Peace was within reach. Then came the missiles. Will it be different this time?

On February 27, about 42 days before the Islamabad Talks, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation and told the world that peace was “within reach”, that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and degradation of existing stockpiles to the lowest possible level.

The Omanis are famously cautious. Al-Busaidi is not a man given to theatrics; he would be the diplomatic equivalent of the family accountant. And here he was on national television, telling the American public that Iran had agreed to pretty much everything the Americans had wanted. This, Al-Busaidi said, went beyond anything achieved in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal (which limited Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief).

Watching this unfold, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute wrote that the Omanis going public like this was “quite unprecedented” and suspected that he knew why they were doing it: so that the American people would know peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.

Breakthroughs and bombshells

Less than 24 hours later, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, along with Israel. Within days, they killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian defence minister, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, and security chief Ali Larijani (who was critical to the very negotiations that produced the breakthrough). Dozens of other senior Iranian officials were also killed in the opening hours of the war.

It was Saturday, a working day in Iran, and the strikes began at the hour parents drop their children off to school. It was at that time that a US Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab, collapsing the roof onto classrooms full of children between the ages of seven and 12.

A hundred and seventy-five people, mostly schoolgirls, were killed.

In the first week alone, important buildings in Iran were struck: the parliament, the state broadcaster’s headquarters, the Assembly of Experts, 13 health facilities, over 120 historical sites, and residential neighbourhoods in Tehran. All of these were civilian targets that are protected under international law.

Then the Iranians did something that, heretofore, had been just a scenario to war planners in Washington and Tel Aviv debated in their tabletop war games and their classified briefings.

They closed the Strait of........

© Dawn Prism