Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian met with his cabinet on Sunday, according to the president’s website, and announced that Trump’s offer of direct negotiations had been rejected. Iran replied through Oman, which has often served as a conduit for communication between Washington and Tehran.
Trump had announced that he wrote to Iran on March 7, with the letter being delivered through the good auspices of the United Arab Emirates.
On Sunday, as well, Trump said in a telephone interview, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
Pezeshkian said that his government remains open to indirect negotiations between the two sides. He underlined that Iran has never rejected negotiating in principle.
He said that, however, the past breaches of its commitments by the United States have posed obstacles to direct talks. That record of broken promises, he insisted, has to be rectified and “trust must be rebuilt.” He concluded, “it is the character of American behavior that will determine whether the process of negotiations continues.”
Iran directly negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the United States. Iran went on to abide scrupulously by its provisions, scrapping 80 percent of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Iran does not have a military nuclear program. Iran gave up so much in order to get sanctions relief. Because the Republican Congress refused to lift third-party sanctions on Iran, however, European companies such as France’s TotalEnergy were unable to invest in Iran, and so the GOP largely forestalled the promised sanctions relief. Then in May 2018 Trump ripped up the JCPOA and, even though Tehran had upheld its side of the bargain, imposed the most severe economic blockade on Iran that had ever been imposed by one country on another in peace time.
So President Pezeshkian is saying that Iranians would have to have their heads examined to go back into direct talks with the US, given that they had been repeatedly lied to and stabbed in the back by the American government.
The Iranian president went on to say that “the catastrophic crimes of the Zionist regime [Israel] must be stopped.” He added, “It is absolutely unacceptable that despite the declaration of a ceasefire, they continue to drop bombs on innocent people, relying on combat instruments and technology. No honorable person would accept this inhumane behavior, and I ask God to help Muslim nations stand against it with unity and cohesion.”
The ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, which is fully backed and enabled by the Trump regime, is another obstacle to direct talks, though Pezeshkian did not link the two. It is simply the case that members of the Iranian government can hardly be seen to be hanging around with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other diehard supporters of the genocide, red in tooth and fang, while they are enabling the Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians and children. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu killed 64 Palestinians on Eid al-Fitr, the festival for breaking the month-long Ramadan daytime fast, including children.
In all, the Israeli military has killed some 17,500 Palestinian children that we know about — many are dead undiscovered beneath rubble — by dropping 2,000-lb. bombs on inhabited apartment buildings. There is also a disturbing pattern of children showing up in hospital with gunshot wounds from Israeli sniping, suggesting that Israelis are hunting the children for sport the way some people hunt deer.
Some families in Gaza had somehow managed to get their children new clothes to wear on the Eid, but I saw pictures on satellite news of those children’s lifeless bodies, still wearing new jeans and sneakers, victims of Israeli bombing.
“There will be bombing,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2025.
Hard to imagine backslapping, laughing and sharing meals with the monsters enabling this ongoing set of egregious war crimes. It would sort of be like exhuming the corpse of Vice Admiral Tadashige Daigo of Imperial Japan and drinking champagne with him. He was executed for war crimes that involved abducting, torturing and killing 21,000 people, including women and children, by Japanese troops at Pontianak in what is now Indonesia during WW II.
The head of an Arab research institute studying Iran published what he said was the text of Trump’s initial letter to Iran. It sought direct negotiations, but went on to threaten Tehran if it continued to support what Trump termed “terrorist organizations” that menaced the US and its allies and continued to pursue military “adventures.”
Iran backs Shiite militias in Iraq such as the League of the Righteous and the Organization of the Party of God that have used mortars, drones and missiles against US troops in Iraq and Syria, and killed three US service personnel in Jordan. It also supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has been involved in hostilities with Israel over the latter’s total war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Finally, Iran gives some support to the Helpers of God or Houthis in Yemen, which have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea and have fired missiles at Israel itself. The likelihood of Iran ceasing to back these groups is slim to none, and no amount of Trump bluster is going to produce that outcome. There is some reason to think, however, that Iran has tried to rein in its allies in the region, though not always with much success.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved