Trump presided over national security meeting on Iran, US official says

WASHINGTON, June 20 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump presided over a national security meeting about Iran with top aides at the White House on Friday, a U.S. official said.
The official also said U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is in regular contact with the Iranians, both directly and indirectly, with Qatar acting as an intermediator.

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The National

12 minutes ago

• The National

Donald Trump's ultimatum is a threat to Iran and the Middle East

What this means, one assumes, is that the Iranian government must – within the next 12 days – open all areas of its nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo to ­investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thereby proving that it is not developing a ­nuclear bomb. Failure to do so will risk the site ­being hit with a US 'bunker buster' bomb – or a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance ­Penetrator, to give this particular weapon of mass destruction its proper name. The dangers of such a development are, obviously, grave, not only for the ­environment and people of Iran (who would likely suffer catastrophic ­radioactive contamination), but also for the geopolitics of an already deeply ­unstable Middle East. The world recoils from the prospect. Even Keir Starmer – who has made himself Trump's sycophant-in-chief – has urged restraint. There is, however, one ­regime which greets the possibility of such a reckless escalation with the glee of an excited toddler in a sweetie shop. That regime is, of course, the ­Benjamin Netanyahu administration in Israel. Ever since the attacks of October 7, 2023 – in which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and, I suspect, self-organised groups of young Palestinians killed 300 Israeli ­military personnel and 900 ­civilians – ­Israel has sought opportunistically to ­extinguish, not only the Palestinian ­people of Gaza but all of the Zionist state's many enemies across the region. The US is, needless to say, deeply ­involved in Israel's regional war efforts, which have – over the last 20 months – involved military action against Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Without American weapons, ­intelligence and finance, it is ­unimaginable that Netanyahu could have been able to conduct war on so many fronts. Nevertheless, the Israeli prime ­minister would prefer that the US was already ­engaged directly, alongside Israel, in ­military action against Iran. He has been urging US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites for well over a decade. Trump's two-week deadline ­expresses tensions within the US security ­establishment and within the president's own MAGA movement. The property ­developer-turned-politician was re-elected to the White House on the promise that he would keep the US out of foreign wars. READ MORE: Labour blasted as 'deeply authoritarian' over plans to proscribe Palestine Action Much of the MAGA base rallies ­enthusiastically to Trump's promise that, on his watch, the US will not suffer the ignominy of seeing one of its diplomatic missions overrun and its ambassador killed (as was the case with John Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, in 2012). Never again, the president has vowed, will US forces be seen withdrawing from a foreign country in disarray (as occurred in Afghanistan in 2021). Many of Trump's supporters – ­including the ultra-conservative journalist Tucker Carlson – are pushing back against the prospect of US attacks on Iran. Trump is caught between presenting himself as the 'peace president' and – to use his own words – being 'very, very pro-Israel' (so 'pro-Israel', indeed, that he has openly advocated the mass expulsion of the Palestinians in Gaza who have, thus far, survived Israel's genocide of more than 56,000 people). There are, however, a series of ­problems with the insistence by both Trump and Netanyahu that Iran is on the ­immediate brink of having a nuclear bomb. As ­recently as March of this year, Trump's now director of national intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard testified to US ­lawmakers that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons programme. Indeed, in June, Gabbard tweeted a video in which she warned against the 'political elite and warmongers' who are 'carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers'. Referring, perhaps, to the war in Ukraine, tensions between India and ­Pakistan and/or the Middle East crisis, she opined that the world is 'on the brink of nuclear annihilation'. However, Gabbard's March testimony – made when she was Trump's trusted nominee for DNI – is now proving so inconvenient to the president that, on Friday, he felt it necessary to reject her comments of less than three months ago. Trump has averred that he 'doesn't care' what Gabbard said in March, and that her testimony on Capitol Hill was simply 'wrong'. For her part, Gabbard has sought to save her job by resorting to the MAGA playbook. Blaming 'the dishonest ­media', she accused journalists of 'intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news'. Gabbard's testimony in March was a reflection of the analysis of the US ­intelligence establishment. It was entirely at odds with Netanyahu's claims. Speaking at the UN, the Israeli prime minister said that Iran was 'months away' from having nukes. At another meeting of the UN, he insisted that the Tehran administration was just 'weeks away' from having 'an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs'. The problem with these pronouncements – as was pointed out last week by American satirist Jon Stewart on his ­always well-researched Daily Show – is that they were made in 2012 and 2015, respectively. When it comes to Israeli claims regarding the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons programme, Netanyahu has less credibility than Liz Truss denying that she crashed the UK economy. There are, in all of this, more than a few shades of Tony Blair's 2003 'dodgy dossier', the entirely discredited file with which the UK government sought to prove that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had 'weapons of mass destruction'. Back then, the Labour prime ­minister claimed that Saddam could deploy ­chemical or biological weapons against UK military installations in Cyprus in just '45 minutes'. Blair's later claim that he fell victim to erroneous intelligence would struggle to convince an unusually naïve ­five-year-old. The Iraq debacle exposed the leader of 'New Labour' as a lying warmonger. If the Blair dossier was dodgy, the ­Israeli claims about Iran (claims which are now backed by the US) amount to a ­multi-volume ­encyclopaedia of malevolent falsehoods. Yet, if – as Trump told journalists on Friday – 'my intelligence ­community is wrong', one can only assume that the US president's source of ­supposed '­intelligence' on Iran's nuclear ­programme is the Netanyahu regime. READ MORE: Owen Jones: Opposing Israeli violence is 'extremist'? The world's upside down The irony in all this is that the ­governments in West Jerusalem and ­Washington insist that Iran cannot ­become a nuclear weapons state because its government is untrustworthy and unstable. This from an Israeli coalition government that comprises: Netanyahu's far-right, ultra-nationalist Likud party; the fascist Jewish Power party of national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is a lifelong supporter of the late leader of fascist Zionism Meir Kahane); and the fascist-theocrats of the Religious ­Zionism party (which is led by Israeli finance ­minister Bezalel Smotrich). The idea that this ragtag collection of genocidal fanatics should be considered a trustworthy custodian of the 90 to 400 nuclear warheads Israel has sitting in the Negev Desert is beyond laughable. ­Likewise the notion that Trump – who is ­currently at war with much of the ­population of Los Angeles – is a ­statesman with whom the nuclear codes of the world's most ­powerful military should be ­considered safe. On the issue of Iran's nuclear ­programme – as on so many other ­geopolitical questions – US policy is characterised by flagrant hypocrisy. The demand that Iran open up its facility at Fordo to IAEA examiners can only be made because the Tehran government is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel, by stark contrast, has never signed the NPT. Mordechai Vanunu – the former nuclear technician who blew the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme in 1986 – spent 18 years (11 of them in solitary confinement) in Israeli jails for his brave and principled actions. As Marwan Bishara – Al Jazeera's ­excellent chief political analyst – said ­recently, Israel's influence over the White House is a case of 'the tail wagging the dog'. This influence is not down to the clout in Washington DC of the much-vaunted 'Israel lobby', much less to the conspiratorial power of a supposed '­Jewish lobby' (an antisemitic trope that insults every Jewish person who speaks out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza). Rather it is explained by the crucial role Israel plays – and has always played – for Western, particularly US, imperialism in the oil-rich Middle East. In 1943 – five years before Zionist forces visited the Nakba (Catastrophe) of mass murder and 'ethnic cleansing' upon the Palestinian people – Sir Ronald Storrs (former British administrator in Jerusalem) expressed his hope and belief that a future Israeli state would be a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'. In 1953 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the Zionist state as the Middle Eastern 'watchdog' for the Western powers, and the US in particular. The State of Israel's highly militarised, belligerent role in the Middle East makes it an extremely valuable asset for Western imperialism. That was true during the Suez Crisis in 1956, in which – against the urging of an unconvinced US – Israel joined its ­patrons France and the UK in the ­disastrous ­invasion of Nasser's Egypt ­(following the Egyptian leader's ­nationalisation of the Franco-British-owned Suez Canal). It was also the case in the Six-Day War in 1967, in which US president Lyndon Johnson's administration assisted Israel in its ­victory over Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and in its consequent illegal occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Ever since then, Israel has been relied upon to use military force, or the threat of it, to keep Arab states and Iran in line. That is why the US finances Israel to the tune of $3.8 billion annually. Israel is the number one recipient of US foreign aid, accounting for 5% of the total US international aid budget (and rising, given Trump's cuts to aid spending). This to a country which – with a population of around 9.7 million – accounts for just 0.1% of the world's population. Israel's watchdog role makes it indispensable to US interests in the Middle East. However, its interests and US interests are not identical, and, from time to time, the watchdog slips its leash and acts in ways that make life difficult for Washington. Trump is currently caught on the horns of this dilemma. His MAGA base is split between 'no more foreign wars' isolationism and 'very, very pro-Israel' militarism. He has given himself 12 days to decide whether to set light to the tinderbox of the Middle East by involving US forces in direct attacks on Iran or simply continue to 'green light' Israel's bombardment in ­Persia. His choice will come down to his estimate – in his own extremely right-wing, nationalistic terms – of what best serves the economic and political ­interests of the US imperium.

The Independent

14 minutes ago

• The Independent

The Latest: US joins Israeli air campaign and strikes 3 nuclear sites in Iran

The U.S. military struck three sites in Iran early Sunday, inserting itself into Israel 's effort to decapitating the country's nuclear program in a risky gambit to weaken a longtime foe amid Tehran's threat of reprisals that could spark a wider regional conflict. The decision to directly involve the U.S. comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran that have moved to systematically eradicate the country's air defenses and offensive missile capabilities, while damaging its nuclear enrichment facilities. But U.S. and Israeli officials have said that American stealth bombers and a 30,000-lb. bunker buster bomb they alone can carry offered the best chance of destroying heavily-fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program buried deep underground. President Donald Trump was the first to disclose the strikes. There was no immediate acknowledgment from the Iranian government. Iran's state-run IRNA news agency reported that attacks targeted the country's Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites. The agency did not elaborate. Here is the latest: Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency has published an account by one of its reporters, saying flames could be seen after the bombs hit the Fordo facility. Fars, which is believed close to Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, said its reporter heard anti-aircraft fire around 2:05 a.m. local time and explosions two minutes later. 'When I reached the vicinity ... the air defense system was operating intensely, and its activity was clearly visible in the sky,' the reporter said. Later on, the reporter said, "flames suddenly erupted from the direction of Fordo.' Simultaneously with the flames, a faint trail of smoke and a significant amount of dust rose in the area, Fars quoted the reporter. It offered no photos or video showing the attack Israeli officials lauded the strikes Israeli officials lauded the strikes in sweeping and dramatic language. Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, thanked Trump and said the strikes marked a 'decisive moment between the axis of terror and evil and the axis of hope.' Israel's defense minister congratulated Trump on what he described as a 'historic decision.' US steps up efforts to evacuate citizens from Israel The U.S. is stepping up evacuation flights for American citizens from Israel to Europe and continuing to draw down its staff at diplomatic missions in Iraq as fears of Iranian retaliation again U.S. interests in the Middle East grow. Even before those airstrikes were announced by President Donald Trump on Saturday evening in Washington, the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem announced the start of evacuation flights for American civilians from Israel. Sixty-seven American citizens left Israel on two government flights bound for Athens, Greece on Saturday and four more evacuation flights to Athens were planned for Sunday, according to an internal State Department document seen by The Associated Press. In addition to the flights, a cruise ship carrying more than 1,000 American citizens, including several hundred Jewish youngsters who had been visiting Israel on an organized tour, arrived in Cyprus, according to the document. — Matthew Lee Israel closes airspace in wake of US attacks Israel's Airport Authority announced it was closing the country's airspace to both inbound and outbound flights in the wake of the U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. The agency said it was shutting down air traffic 'due to recent developments' and did not say for how long. Iran says 'no signs of contamination' after US strikes nuclear facilities Iran said early Sunday there were 'no signs of contamination' at its nuclear sites at Isfahan, Fordo and Natanz after U.S. airstrikes targeted the facilities. Iranian state media quoted the country's National Nuclear Safety System Center, which published a statement saying its radiation detectors had recorded no radioactive release after the strikes. 'There is no danger to the residents living around the aforementioned sites,' the statement added. Earlier Israeli airstrikes on nuclear sites similarly have caused no recorded release of radioactive material into the environment around the facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said. Strikes used 'bunker buster' bombs and cruise missiles The U.S. military used 'bunker-buster' bombs in its attack on Iran's Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, which is built deep into a mountain, a U.S. official said. That official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations. The 30,000-pound bunker-busting American bomb known as the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator uses its weight and sheer kinetic force to penetrate underground and then explode. Saturday's strikes were the first time it has been used in combat. U.S. submarines also participated in the attacks in Iran, launching about 30 Tomahawk land attack missiles, according to another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations. It was not clear what those missiles were aimed at. Two Iranian nuclear sites besides Fordo were attacked, Isfahan and Natanz. — Lolita C. Baldor Trump called Netanyahu after strikes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video that Trump called him after the strikes. 'It was a very warm conversation, very emotional,' Netanyahu said. Speaking in Hebrew, he called Trump a friend of Israel like no one before him. 'In my name, and on behalf of all citizens of Israel and on behalf of the entire Jewish world, I thank him from the bottom of my heart.'

Reuters

18 minutes ago

• Reuters

Airlines keep avoiding Middle East airspace after US attack on Iran

June 22 (Reuters) - Airlines continued to avoid large parts of the Middle East on Sunday after U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, with traffic already skirting airspace in the region due to recent missile exchanges. "Following US attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, commercial traffic in the region is operating as it has since new airspace restrictions were put into place last week," FlightRadar24 said on social media platform X. Its website showed airlines were not flying in the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Israel. They have chosen other routings such as north via the Caspian Sea or south via Egypt and Saudi Arabia, even if it results in higher fuel and crew costs and longer flight times. Missile and drone barrages in an expanding number of conflict zones globally represent a high risk to airline traffic. Since Israel launched strikes on Iran on June 13, carriers have suspended flights to destinations in the affected countries, though there have been some evacuation flights from neighbouring nations and some bringing stranded Israelis home. Japan's foreign ministry said on Sunday it had evacuated 21 people, including 16 Japanese nationals, from Iran overland to Azerbaijan. It said it was the second such evacuation since Thursday and that it would conduct further evacuations if necessary. New Zealand's government said on Sunday it would send a Hercules military transport plane to the Middle East on standby to evacuate New Zealanders from the region. It said in a statement that government personnel and a C-130J Hercules aircraft would leave Auckland on Monday. The plane would take some days to reach the region, it said. The government was also in talks with commercial airlines to assess how they may be able to assist, it added.