In its recent statement, the Gulf Cooperation declared that “Iranian attacks have also led to a sharp loss of confidence by the Council states in Iran, which requires Iran to take the initiative to make serious efforts to rebuild trust”. While rebuilding trust in our region is a lofty and essential objective, and while Iran has always taken the initiative in this regard, it is imperative for all sides to recognise their share in the current regrettable state of affairs.

The unprovoked aggression against Iran was the product of blatant miscalculations and mistakes. It was predicated on the illusion that Iran had been weakened and thus incapable of resisting and responding forcefully to a massive onslaught by two nuclear powers, aided and abetted by regional actors. Policymakers in Washington and Tel Aviv and in some regional capitals convinced themselves that a swift campaign of economic pressure, sabotage, covert operation, decapitation and indiscriminate war crimes could break the Islamic Republic and leave it with little opportunity to respond. They were wrong. Iran’s response, measured yet resolute, demonstrated not only its military resilience but also its capacity to react on a scale that reverberated far beyond the region.

Our Arab neighbours in the GCC had their grave share in these miscalculations – and Iran may have played a role in misleading them. For five decades, they consistently stood on the wrong side of history – supporting Saddam Hussein’s aggression and even assisting Israel to intercept Iranian missiles launched in self-defence following Israel’s murder of an Arab leader in Iran. Some of them actively encouraged the United States to take military action against Iran, even asking the latter to add Iranian naval forces to its list of targets. In return, they allowed the United States to establish military bases within their territories to launch and logistically support many of its acts of aggression and war crimes against Iran. They even publicly sided with the United States as it committed war crimes against Iran, reminding Iranians of the sad days when these Muslim brothers and sisters sided with Saddam Hussein as he used chemical weapons against Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish civilians. Extensive human and financial damages were inflicted upon the people of Iran through these illegal attacks, which were deliberately launched and sustained from the sovereign territories of our Arab neighbours. Even as it became unmistakably clear that the United States was preparing to commit systematic war crimes against Iran’s civilian population — including strikes on populated areas and critical infrastructure — they indeed proved unwilling to prohibit or........

© Al Jazeera