Albusaidi suggests non-aggression pact among six Gulf states, Iran and Iraq
A talks process mediated by Qatar, though neglected and boycotted by the White House, has not completely collapsed, according to Simon Tisdall in a Guardian commentary published October 28. Tisdall, The Guardian’s foreign affairs commentator, adds that top officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey were in Tehran on a last-ditch mission to pre-empt resumed hostilities with Iran.
Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, told The Guardian that week that negotiations “could yet produce viable outcomes” if given a chance. He said a longer-term solution could be a non-aggression pact involving all six Gulf states, plus Iran and Iraq, on the premise that those states, not the United States, would be the primary, joint providers of future regional security.
Tisdall’s warning about what could follow carries several qualifications. He writes that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu “appear hell-bent on resuming” the conflict that the United States and Israel began in June of last year and expanded in February, which he describes as an “illegal war of choice,” and he treats renewed attacks after the November 3 U.S. midterms and Israel’s election as likely. He also writes that both men probably want the war.
The column’s photograph shows Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Crossroads Arena in Corinth, Mississippi, on October 26, photographed by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Before the midterms, Tisdall writes, Trump has been trying to dodge blame for an anticipated Republican midterm loss that Tisdall links largely to war-related fuel and consumer-price inflation. Trump blamed Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries, but that explanation “didn’t wash,” the column says. He cut what Tisdall calls a treacherous diesel deal with Vladimir Putin, and Tisdall argues Russia conned him over the deal. Trump urged U.S. allies to tap their strategic reserves, then vilified and sidelined European leaders, who Tisdall says view his war as an “unmitigated disaster” and declined to bail him out. Trump reportedly rebuffed last-gasp, electorally driven pressure from Netanyahu to hit Iran that month because he feared it would unleash a Democratic tsunami.
Once the midterm polls close, whatever the result, Tisdall writes, what voters think will no longer matter to Trump. Trump will then be freer to pursue his preferred foreign and defense policy during his final two years. The column says he wanted an easy, Venezuela-style, regime-altering victory and “sweetheart oil deals” in Iran but encountered resistance and a long-running war. Tisdall argues that what Trump wants has little to do with “imaginary Iranian nukes,” a “democratic uprising in Tehran” or other justifications Trump has offered, and concludes: “It’s not rational or ideological. Like everything with Trump, ultimately, it’s personal.”
Tisdall faults Benjamin Netanyahu for what he calls “myriad, chronic failures before and after the 2023 Hamas massacres” and for what he describes as the “trashing of Israel’s international reputation” through what he calls criminal actions in Gaza and Lebanon. He links that record to what he calls a “Trump-ish slide into bigoted, ultra-nationalist authoritarianism.” Tisdall writes that Netanyahu “is fighting for his job and, potentially, his freedom,” insists despite his record that only he can ensure Israel’s security, and has suggested that an opposition victory could pave the way for Israel’s destruction in a second, nuclear Holocaust. Israel’s military chiefs suspect, the column says, that Netanyahu may restart the Iran war to dominate and manipulate the inevitable post-election coalition talks, hoping to stay in power and out of jail.
Tisdall presents his forecast as a set of expectations. He says three things seem certain: the United States and Israel will again fail to totally destroy Iran’s “largely hypothetical” nuclear capabilities; Iran’s regime will survive; and millions of ordinary people, there and around the world, will pay the price. The column says Trump reportedly plans a “shock-and-awe, time-limited assault” aimed primarily at the mountain complex where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is supposedly stored, along with missile bases and the energy grid. Pete Hegseth and Air Force personnel have claimed many of those targets were destroyed already, some more than once. Total success would probably elude them again, Tisdall writes, and the likelier outcome is a longer war in which more Iranian civilians could suffer the fate of the more than 100 schoolgirls killed in a Tomahawk missile strike in Minab in February. Trump and Hegseth have never admitted responsibility, the column says.
Economically, Tisdall writes that another attack would send oil prices spiking again, perhaps to unprecedented levels, with effects around the world. He says Pentagon officials, possibly “peddling disinformation,” suggest Iran is preparing to retaliate with missile and drone attacks against Saudi and other Gulf oil refineries, infrastructure and underwater internet cables, while reinforcing blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait. The resulting impact on international energy supplies, transportation and trade could be far worse than last spring.
Tisdall lists other foreseeable consequences: the spread of related conflicts involving Iranian allies and proxy militias to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon; attacks on U.S. embassies and personnel from Jordan to Kuwait; intensified, opportunistic settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank; and “stepped-up Iranian freelance assassination and sabotage operations in Europe.” He warns of further undermining of U.S. and Israeli democracy through deliberate obstruction of war-zone accountability, official cover-ups and “blatant lying,” and restrictions on independent media reporting. He expects another hugely damaging split between Washington and its reluctant European allies, and says Russia and China could take advantage.
Among his questions, Tisdall asks by what right the United States, in particular, can behave this way, and what the American public, or at least Republican voters, thinks. He asks whether Americans have learned, after so many disastrous interventions, that the world neither wants nor needs the United States to be saved. He writes: “In the age of Maga, this vulgar exceptionalism has surely had its day.” He reformulates the question as how a looming catastrophe can be prevented, saying resumed warfare, leading to a wider, globally destabilizing conflagration, is not inevitable, but urgent action is necessary now.
In Istanbul last weekend, Britain, its European allies and like-minded governments took what Tisdall calls a tentative, defiant step, urging diplomacy over violence. He argues that all the world’s democracies must now stand as one and, in a formal demarche, tell the United States and Israel they risk a permanent rupture with “immediate and long-term negative economic, diplomatic, commercial, military and security consequences” if they ignore global opinion and go to war again.