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As the two weeks’ truce between Iran and the United States enters extended time, it should be obvious to anyone who has not been taken in by the propaganda barrage launched by the US and Western governments against Iran that Washington is not genuinely interested in peace, and that its main, if not only,  purpose in agreeing to the Islamabad talks was to get time to replenish its  armoury of weapons in West Asia after Iran destroyed its bases in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia.  A secondary purpose may also have been to  gain a respite for Israel from the merciless pounding it was receiving from Iran’s hypersonic and cluster missiles after it had exhausted  its much vaunted anti- missile defences.

Trump’s 15-point plan had been nothing but a demand for abject surrender that no one in the US could have believed would be accepted. By contrast,  Iran’s 10 points constituted  a genuine  peace offer that, if accepted,  would have helped resolved all remaining tensions in the Middle East. The  key requirement of this  plan was that the peace be regional, i.e. that it had to  be observed by not just the US but also by Israel. Israel destroyed that requirement on the very eve of the Islamabad conference by carpet bombing south Beirut. When, instead of roundly condemning Tel Aviv, Trump’s chief envoy J.D. Vance stated that  Lebanon was not covered by the two week truce, the talks turned into a farce, and Vance flew away empty handed. 

Today the war is on the verge of starting anew. Israel has taken the US’s blatant lie that the truce did not cover Lebanon,  as a green light to turn South Lebanon into another Gaza, before absorbing it into “Eretz Yisrael”. Despite a separate ceasefire agreement with the Lebanese government, it continues to bomb targets, especially civilian ones, in Lebanon. The US is blockading Iranian ports.   Iran has responded by lightly firing on three Indian oil tankers with, one suspects,  only small arms in order to turn them back and inform the world that the Straits are now closed. There is........

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