The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), defines and designates as nuclear-weapon states those that have built and tested a nuclear explosive device before January 1, 1967: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. In a bizarre coincidence, these are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

Everyone else should not be able to have nuclear weapons! Nonetheless, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea do possess nuclear armament, with Israel neither acknowledging nor denying it. But these countries are not parties to the NPT.

The NPT doesn’t grant any member the right to use military action against a state that violates the treaty as a member or after withdrawing from it. Sanctions, resolutions, or other actions are possible through the UN Security Council, but subject to the veto power of the five permanent members.

Guga Chacra, in O Globo: Quem pode ter armas atômicas?

There is also the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination.

None of the five major nuclear powers are signatories to it!

Unfortunately for Iran, there’s the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and the “P5+1” (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), together with the European Union. And that’s the framework for the so-called “Iran nuclear deal.”

But Israel is not part of it. Israel is a rogue state if it interferes in the “Iranian deal” the way it did. But Germany is in the “P5+1” not on account of being a major economic power, but because it’s Israel’s Trojan horse in the deal. Germany always supports Israel and would support the Hebrew state even if they launched a nuclear missile! “It’s self-defense, you know. And they have the right to do it because of the Holocaust.”

There is absolutely no proof that Iran is close enough to building a nuclear explosive device. In fact, it’s still years away from it, and it’s not even sure that this is what it wants. But even if it were, it’s a sovereign state. Its authoritarian regime is despicable in many regards, but this doesn’t give anyone any legitimacy to wage war against it!

Israel is in breach of international law. The United States is preparing to do the same. As a matter of fact, who gave the US the right to “negotiate” a “nuclear deal” with Iran in the first place?

Nobody.

To add insult to injury, Trump and Tehran were holding talks when Bibi decided to attack. There was a 60-day deadline, which just expired without an agreement, when Israel attacked Iran.

I really, really, really cannot understand what kind of “nuclear deal” the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, together with the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, are trying to reach in Geneva by talking exclusively with Tehran!

Remember when Trump only “negotiated” with Ukraine, but without Russia, when the actual aggressor was and still is Russia?

Now, Europe “negotiates” with Iran, but without Israel, which is the aggressor in this war! The United States, too, should have been present in Geneva.

This is mind-blowing.

What the fuck do the Europeans believe they’re doing?!

Israel’s UN representative told the UN Security Council that Israel will not stop attacking Iran until the nuclear threat is dismantled. At home, Bibi Netanyahu promised to topple the regime in Tehran.

Israel is a rogue state. I’m afraid the United States is quite the same, at least when it comes to colluding with Israel.

The Weekly Show’s Jon Stewart, with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Ben Rhodes, co-host of “Pod Save the World” and former Deputy National Security Advisor:

Excerpts from the transcript provided by Whisper:

00:02:28 [Jon Stewart] And now it’s Iran, and it’s just, hey, it’s the Iran episode. And I gave him 60 days because I’m the dealmaker in chief, and we’re going to have a nuclear deal. And this is all going according to plan. And it’s utter incompetence. We’re in such a bizarre world.

You’ve got me nodding my head to Tucker Carlson videos. You got Tucker Carlson going, “Why are we going to war with Iran again?” And I’m like, “Yeah, you tell him, brother.” Like, that’s how fucking upside down we find ourselves.
…

00:04:46 You have just gotten off with a discussion with the deputy foreign minister in Iran. So if I could very quickly, Christiane, what is the viewpoint from Iran right now?

00:05:07 [Christiane Amanpour] Well, I’m going to download quickly because I’ve literally just come off the set. And just to give you a context, it’s very difficult. Their Internet, because of these strikes, is very compromised. Their phones are very compromised. Obviously, you can see there have been targeted assassinations of leaders by the Israelis. You know, they have wiped out a whole layer of military leadership. And people are scared about using their phones. So just to get this was quite extraordinary. And I didn’t ask exactly where he was, and he didn’t want to tell me. But nonetheless…

So in response to what President Trump has been saying, like, “I demand unconditional surrender, you know, that we could get your supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, if we decided, I might, I might not.” He’s also just been saying, Trump, “I might join Israel on these strikes. I might not.” There’s just a lot of mixed messages coming out. And I’m not sure what Trump intends.

But he said, the deputy Iranian foreign minister, that, “Look, we do not buckle under threats.” And it’s very boilerplate Iran commentary. But it happens to be, you know, true based on history. He reminded me how they’d gone through eight years of war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, how the whole world was not on their side, and how they emerged without surrendering.

And he said the same here. He said, you know, Israel is trying to destroy them, and that “we will not surrender and we will continue to defend ourselves.” But he did say, and I think Ben would be interested in this, that “we thought we were going to a negotiation on Sunday, June 15th in Oman. I was, and my bosses were, headed that way. And then, two days before, out of the blue, we were attacked across the country.”

And he also said that civilian areas were attacked and buildings and infrastructure, as well as the military and nuclear sites.

I happen to know this for a fact. I’m half Iranian. I grew up there. I know many of the locations, but importantly, I still have family and friends. So I’m listening to them.

And there’s a huge amount of panic. And it’s it’s very difficult for them right now. But that’s the bottom line.

00:07:18 [Jon Stewart] Well, Christiana, I so appreciate that perspective. And we can get into a little later the complicated relationship that so many Iranians have with their government and what’s going on in there, but I want to jump in really quickly to go off of what Christiana said.

In my mind, this is another example of sort of the impulsive and strange nature of our administration here in the United States, so the dealmaker in chief, the most wonderful negotiator that’s ever existed in the history of dealmaking and shaking hands is going to make a great deal with Iran.

They’ve got 60 days apparently to do it because, as you know, the best deals always come with only the amount of time you can you can make them. And then on day 61, they are attacked by Israel.

Do either of you know whether or not the United States was taken by surprise by that attack or whether or not Iran had any idea that this 60-day so-called limitation on negotiations was a hard red line that would be met immediately with widespread bombing?

Do any of you have a sense that that this was pure impulse on the part of the Israelis, that this was coordinated or that the 60 day negotiation was a ruse by which to get the Iranians to drop their guard?

00:08:47 [Ben Rhodes] I just don’t believe that Trump was somehow… First of all, I don’t believe that the 60-day thing was a firm deadline.

[Jon Stewart] I never understood to be that, by the way.

[Ben Rhodes] Yeah, because why would there be a meeting set up with Steve Witkoff?

But also the Iranians weren’t acting like they were going to be attacked. You know, they were not taking security precautions. That’s how some of these people were able to be killed in their homes. If they thought that day 61 was a potential military operation, they would have changed their pattern of behavior more than they did.

I think that Israel believed, and Netanyahu believed, more specifically, that they had a window of opportunity where Iran’s proxies have been dealt a blow, where Iran’s on the back foot, where they softened up their air defenses and some of those previous strikes, and he wanted to take this action.

And frankly, the diplomacy that Trump was in was a threat to their capacity to take military action against the nuclear program. And so he does it after the 60-day thing. That gives him kind of some pretext to say, “I’ll let this diplomacy go.”

They have not even really presented like any kind of detailed intelligence case. It suggests an imminence of Iran having a nuclear weapon. They’ve said the kind of same things he always does.

[Jon Stewart] He’s been doing that for about 30 years now, I believe.

[Ben Rhodes] Yeah, he’s playing the hits.

[Jon Stewart] “Coming tomorrow. They got it tomorrow.”

[Ben Rhodes] This is the problem, is nobody can credibly say that, like, if they didn’t do this today, Iran was going to do something tomorrow. The only thing that was looming was this Witkoff meeting in Oman.

And Trump, I think, has been hurriedly trying to get on board with what is happening to him in terms of Netanyahu having changed the dynamic. And he doesn’t want to admit that he just got rolled by Netanyahu. And now he’s being rolled all the way, potentially, into joining the war, you know. And we can talk about all the different dimensions of that.

I can tell you, John, that, as someone who’s been in simulations of what would happen in precisely this scenario.

[Jon Stewart] When you say been in simulations, what do you mean by that?

[Ben Rhodes] It means essentially you war game out. What would happen if the Israelis bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities?

[Jon Stewart] So these are sort of AI-generated or computer simulated. Here’s where the casualties would be. Here’s what would occur.

[Ben Rhodes] Or people run them, you know, or people kind of run them who know a lot about this stuff.

It always leads to Israel asking the United States to bomb this facility. And it almost always leads to regime change in Iran, because it’s like, “Well, why did we stop now?”

And so, we’re on the, you know, people have been thinking about this for a long time. And we’re on the ride right now. And the question is, can we get off?

[Jon Stewart] Right. And the facility you’re talking about is is that one nuclear facility that is buried in a mountain that is apparently can only be reached by United States bunker busting weaponry, yes?

[Ben Rhodes] Yes, that’s right.

[Jon Stewart] Fordow, I believe it’s called.

[Ben Rhodes] Fordo. And for all the talk about how sophisticated these Israeli operations been, if you don’t blow up Fordo, you’ve only set the Iranian nuclear program back like a few months. And so obviously, they’re going to want us to get the underground facility that only we can hit. We are the only people that have a bunker buster bomb that can get at that facility, the only people have planes that can drop it.

And frankly, we don’t even know that it would destroy it entirely. That’s how deep underground this is.

[Jon Stewart] Right.

00:11:55 [Christiane Amanpour] In answer to your question, John, about did the Iranians know they had a 60-day deadline? No, according to the deputy foreign minister.

[Jon Stewart] Well, I mean, they were all going to meet in Oman, I mean, on day 63. So what’s the point?

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, right. And Ben will remember that it took, I don’t know, 18 months to get the, you know, the Obama administration called the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that was a perfectly reasonable and manageable and verifiable arms control deal…

[Jon Stewart] …signed off on, by the way, by the world’s other countries, Russia, China…

[Christiane Amanpour] …by the UN. Exactly. Yeah.

[Jon Stewart] I mean, this was not a bilateral deal between the United States and Iran. This was a multilateral.

[Christiane Amanpour] Exactly. But the key here, and Ben’s alluded to it, is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has never believed in negotiation, just like he does not believe in a Palestinian state. He does not believe in negotiating security around Iran’s nuclear program. He believes in wiping it out and, and regime destruction, as we’ve just been mentioning.

But there has been successful diplomacy. They all say, “Oh, diplomacy failed.” But no, in 2015, under the Obama administration, actually it succeeded.

And then, there was this concerted campaign to topple it. And that’s what caused Trump to pull out of it when he was in 1.0. So Trump pulling out of this nuclear deal set the Iran’s off on, you know, more enrichment. So now they have hundreds of kilograms of 60 percent enrichment as part of a bargaining technique or to show their capability.

But even the American intelligence community and Tulsi Gabbard said it again this week. “We assess that they have not made a decision to go to a bomb or to weaponize, and that even if they did, it would take a number of years.” She was slapped around by Trump.

And now she says, “Oh, no, I have no daylight between me and Trump.” So it’s all very confusing.

00:15:42 [Jon Stewart] In 2015, you know, after that deal, it’s not, you know, when, when Trump pulled out and, I believe, what was it 2018, I think, when they did that? Was that at the behest of Israel as well? Or were there other forces that had asked for, was that merely a knee-jerk reaction to anything that Obama did? “I will undo and therefore I’m going to pull out.” Do you know what the, uh, the lead up to pulling out of that deal entailed?

[Ben Rhodes] I would say it was a convergence of those factors, that Trump wanted to dismantle anything Obama did, but that Israel and kind of hawkish types in the U.S., um, wanted us out of the deal from the day we were in it. I think what’s important to note, Jon, about that, is that Trump wanted to find that Iran was not complying with the deal. And if you recall, he kept asking for that report and his own administration, including, you know, guys like Jim Mattis, you know, his Secretary of Defense, kept saying, “Well, no, actually, uh, Iran is complying with this deal. You shouldn’t pull out.”

And, and then ultimately he kind of overruled his more, you know, conventional, but still hawkish advisors to pull out. But I think it was, you know, Trump’s instinct was “I’m just want to get out of whatever deal Obama was in.”

Um, because the deal that he was negotiating with Witkoff sounded very similar to the JCPOA, the Iran deal. You know, we wasted a decade on this and, frankly, led us to a place where we
might end up in a war because of that antipathy for Obama.

[Jon Stewart] Christiane, is that your understanding of how things went down?

[Christiane Amanpour] Yes. Um, you know, you could say if you wanted to be really generous, that Witkoff had come up with another plan, and it was about this sort of consortium whereby they would try to, uh, let Iran say that it could still enrich, but maybe not right on Iranian soil, but maybe in an island… Anyways, it was to try to, try to thread all the needles to, to, to go into another deal that was not exactly Obama’s deal, but it was similar.

Um, but it, it had this thing which said Iran cannot enrich. So how were they going to resolve that? Because Iran believes that to be their fundamental international right. And so that was what was being worked out.

[Jon Stewart] Especially given that Israel has nuclear weapons, and America has, and everyone else has nuclear weapons, and North Korea has.

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, that’s the thing, John, John, you just hit on something really, really vital, because one of the unintended consequences, and there are always unintended consequences in a war that is not planned out, in a war that has no exit strategy, in a war that has actually no big strategy other than “Let’s set back or maybe let’s have regime change.”

Some say that if this regime survives, that they will then, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy that they may, like North Korea decided, to go in secret, to get out of the IAEA, the NPT, the inspections, and actually to become a nuclear power, because they’ve been shown by Israel that their conventional weapons are useless…

[Jon Stewart] …not enough of a deterrent…

[Christiane Amanpour] …and this shadow war. Yeah. So, so they could have a kind of a worse negative impact.

[Jon Stewart] And I want to step back for a second and talk about the macro idea of risk assessment within this world.

The one thing about Israel that I truly do not understand is this idea of they won’t live in a world of risk. But we live in a world of risk. There is no zero risk.

Uh, it’s this idea of “If there is one, uh, suicide attack, uh, that is done by a Palestinian, well, then we must remove a Hamas, or we must, uh, wage war until we are safe.” And that just seems like a fundamentally flawed.

The United States certainly lives in a world of risk. Uh, Russia has nuclear weapons. China has nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons. They have all expressed at different times, antipathy towards the United States or a desire to use them in North Korea’s case against the United States.

So this idea that we can create a world where there is no risk, it seems that what they create is a world of instability where everything is at risk.

And so I just want to get at the underlying fundamental principle that is being deployed here, that’s causing such destruction in Gaza and, and all of this death, as though you can create a world of no risk through violence. It makes no sense to me.

Uh, Ben, what is your thought on that larger principle?

[Ben Rhodes] I think you put your finger on it. There’s two things I’d say about this.

Cause the first is that there’s been an Iranian nuclear program for decades, and Israel’s lived with that, and Israel’s done quite well in that world, right?

Um, uh, and, and, and what we were trying to do is put a lid on that program, make sure they can’t get a weapon. The risk is them having a nuclear weapon.

[Jon Stewart] Transparency and verification.

[Ben Rhodes] Yeah. Them having a nuclear weapon? Now that’s a different level of risk, but them having a few centrifuges operating, um, if, if you have transparency verification, you got inspectors all over there, you’re looking at the whole supply chain, like that’s a level of risk that you should be able to live with.

And my concern is in trying to remove all risk, Israel is creating more risk for itself in the sense of, for everybody, if you remove that government through violence, it doesn’t, we saw in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in the Obama years, you get something usually worse. You either get the IRGC that the worst guys with guns in Iran will be the strongest guys, or you get kind of a failed state civil war in a country over 90 million people with no plan for what comes next.

You also could get a situation where, you know, even what we’ve seen in Gaza, do we really think that’s going to bring meaningful, quote unquote peace over time?

[Jon Stewart] Or that you can bomb, uh, uh, uh, people out of wanting to be free.

[Ben Rhodes] Yeah.

[Jon Stewart] What if Netanyahu decides he’s actually the biggest threat to Israel? Does he have to bomb himself at that point?

[Ben Rhodes] Well, but this leads to the second point I was going to make. Cause we can get into like, they’re creating enemies for the future. That one of the things I hate about our discourse on this stuff is if the negative consequences don’t happen next week, it’s like, “Well, look, see that works.” It workes usually, like. the price comes due five years, 10 years out, right. Iraq took a while. It looked great when the statue fell in Baghdad, right?

But the second thing I think that’s important here is they’re changing the nature, a country that does what they’re doing in Gaza or a country they’ve now gone to war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, that’s not healthy, and their society is moving to the far right.

I think there’s a synergy between what you’re doing abroad with violence and the kind of government you have at home. And so it’s not just the risks of their foreign policy. It’s the risks of what this is doing to Israeli society and democracy because…

[Jon Stewart] Right. What does it turn you into?

[Ben Rhodes] I had people I know who are like hawks and they’re like, “Well, I don’t like
what Netanyahu is doing with democracy in Israel, but I support, you know, all these other things he’s doing.” I’m like, “No, those things are connected, you know, he’s consolidating what it feels like a far right extremist, you know, political system in Israel.”

…

00:22:52 [Jon Stewart] In 1953, the CIA, along with British petroleum and the UK government, overthrew Mohammed Mosaddegh, who was the democratically elected leader of Iran. They destabilized that country, allowed the Shah of Iran to gain control for so-called because he was Western friendly. Did we not sow the seeds for this entire nightmare ourselves in 1953, to some extent?

[Christiane Amanpour] As you know, that coup was the first of America’s many coups throughout the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s in Africa. You know, Lumumba was killed. In Central America, in, all over, in Brazil, they supported military dictatorship. It was a dreadful, dreadful time and it all backfired against the US.

In fact, it said, and I was there during this, you know, the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, they brought this up over and over and over again. This is one of the reasons that they were motivated to rebel and rise up against the Shah and also to essentially blame the United States in great part.

Now, we’ve moved many, many decades on from that, and I think the high point was the 2015 JCPOA, because it’s a very difficult relationship and the United States and Iran were not yet ready to address all the issues. But I can tell you from my own personal perspective that as a reporter, I met with all these top level Iranians for decades, ever since 1995. I was the first into the nuclear plant that was a civilian nuclear plant called Boucher on the Persian Gulf. I’m the first and the only one to have interviewed almost all the Iranian presidents, including the so-called reformed presidents.

Over these decades, many, many officials have said to me background, off the record, and even on camera, that they wanted to make… “peace” maybe not the right word, but to close the file of conflict with the United States on all issues, on terrorism, on missiles, on nuclear and everything. But they wanted to get into negotiations.

But as Ben knows, that this was scuttled many times by hardliners in the United States, hardliners in Iran and hardliners in Israel. So that was never possible.

So the JCPOA was the single, the only major negotiation that came out of 40 years of this Iranian revolution.

As you know, nobody in the world wants to see a nuclear armed Iran. Iran says it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon. Intelligence says it hasn’t got one right now. It hasn’t made a decision to get one.

There was a time, and again, I was in conversation with a senior Iranian during the post 9-11 time in Afghanistan. And this Iranian called me in and he said, because, you know, there was the whole invasion of Iraq and all the rest of it, based on a fear that they had, weapons of mass destruction, which proved not to be true, and we know the backlash, but this Iranian told me, “Yes, we did have a serious discussion in the leadership about whether we should weaponize, but then we decided not to, because that would make it much more dangerous for us in the region and in our very dangerous neighborhood.”

So they decided not to, and that’s what intelligence says since 2003, there’s no evidence of that.

So I think that, you know, this is a really difficult situation between Iran, Israel, and the United States that requires not Trump saying “I can fix it in 60 days” or, or what did he say, “overnight” between Russia and Ukraine, or fix Gaza?

It requires staffing, experts, technical expertise, and patience to negotiate.

[Jon Stewart] Christiane, he’s got one guy. Witkoff must be a platinum miles member right now. He’s got one guy.

Marco Rubio is doing five different… he’s like the secretary of state, the NSA, I think he’s the ombudsman, he’s the parliamentarian now for the Senate. Like they are understaffed, they douched themselves out of having any ability to carry out the complexity of the tasks that they need to be carried out.

And so these are all shortcuts. And it seems like the easiest thing to subvert in the world is peace. It seems like, as Ben talked earlier, and Ben, I want to ask you this because it’s hard liners can easily, if you, if we remember in Iraq, Hans Blix had gone in, and they were going to be inspecting all the sites that had supposed weapons of mass destruction, and we had a process in place that would have avoided the chaos and carnage of those 20 years in Iraq, in Afghanistan, all those places. And it was easily subverted.

Ben, how fragile are these moves towards a more stable, peaceful world when hard liners are involved in the room?

[Ben Rhodes] The problem is our politics in this country is so messed up on national security that it was much harder to get the Iran deal through Congress than it was to take this country to war in Iraq.

[Jon Stewart] Why is that, Ben, when you say it’s harder to get that peace deal through than war, what is messed up about it?

[Ben Rhodes] Well, first of all, peace, there’s a, we could have a long conversation about all the actors that influence American politics, but I would just say peace is inherently messy, right? Like the Iran nuclear deal, sure. Like it didn’t remove the entire Iranian nuclear program.

So it’s easy to kind of shoot at a target of like, you know, this is a compromise. This is a deal between adversaries. You make peace with your adversaries, you know, these are bad people. Why are you even talking to these people?

Well, you know, cause you make peace with the bad guys, you know…

[Jon Stewart] It’s sort of how it works, right?

[Ben Rhodes] It’s not hard to make a deal with the UK. Like even, you know, even Trump could do that. Whereas a war, you kind of promise that it’s going to look good and we’re going to take out these bad guys and actually it usually looks good at the beginning of the war, right?

[Jon Stewart] Right, right.

[Ben Rhodes] You know, at the beginning, it’s like, oh, look at the Israelis are killing all these guys and, and, and, and wow, the Mossad had drones in Tehran. Isn’t that cool?

But to your point, the coup in 1953 looked pretty good, you know, it was like, wow, we got our guy back in there. And now that Iranian oil and gas is flowing, there’s no war, no concern about them being on the wrong side of the Cold War, you know, it, well, you know, 1979, it didn’t look good.

And, and, and so I think that the problem is we are so short-term in our thinking and our response… And I’ll fault the Democratic Party here! You can sense the kind of fear in some of these Democratic politicians right now. It’s like, “Well, if I, if I oppose this Israeli military strike, or oppose the US getting involved, you know, I’m not picking a fight with Netanyahu while I be called weak, maybe this strike is going to look good and then Trump’s going to like say I’m weak…”

Stand for something! If we haven’t learned anything from last 25 years, we’ve learned that violence in the Middle East is unlikely to lead to better outcomes, and certainly the violent removal of governments by the United States or Israel for that matter is [not] going to lead to a better government.

Like, I don’t know how many countries we have to try that out in before we learn that that is not what works. And so I think, you know, opponents need to, to simplify the message.

And Christiane will remember, she can attest when we said in the Obama years that it’s either this deal or a war, we were called, you know, “How dare you say that?”

Well, that was the case. Because either you’re going to have a deal over this nuclear program, or Israel was going to do something like this and try to get the United States involved in that war.

That’s where Trump is now. Trump is either going to join this war or he’s going to try to stop it. And that is such a consequential choice.

00:30:31 [Christiane Amanpour] And I think you guys saw this in your administration. Netanyahu, as I said, has been trying to do this for decades. No other American president allowed him to do it. Everyone restrained him.

He came to Congress and was given the floor to address Republicans practically only to diss the JCPOA. He did that.

[Jon Stewart] He had charts. I think he even went to Kinko’s and got some bomb charts that he drew. Little pictures.

[Ben Rhodes] Cartoon bombs.

[Jon Stewart] Yeah?

[Christiane Amanpour] Yeah. I mean, it’s an absolute, now successful strategy against negotiations and against getting a deal.

And I think that this is, you know, we talk about peace, it is hard, but look at what the US was able to do, for instance, with the parties in Northern Ireland. Look at what the South Africans were able to do after apartheid. Look at any number. Look at Oslo.

I know Oslo has not come to fruition and we wish we were back in the mid-90s. But that was, you know, all sides getting together with really invested honest brokers and third parties, whether it was the US, whether it was the Oslo negotiators and the parties on the ground decided to come. And they got the help to move towards peace.

Bosnia. I mean, it’s not perfect. But after, you know, I covered that war, there was a US brokered end and, you know, it’s tenuous, but it’s not back to war.

And so it is possible. Politicians and leaders have to decide whether they want to do that or whether they want to react in this kind of easier way, as Ben was laying out. And, you know, whatever you might say about President Biden and about “Should he have restrained Israel more, given what’s going on in Gaza?”, on the day that he landed in Israel after October 7th and the horrors that were committed there, he told them, “Don’t do what we did in Iraq. Don’t go for revenge. Look what’s going to… look what happened to us. You know, self-defense, but don’t go crazy like we did in Iraq, because look, look at the blowback. And it’s been severe.”

[Jon Stewart] Why do you think that politicians are more likely to be okay owning the years of instability and chaos that occurs from these types of military interventions? But they are afraid to own whatever, even singular incidents, might be the result of peace. In other words, no politician seems to want to make the peace deal. If there might be a suicide bombing that occurs, I’m not suggesting that that’s a wonderful outcome, but they seem much more willing to own the years of instability and the long-term deleterious effects of these kinds of interventions, then they would have the courage that when you make peace, peace is not oftentimes final, idealized serenity. There will be spasms of violence within that.

Is that the fear that they have? They don’t want to own those outcomes, or is that not in the calculation? Ben, you know, you were in the room when these things were going on. I’m only saying that in the way of like, you know, in Israel, the only person, when they tried to make peace, there were assassinations, Sadat was assassinated, Rabin was assassinated, you know, that that’s how things roll. But if you make peace, if you shake hands and then there’s a bombing, now suddenly everybody says, “See, you never should have done that.” But nobody goes back and says, “This is a nightmare of instability.”

[Ben Rhodes] I think that this has been a huge issue in American politics for a long time. And again, it comes back to the point that peace, like, like LBJ, even though it was evident in 1965 that, you know, we’re unlikely to defeat North Vietnam and South Vietnam, right. That the Vietnamese people didn’t want us there, that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. He was afraid of, you know, essentially pulling out and being told, well, look, this guy, you know, he wasn’t tough enough to stand up to these guys. And because he escalated, he destroyed his own capacity to do the great society, you know.

So in other words, he was more afraid of the, the much smaller cost. And I think part of the, I think that the reason is, Jon, is that everybody can see what the cost is going to be to doing the peace deal. You’re going to be called weak by all these people, you know, there’s going to be holes in it, but what they don’t see is that the costs are usually deferred to doing the war. Um, and, and again, so I think it interacts with this kind of short-term way in which we think about these things in our politics.

If you look at, um, you know, Israeli and Palestinian leaders, even, you know, Rabin is the only Israeli leader who was like, you know what, like “I’ve fought in all these wars and I’m going to take this risk, um, and make this peace,” and guess what? He was assassinated, you know, by a right-wing extremist, right?

And so sometimes people are afraid to make peace because the peacemakers, uh, have been targeted in some of these places too, right?

[Jon Stewart] Always, always.

[Ben Rhodes] So that’s a more extreme version of, of getting criticized politically. But in the US, I just think, you know, this default to like, you know, despite the fact that one other thing I’m going to say is that every American — I worked for Obama in the way he ran as the anti-war candidate — the American people keep telling us through their elections, who they want, um, the kind of leaders they want or leaders who don’t get us into these wars. And yet politicians have not absorbed that lesson, apparently.

[Christiane Amanpour] And it looks like Trump is struggling. I don’t know, but I mean, every time I look around, there’s another Trump thing saying, “Oh, you know, Ayatollah says he, he won’t surrender; good luck to him.”

And then, “But I wanted to not go to war. I wanted to be the peace candidate. I want the Nobel prize, et cetera, et cetera.”

I mean, it’s just, we’re just not sure what’s coming out.

[Jon Stewart] Yeah. Why is it easier to own war than to own peace? I don’t understand that.

[Christiane Amanpour] Ehud Barak, also a military man, prime minister, defense minister, head of the Israeli army, chief of staff. He made one of the most far-reaching offers to the Palestinians back at the famous Camp David of 2000 with, um, you know, with Yasser Arafat and Clinton, et cetera, and Arafat couldn’t get himself over the line, I think partly because he was afraid of being assassinated like Assad was, but I also think they missed a huge opportunity.

And once Netanyahu came back, it’s been no way, has there been any effort to make any peace deal. And then I’ll say another thing.

People are never incorporated. The Iranian people for 45 years have never been mentioned, not by Israel, not by the West, not by the United States.

It’s all been about terrorism, this and that. Nobody has thought about the people. We have been so dehumanized, so delegitimized.

Now Netanyahu saying, rise up, you know, and using the slogan and saying Zan, Zindagi, Azadi, woman, life, freedom. I mean, when did you ever care about the Iranian people?

Likewise, when did anybody, the entire body politic care about the Palestinian people?

[Jon Stewart] And by the way, as, as difficult as the Iranian people’s relationship is with their government, and nobody is making the case that the Ayatollah is a great dude and has brought, you know, real progress to them, boy, if you want to get a people to unify with their government, even those that have an incredibly fragile relationship with that government, bomb them.

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, you know, the deputy foreign minister said exactly that because I said, you know, “People are unhappy with your, your regime and they have been for a long time and the rest of the world is watching to see whether this is finally going to lead to the end of your regime.” And he said to me, “Christiane, people may have a lot of problems with our policies, but as you just said, once they are bombed by a foreign entity, then they, they coalesce.”

Look, I will say that is also complicated. I would say the majority of the people of Iran want a different kind of government. They want freedom. They want to be able to have electricity and heat and travel and have, you know, pay their bills and all that other stuff.

And some may even be hoping that this Israeli attack will lead to some kind of freedom. But the majority we’re reaching, or those who are commenting online, are actually more rallying around the flag at this time.

So I think that’s something also potential unintended consequence that we don’t know where that’s going to lead. But I would say leaving out the human equation, the human factor in any of these, you know, any of these situations just proves that actually people don’t care about, about people. They just don’t.

…
…

00:43:07 [Christiane Amanpour] So Israel is on its own with the United States right now, as far as we can gather.

And that goes to the heart of what Ben mentioned. And it’s about Gaza right now.

Israel, which would have wanted and Saudi, which would have wanted the normalization deal, cannot do it. Saudi cannot do it while Israel is still in Gaza, while it’s still slaughtering civilians. And every single day we get pictures on our on our feeds and statistics of children, women and men being killed just at the aid distribution site. I mean, dozens a day.

[Jon Stewart] There was, I think, 140 killed just yesterday within a 24 hour period at these at these aid sites. It’s insane.

[Christiane Amanpour] And the settlers running rampage in the West Bank.

[Jon Stewart] But why then, guys, you know, for MBS [Mohammed bin Salman], who is assuming this sort of larger role within as a statesman, not just in Saudi Arabia, but in the larger Middle East. Why then is there passivity? Because it is. Look, they could have very easily the idea that Gaza is being left to be brokered by Israel in the United States clearly is not going to, in any way, help the Palestinian people avoid this just godawful carnage that they’re living through. Why hasn’t MBS and that part of the world been more forceful? You know, they all, like I say, they throw out the missives. That’s why in my mind, I think to myself, well, ultimately, they must be OK with this.

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, I mean, look, Ben, but it’s for me, it’s been my first question I ask every Arab leader.

It’s a shameful dereliction of their duty as well, which doesn’t mean to say, unlike Mike Huckabee is suggesting the ambassador to Israel for the US, that is the Arab countries who should give the Palestinians their state.

But it does mean that they’ve never given them, you know, citizenship. They kept them in, quote unquote, refugee camps. And they have not done what you just suggested. Use their influence, their strength.

[Jon Stewart] That’s what I don’t understand.

[Christiane Amanpour] We tried in 2002. The so-called, you know, Arab Saudi Arabia peace plan. It was rejected…

[Jon Stewart] …which, by the way, could still could still be in effect!

[Christiane Amanpour] Yes.

[Jon Stewart] Why does Israel have a veto on all this? That’s what I don’t… Why are we continuing to allow Israel surely to have a veto based on their sense of security? Why is everyone else’s security secondary to their sense of it?

[Ben Rhodes] I think that they I mean, there’s a layers to this. You know, there’s no love for Hamas, obviously, in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.

[Jon Stewart] Right. Or anywhere…

[Ben Rhodes] …or anywhere. Or even like, there’s not a lot of confidence in the Palestinian authority, there’s a lot… But I think one of the reasons, Jon, is that at the end of the day, they believe that the US will back whatever Israel does. And so why do they want to stick their neck out for the Palestinians, when…

[Jon Stewart] So they don’t want to own the peace. It goes back to what we talked about. They won’t own the peace.

[Ben Rhodes] They don’t own the peace because… but they don’t trust Netanyahu is going to make peace. Why should they spend a lot of capital?

Now, they tried to kind of shortcut this thing with the Abraham Accords, where the Saudis stayed out of the Emiratis are kind of like, “Well, let’s make this deal, we’ll normalize relations,” which was not really a peace deal. It’s like direct flights and commercial relations, because the peace has to be made with the Palestinians, not the Emiratis, you know.

And that, you know, I think some people sincerely believe that maybe that would like pull this issue into kind of a broader context where the Palestinians could do economic development, everything in this region is going to get rich. Well, it turns out, to your point, Jon, earlier, people want to be free. And they want to be free in the places that they live. And the Palestinians didn’t get anything out of a deal where the Emiratis are making business deals with the Israelis, right?

And there’s just not an Arab leader that has been able to speak to that, or has been willing to go out on a limb and speak to that, because they frankly think if they go out on that limb, the US and Israel are going to stop it off at the end of the day.

[Jon Stewart] Christiana, I know you have to go. And so we’re going to let you. What does pulling back from the precipice look like in your mind? And how could that be achieved in these next, you know, tumultuous days?

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, from my perspective, having just talked to the Iranian foreign minister, so from their perspective, they’re one party to this.

If it stops, they’ll go back to negotiations. He told me, we haven’t given up on negotiations.

[Jon Stewart] And what does escalation look like on the Iranian part? Like, what do you think they’re willing to do?

[Christiane Amanpour] Well, he wouldn’t tell me straight out, but they have threatened if the US gets involved, and has been laid out that the US has a lot of bases, it has 40,000 troops, I believe, or something like that, personnel in that region.

[Jon Stewart] And more right now, we’re sending more.

[Christiane Amanpour] And, you know, it’s considered that Iraq or, you know, militias in Iraq, Iran backed militias, perhaps the first line of attack on various, you know, American targets. But it’s not going to be good.

[Jon Stewart] Ben, your final word on what you think de-escalation could look like and in your mind, how that could be accomplished?

[Ben Rhodes] De-escalation involves the United States stepping in, saying Israel has to stop the military operation and we’re going to make a nuclear deal with the Iranians and the Iranians, you know, get crappy terms. And and this thing is just kind of put on the freezer.

If it doesn’t happen, and I think if the US bombs Fordow, to end where Christiane started, there’s real meaningful pride in Iran. It’s a revolutionary government. It’s a government that went through the Iran-Iraq war. So the idea of unconditional surrender, as Trump like, you know, tweeted, is just not in their DNA.

[Jon Stewart] Or any country’s.

[Ben Rhodes] Or any country’s. And again, the concept that we might not see, like maybe they go underground, the nuclear program, and they pretend like they’re making deals. But they pop up in a year or two, like North Korea did, with a nuclear weapon. Maybe the response comes through an immediate flood of attacks against US service members or oil fields. Maybe it comes later in terrorist actions.

But the idea that this is going to be neat and clean and that they’re just going to surrender or that, I saw Newt Gingrich’s post, they… “now is the time for a moderate, inclusive, secular, democratic government in Iran.” Like, we don’t even have one of those in the United States! Right?

[Jon Stewart] By the way, they had it and we overthrew it. [In 1953.]

[Christiane Amanpour] Not in Israel either!

[Ben Rhodes] Right. Not in Israel either. So the idea that the regime change thing is the catastrophic success, right? But it’s Iranian people that should replace it, you know. And I worry about a failed state in Iran.

…

Wow. This is da shit, man!

There’s still something that bugs me. Say that, by some miracle, Israel stops attacking Iran. So Iran goes back to negotiating the “Iran nuclear deal.” They’re already doing so in Geneva [UPDATE: The Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi ruled out new nuclear talks until Israel’s agression stops.], but the US is not there, and Trump is the one who’s going to bomb Fordo in two weeks’ time. Well, suppose we could find a pacifier [sic] for Trump. And I mean a teat or a dummy, in Brit speak. Who punishes Israel? Who fucks Bibi in the ass?

Nobody.

There isn’t going to be any peace in the Middle East. Ever. Not as long as Israel exists.

UPDATE ON ISRAEL: A leaked audit report by the European External Action Service (EEAS), seen by Reuters, AFP, Politico, and The Guardian: “There are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under article 2 of the EU-Israel association agreement.” Also: “In response to the terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel launched an intense military campaign, involving the use of weapons with wide are effects in densely-populated areas, and severe restrictions on the entry and distribution of essential goods and services into Gaza.” “In the context of Israel and the [Occupied Palestinian Territory], observers have deplored a persistent lack of accountability on all sides. This ongoing lack of accountability measures for serious allegations of international law violations has raised serious doubts about Israeli authorities’ willingness and ability to conduct genuine investigations, as required by international law.” The documents deplores an “unprecedented level of killing and injury of civilians,” as well as attacks on hospitals and the displacement of 90% of the population of Gaza.

On June 19, 114 organizations and Human Rights Watch have signed a Joint Statement on the EU-Israel Association Agreement Review, declaring that “a credible review can only reach one conclusion: that Israel is in severe non-compliance with article 2. In light of this, we call on the European Commission and all EU Member States to support meaningful and concrete measures, including the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, at least in part.”

UPDATE ON IRAN: Using images from A simple visual guide to Iran and its people, but slightly sharper, because the embedded pictures are resized and have a Q=80 on their website.