The fragile agreement that paused hostilities between the U.S. and Iran on April 8 is ever more shaky after both sides fired shots in the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump warned Iran they would be “blown off the face of the Earth” if they attempted to target U.S. ships blockading Iranian ports in the strait or the Persian Gulf and claimed that U.S. forces had fired on seven Iranian “fast boats.” On May 4, Iran’s state media said that the U.S. had fired on small cargo boats carrying goods and passengers, killing five civilians, as the UAE claimed that Iran had fired missiles at its largest oil port.
The very next day, Trump announced that he was suspending his one-day operation, called Project Freedom, where he ordered the U.S. Navy to escort commercial ships through the strait, claiming that there had been “great progress” toward an agreement with Iran. However, the president’s declarations about progress in peace talks with Iran have often proven to be false, underscoring his increasingly erratic statements and decisions in the conflict since he and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28.
Because the war has now gone past 60 days, under the War Powers Act the president must seek approval from Congress to continue the conflict, a requirement that Trump intends to defy. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project and author of Understanding Palestine and Israel. Here she talks about the cost of the war and the focus of U.S. and international concern regarding Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons — an issue that was resolved with the signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) international Iran nuclear agreement with the Obama administration and the European Union, but which Donald Trump tore up in 2018, during his first presidential term.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: I think the first thing we have to be clear about is that this isn’t a fragile ceasefire. It’s not a questionable ceasefire. It is not a ceasefire. When you have the U.S. continuing a blockade of all ships going to or coming from Iranian ports, that’s an act of war. The war is still going on. The bombing had stopped for a while, but the war had not stopped. It had taken a different form. It may, hopefully not, but it certainly is quite likely that it will escalate again to direct military assaults. Both sides actually are carrying out actions which are in violation of any kind of a ceasefire because any kind of blockade makes a ceasefire non-existent.
Iran has imposed limits on who it will allow to transverse the strait. They basically said that any boat or ship that’s flagged with anything resembling or having any connection to either the United States or Israel would not be allowed through, but that other ships will be as long as they abide by the Iranian rules that have new rules that have been set that include paying some kind of fees to transit the strait.
This was something that never existed before the U.S.-Israeli war. So before the war, the strait was open. We were being told various versions of either the U.S. has destroyed completely all of Iran’s nuclear capacity or that whatever was left of it was so buried so deep under rock and stone outside of the city of Isfahan that it would be impossible for Iran to even try to get to it without the U.S. knowing the moment they made a move in that direction.
All of that’s gone now. The estimates so far—there’s a number of estimates—but the average of the estimates is about 3,600 people who have been killed so far. In Iran, half of them are civilians. At least 254 of them are children. That’s including the 175 that were killed that first day. Beyond that, there have been over a 100,000 homes destroyed by Israeli and U.S. bombs.
Three hundred health centers have been destroyed. And the financial destruction, what it’s going to take to even begin the process of rebuilding is estimated as somewhere between $145 and $300 billion. That’s just inside Iran. That doesn’t even touch the casualties, the civilians killed, the destruction, the displacement in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza where genocide continues. This war has been an absolute disaster and it is far from over.
SCOTT HARRIS: Phyllis, I did want to ask you about possible negotiations. You have Pakistani and negotiators from Oman who are trying to get the U.S. and Iranian officials together on some kind of plan. And the irony here is that Donald Trump in 2018 tore up the international U.S. nuclear agreement with Iran. And it looks like many of the points that they’re coming to understand will be hopefully a solution and end to this war. And Iran doesn’t want just a cessation of hostilities. It wants a permanent end to this long, decades-long war. But many of the points that they need to agree on were right there in the JCPOA that the Obama administration successfully negotiated with John Kerry back then, it was just torn up. Now we’re here again.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: We’re here again, and it’s quite likely, I’m afraid, that the negotiations from the vantage point of the United States are really not going to go as well as those did back when the JCPOA was signed in 2015. It took, Scott, almost two years to negotiate that agreement. It was not something that was done overnight. They didn’t send President Obama’s kids off to negotiate. I could just see Sasha and Malia being sent on the plane off to … It’s about as useful as sending Jared Kushner and the other real estate guy. The notion that they … And not only that they were the lead negotiators without any training in diplomacy, without any familiarity with Iranian politics, with who they were dealing with, they didn’t take with them any of the technical experts, the folks who actually know what people are talking about when they talk about nuclear weapons.
What does enrichment mean? What is 60 percent enrichment versus 20 percent enrichment? They don’t know any of that, which is fine. Diplomats don’t have to know all the technical stuff. But that’s why you have a technical team that goes with you, to interpret it all for you. They went off without a technical team. So what a surprise. They haven’t been able to get any kinds of serious negotiations underway.
For more information, visit the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project at
ips-dc.org/new-internationalism.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Phyllis Bennis (18:32) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
Subscribe to our Weekly Summary
