Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who was in the midst of mediating U.S.-Iranian negotiations when the United States and Israel launched their “unlawful military strike” against Iran, has now put on the table a far-sighted proposal for negotiations towards a regional non-aggression treaty, pivoted on an agreement on developing nuclear energy, as a pathway out of the ongoing unwinnable war. His proposal takes on added weight, as it comes not from the outside, but from a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Albusaidi outlined his proposal in an opinion piece published in London’s weekly The Economist on March 18, under the title “America’s Friends Must Help Extricate It from an Unlawful War.” He writes as a friend of the United States, to warn that it has “lost control of its foreign policy,” by allowing itself to be drawn into the war against Iran. The illusion that Iran would swiftly capitulate was a great miscalculation; Iranian retaliation against a war openly described as “designed to terminate the Islamic Republic” was “inevitable.”
The question before America’s friends is “What can we do to extricate the U.S. from its unwanted entanglement?”
First: “America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth. That begins with the fact that there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it, and that the national interests of both Iran and America lie in the earliest possible end to hostilities….
