorry I did. Trump was more conciliatory towards Iran, the enemy, than he was to Israel, our ally. I don't understand it. Who talked him into this? If anyone,
ISRAEL should have been a full partner and asked to decide the terms, as they know more than anyone what Iran is capable of.
Any mention of money going to Iran should be deleted from the MOU. The only understanding Iran should have is that the Strait of Hormuz must be reopened now; that there cannot be any nuclear weapons or other weapons with which to wage war; and that the IRGC must disband.
And what about the Persian people in Iran? If the Islamic regime will remain, what happens to those people, 40,000+ of whom have already been slaughtered? Where is Reza Pahlavi now?
I just hope Iran refuses to sign the actual agreement on Friday, and we can resume bombing. We never should have stopped.
And if Iran does sign? Then Trump will go down in history as another Neville Chamberlain.
--------------------------------------------------------
David Horovitz at The Times of Israel, 6-17-26`
Trump’s deal is a catastrophic capitulation to Iran’s aggressors, leaves Israel vulnerable and constrained
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.
According to a draft text obtained by The Times of Israel,
CNN and Bloomberg on Wednesday, the 14-point MOU potentially grants the
regime hundreds of billions of dollars — which it will doubtless
utilize to help keep its restive population in line, to massively fund
Hezbollah, Hamas and its other terrorist proxies, and to spend as needed
on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. (The White House said
later Wednesday, without elaboration, that the draft text “does not
reflect the language of the actual MOU.”)
The draft text provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz —
the vital waterway Iran seized and leveraged to push Trump into this
deal — but with no long-term commitment by the regime to keep it open
and toll-free.
And it pushes the entire subject of Iran’s rogue nuclear program into
a 60-day negotiation period, during which the regime can be relied upon
to be as uncompromising and dismissive as its negotiators were when
facing Witkoff and Kushner in January.
Incredibly, the draft text of the MOU already rewards the regime for
its intransigence: It states that Iran’s “nuclear needs” will be
addressed in those 60 days; the US negotiators apparently could not even
persuade the regime to include the words “peaceful” or “civilian,” to
at least keep up the pretense that it has legitimate nuclear
requirements.
During the 60 days, the text continues ridiculously, “Iran will
maintain the status quo on its nuclear program.” What status quo would
that be? The “status quo” under which Iran has run rings around the UN’s
nuclear inspectors, to the point where, as its negotiators boasted to
Witkoff, it amassed enough near-weapons-grade uranium for 11 nuclear
bombs, an underground stockpile that survived the US Army’s B-2 bunker
busters last June?
Last month, a senior Israeli military official warned
that if the stockpile was not removed in the wake of the war, the
campaign should be considered “one big failure.” And here we are. The
official also warned that if that central goal was not met, Israel would
need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve it. The draft text
of the MOU would prevent Israel from doing so.
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.
Of course, the Iranians have no intention of making any concessions that would strategically thwart their path to the bomb. Of course, they’re lying. They cheerfully told Witkoff in January that they’ve lied their way to their 60% stockpile.
The danger now, as realistically seen by Israel, is that they will use the 60-day “status quo” to accelerate toward nuclear breakout.
And yet, the same US administration negotiators who recoiled in
horror at Iran’s obduracy in January have now yielded to it in June.
The deal manifestly empowers and finances a mass-murdering regime. It
elevates the Islamic Republic to a regional powerhouse. It abandons the
Iranian people to whom Trump promised that help was on its way.
And it directly endangers and constrains Israel, with terminology
that binds Israel to a ceasefire it had no part in negotiating: “The
Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war,
declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an
immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon,
and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action
against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force
against each other (italics added).”
Trump asserted in remarks at the G7 summit on Tuesday that Israel
should be showering him with gratitude, since it is only thanks to him
that we were not already eliminated in an Iranian nuclear assault.
“If it weren’t for the United States of America — with me, because
Obama was the opposite — Israel would not exist right now. Israel would
have been blown off the face of the earth, 100 percent. And every smart
person in Israel knows that,” he declared. “Without us, without the
United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there’d be no
Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did [in
tackling Iran].” Iran, he said, was “two weeks away” from having a
nuclear weapon.
But he has now struck a deal that fails to definitively close off
Tehran’s practical capacity to complete its nuclear program, and removes
US military leverage to deter it from doing so.
And that’s not all.
Let Syria take care of Hezbollah?!
Trump at the G7 also took public aim at Israel for its ostensibly disproportionate military action against Iran’s Hezbollah terror proxy in Lebanon.
Using the language of Israel’s bitterest critics, he charged that
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being
killed.” Elaborating, he snapped that “you don’t have to knock down an
apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there
are a lot of people in those apartment houses. And they’re not all
Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”
So he wants both a shorter war, and also a less damaging war, to
tackle a vast terrorist army, emplaced within civilian areas, directed
by Iran to batter northern Israel these past weeks. A terrorist army
dedicated, like Iran, to destroying Israel, and one that will invade
northern Israel if given half a chance.
Warming to his reality-challenged theme, Trump prescribed that Israel
“let Syria take care of Hezbollah. Because to be honest with you, I
think they’d do a better job of doing it.” That would be Syria under
Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist who had a $10 million US bounty on
his head until December 2024, but over whom Trump has gushed since their
first meeting in Riyadh last May. “Very capable,” he said of Sharaa on
Tuesday. “And very good to me.”
In upside-down Trump world, Israel is the ingrate for not
appreciating his heroic interventions on our behalf, and the
illegitimate aggressor for seeking to complicate his submission to
Tehran and its terror proxies. But the fact is that Trump gave up on the
war when it became clear that winning it — first and foremost by
thwarting Iran’s Hormuz takeover — would likely cost numerous American
lives. That was, of course, a legitimate consideration, but one he
should have weighed before starting the campaign. Facing enemies bent on
its destruction, Israel knows it must put lives on the line to survive
in this treacherous region.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frozen out of the negotiations,
was needless to say not present at the G7 in France either — too toxic
to the assembled notables, and perhaps also at risk of ICC-ordered
arrest. Dissembling furiously, he is left trying to assert that the
failed war was a success, falsely asserting on Monday night
that the Iranian nuclear threat has been defused, that Iran’s economy
has been devastated, and that the campaign against Iran “did not go
wrong at all.” For his strenuous efforts to avoid a public showdown with
Trump, the US president has repaid him by calling him “fucking crazy”
and publicly declaring that “he has no fucking judgment.”
Iran’s leaders, in their current iteration, by contrast, “are very
rational people” in Trumpland. “They were nice to deal with. They were
strong people, smart people… They’re not radicalized and they’re, you
know, looking to help their country,” he assured us all on Tuesday.
But, hey, even if they’re not, it turns out that he “never cared about
regime change” anyway. This, from the president who, on February 28, as
the US-Israel airstrikes began, told the Iranian public that, when the bombs stop, they need to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.
The 2026 US-Israel war against the Iranian regime was necessary. The
Islamic Republic had been gunning down its own people in the tens of
thousands. It was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, reviving
its ballistic missile production, rebuilding its terror proxies.
When the US and Israel struck, it had no hesitation in extorting the
world via the Strait of Hormuz, and targeting anyone and anything it
perceived to be vulnerable to attack, not only Israel (of course) but
also its own regional neighbors, while lamenting that it did not (yet) have the capacity to strike directly back at the United States.
The war was lost through inadequate strategic planning by the US and
Israel, and subsequent US presidential weakness. Trump’s capitulation is
a betrayal of the Iranian citizenry. It will come back to bite America.
It leaves Israel more vulnerable than before the war began, with a new
US-Iran ceasefire agreement that aims to deny Israel the freedom to
protect and defend itself.
The terms that the regime held out for and won indeed show its
leaders to be “very rational people.” The same, with dire implications
for the security of Israel and its people, cannot be said of Trump.
.jpg)