War this week end ala Seymour Hersh or negotiations seeking an exit?
Trump gives Iran ‘two-week’ reprieve as his inner circle quietly seeks exit route
For all the president’s hostile rhetoric, his advisers are increasingly wary of threats to American troops — and Steve Witkoff is in constant talks with Tehran
President Trump has stepped back from bombing Iran, giving Tehran up to two weeks to negotiate an end to the conflict with Israel.
Trump is looking for an “off-ramp” after advisers became concerned at Iran’s ability to hit US bases across the Middle East and kill American troops in retaliation for any US military intervention, such as the targeting of nuclear facilities with bunker-busting bombs, The Times understands. On Wednesday, Tehran was able to wreak considerable damage against targets in Israel, including by using hypersonic missiles to evade Israel’s Arrow interceptor system.
On Wednesday, Tehran was able to wreak considerable damage against targets in Israel, including by using hypersonic missiles to evade Israel’s Arrow interceptor system.
I did see some imagery from this attack. Israel did sustain some serious damage. Would this be enough to give the US leadership pause for thought?
Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, quoted the president as saying: “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”
Talks are due to take place Friday in Geneva between the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and European counterparts including David Lammy, the foreign secretary, who was also talking to the US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Thursday night.
It was reported on Wednesday that Trump had approved plans to strike Iran but was withholding his final go-ahead. Leavitt told a White House news conference on Thursday: “The president is always interested in a diplomatic solution. He is a peacemaker-in-chief. He is the ‘peace through strength’ president.
“And so if there’s a chance for diplomacy, the president’s always going to grab it. But he’s not afraid to use strength as well, I will add.”
Missiles used by Iran are among the fastest ever used in warfare at up to five times the speed of sound and can manoeuvre mid-flight, enabling them to evade Israel’s Arrow defences.Trump’s trusted negotiator, Steve Witkoff, is in near daily phone contact with Araghchi, who is refusing to join further nuclear talks while his country is under attack from Israel.
Witkoff was instead due to meet Lammy and Rubio in Washington before Lammy flew on to Geneva to be joined by Araghchi and envoys from France, Germany and the EU.
Araghchi has raised another stumbling block,
telling Witkoff that Iran wants a third party at the negotiating table and suggesting this could be China,The Times has learnt.Iran has indicated that it does not trust the nations presenting themselves as interlocutors for talks — the US, Britain and Germany— because of their hostile language about the regime in Tehran.One can hardly blame the Iranian negotiator for not trusting the US, UK or Germany. They are the wolves in sheep’s clothing!!
Both sides are believed to have made offers: the US, that Iran would be allowed access to low-enriched uranium — up to 3.67 per cent purity — for civilian purposes provided by a dedicated facility run by an international consortium outside the country.
The US will allow Iran to access low enriched uranium- You know they won’t!
That was rejected by Iran, which demands the right to have its own enrichment facility. But it reportedly made a counter-offer that this facility could have similar international consortium involvement.
Those proposals still breach the red lines set by each side — Iran that it must be able to carry out enrichment on its soil, and Israel’s insistence that it must not.
Iran’s deployment of its Fattah-1 and Khorramshahr rockets against Israel this week would be the first confirmed use in any conflict of a hypersonic missile — defined as one flying at Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, or more. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also claims to possess Fattah-2 missiles which fly at Mach 15, and are more manoeuvrable.
A third new type of missile, the Sejjil, is believed to have hit the Soroka hospital in the Israeli town of Beersheba overnight, injuring 240 people. The same type of missile has also been used in strikes around Tel Aviv.
In return, Israel’s bombardment of Iran continued Thursday, including a strike on the Arak heavy water reactor, a part of Iran’s civilian nuclear power grid that had been built but not commissioned.
Trump has applied maximum rhetorical power this week, suggesting that Iran’s supreme leader could be assassinated, that he is fully prepared to launch US bombers and demanding nothing short of “complete and total victory”.
But dramatic rhetoric is a Trump tactic well-known to the Iranians — and one they also use. Behind it, Trump is keeping dialogue open through Witkoff and repeatedly asking advisers whether America’s huge massive ordnance penetrator (MOP) bombs, the weapon that would be deployed to take out Iran’s Fordow nuclear site buried deep within a mountainside south of Tehran, will actually do the job.
There are questions about the effectiveness of bunker busters
Wesley Clark, a former supreme Allied commander Europe of Nato, has cautioned there is no guarantee the Mop bombs would obliterate the main Iranian Fordow underground plant. The only way to know for sure would be to send in special-forces troops followed by specialist nuclear clean-up personnel, he said.
“We’ve obviously done testing on what the bomb is, but unless we’ve got the exact plans and know the composition of the earth that’s over that bunker, you can’t be positive of anything,” Clark told CNN. “You hear stories that it’s 200ft underground, other stories it’s 300ft underground, that it’s got reinforced concrete. You don’t know what’s actually in it, [you’re not] positive of anything.”
“If you really want to get rid of this Iran nuclear program, you’ve got to clean up these sites,” he continued. “It’s not just this [Fordow] site, but it’s the Natanz site — and there’s probably a dozen or two dozen other sites where material, centrifuges have been made, bomb parts have been fabricated, plans are there.”
“There may be unenriched uranium. All that stuff’s got to be policed up, some of it very carefully handled. It’s got to be extricated and that’s after the bombing, because otherwise the regime, if it stays in power, could go back and reconstitute.”
Trump is surrounding himself in the situation room with trusted figures who belong to the more hawkish camp on Iran and excluding Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, who has a record of opposing military intervention in the Middle East.
His inexperienced defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, is also said not to be included in his “tier one” team, consisting of JD Vance, the vice-president; General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; Rubio; and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director.
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