A deal was on the table. They bombed it |
On the morning of 28th February, I woke to an emergency alert telling everyone in Qatar to stay indoors. Moments later came the sounds, blasts, intercepted drones, the unmistakable audio of a region entering war. I write from Doha, from inside a country that has spent years constructing the diplomatic infrastructure that made this region’s fragile stability possible. I am not a distant analyst watching these events through a screen. I woke up inside them.
As someone who has spent the better part of a year tracking this conflict’s slow, deliberate approach; Trump’s escalating threats, the collapsed negotiation windows, the mounting US military buildup in the Gulf, I was not shocked that war had arrived. What shocked me was when it came.
Just the day before, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi had given a remarkable interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation, describing what diplomats had achieved after three rounds of indirect talks in Geneva as a historic breakthrough: Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling and zero accumulation of enriched nuclear material, with full verification. “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” Al Busaidi told CBS, “I think we have cracked that problem, a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before.” A deal, he was confident, was within reach. Technical talks were scheduled for Vienna the following week.
Less than 48 hours later, Israel and the United States launched Operation Epic Fury.
This is the central obscenity of this war. It was not launched in a vacuum of diplomacy. It was launched in spite of a diplomatic breakthrough that had taken months to construct. The negotiator’s optimism was still reverberating in the world’s newspapers when the bombs fell. Iran retaliated across the region, striking US military bases, civilian hotels, airports, and LNG infrastructure across the Gulf, dragging the most stable and prosperous states in the Arab world into a war they did not choose, did not want, and were not consulted on.
READ: Iranian state TV says Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israeli attacks
The admission that clarified everything
In the days following the strikes, something unusual happened: the architects of this war began telling the truth, inadvertently.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted to reporters on Capitol Hill that the United States had launched its attack knowing Israel was planning to strike Iran regardless, and that Washington feared Iran would retaliate against American forces. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told reporters. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded with a bluntness that matched the moment: Rubio had “admitted what we all knew, the US has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian threat.”
The admission did not go unnoticed even within Trump’s own coalition. JD Vance, who in 2024 declared that war with Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources and massively expensive to our country”, was reportedly sidelined after intensely questioning senior officials in the days before the strikes, eventually reduced to watching from the Situation Room while the decision was taken at Mar-a-Lago. Tulsi Gabbard, who once built her presidential platform on “no regime change wars,”........