Abbas Milani:
Well, I clearly think the regime has been negotiating. I think they have been sending signals. They have been negotiating with Europeans. They have apparently been negotiating with the U.S.
What the regime says often is not the same as what the regime does. What the regime does in private behind closed doors is to negotiate, to try to see whether they can get a deal, but publicly they continue to repeat their bombastic rhetoric.
So I think they are negotiating. I think they can maybe achieve a deal that Mr. Trump might be happy with. I’m not sure about Mr. Netanyahu. But if it goes on for long, I think Mr. Netanyahu, under international pressure and under maybe some pressure from home with the increase of the number of people who are killed or injured, he too might decide that peace is inevitable, at least a short peace is inevitable.
But I don’t think any deal that the regime makes is going to save it for long, because I think the day after the deal there will be a political reckoning in Iran about taking Iran to a war that was unnecessary, unwanted. I know people are rightly angry at Mr. Netanyahu for attacking Iran, but I think once that reckoning comes people will ask Mr. Khamenei, why did you take the country to a war that you knew we are not going to win?
It was an unnecessary war. And why didn’t you support even your own folks? I just read before I came on a comment by Mr. Rezaee, the old commander of the IRGC for 18 years. He said we have known for weeks that Israel was about to attack, so we have moved all of our enriched uranium, we have moved all of our sensitive equipment from the sites that Israel has hit.
That’s a stupid thing to say, and I think is unreliable. People will ask, why didn’t you support your own people? Why didn’t you support the people of Iran? Why didn’t you think about shelters for the people of Iran if you knew for several months that attack was inevitable?
