Iran is warning against a United States ground invasion as regional leaders ramp up diplomatic efforts.
It comes as the USS Tripoli – carrying 3500 US troops – arrived in the Middle East over the weekend.
It’s all while Pakistan said it is prepared to host US-Iran talks after meeting foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
University of Otago Peace Studies professor Richard Jackson told The Front Page that the US and Israel have seriously overestimated their might.
“I think both Israel and the US seriously underestimated Iran, which has spent the last 30 or 40 years watching the US in Afghanistan, in Iraq, watching Israel in south Lebanon and in Gaza, and trying to work out, well, what would we do if they attacked us?
“They’ve got a plan. They’re not stupid, and they’ve got the weaponry, and they’ve got a strategic kind of goal, which is to make the international economy hurt so much from the response that this will prove to be a deterrent in the future as well.
“So Iran’s not just thinking about, well, ‘how do we survive this war, but how do we prevent our country from being attacked again in the future?’” he said.
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan met in Islamabad, where they discussed regional issues and “possible ways to bring an early and permanent end to the war in the region”, according to Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar.
“I’m not sure anyone’s a good mediator at the moment. The challenges for mediation here are that there is no trust anymore between Iran and the US, largely because during the last round of negotiations, that was when the US attacked,” Jackson said.
“That is such a violation to say, let’s have peace talks, and then to attack during the peace talks, but then also to try to assassinate the country’s leaders.
“So, we want to talk to you, but we’re gonna try and kill you as well. These sorts of actions are totally antithetical to peaceful resolution through diplomacy,” Jackson said.
The US and Israeli justifications for their attack have differed in the weeks since.
After the first missiles fell, US President Donald Trump posted on social media that their main objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”. Those threats, he said, included Iran’s nuclear programme.
Most people, Jackson said, can see that Iran was nowhere near developing nuclear weapons.
“And even if they did, it would purely be for deterrence because they know, as the rest of the world knows, that if you have nuclear weapons like North Korea, that you are not gonna get invaded, and they just don’t want to get invaded.
“They’re attacking me because I haven’t got nuclear weapons. That’s what happened to Iraq. That’s what happened to Afghanistan. That’s what’s happening to Iran right now.
“I think, in some ways, this has had the opposite effect, and in the years after this, Iran may accelerate its nuclear programme unless we can get back to the agreement that was there before Trump got rid of it. The Obama-era agreement under which Iran adhered to low levels of enrichment and regular inspections of its nuclear programme,” he said.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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