AUDIO: “We Don’t Know What’s in the Iran Deal, and That in Itself Is a Commentary”
In a wide-ranging interview with Tavis Smiley, Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, cuts through the fog surrounding the latest U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, and explains why Americans should be deeply skeptical of what’s being sold as a breakthrough.
On the flurry of “tentative deals” Trump has announced with Iran, Phyllis urges caution: “We don’t know what’s in this deal. It hasn’t been revealed. We don’t know if it will be signed.” She is careful to note what this agreement actually is and isn’t: “This is a promise to engage in negotiations for an agreement. This is certainly not a nuclear agreement. Nobody’s even claiming that it is.”
That said, she acknowledges a ceasefire would have real value, with an important caveat. “It’s always better because it’s always innocent people who die. It’s not the powerful people who die. It’s people who have no choice but to be under the bombs.” But whether the agreement will hold, she warns, depends heavily on whether Lebanon is included. “The Iranian government says it does. The Pakistanis, who have been acting as a kind of go-between in these negotiations, they say it does. The U.S. isn’t saying, and Israel says it doesn’t.”
On the question of Iran’s frozen assets, billions of dollars seized and held in banks across the Arab Gulf states, Phyllis explains the human cost of their continued freeze: “There is a huge amount of money just missing from the Iranian treasury that was being used to buy medicines abroad, to buy equipment, to fix the planes on Iran’s civilian air fleet. People are dying in Iran who have cancer because they can’t get cancer drugs.” She predicts Iran will push hard for the release of those assets as part of any final agreement.
She is equally skeptical of Trump’s claim that this deal is better than the Obama-era JCPOA: “Nothing that we’re seeing now indicates that it’s going to be anything close to what he would consider ‘better.’ Iran is not going to have to refuse to enrich any uranium to any low levels, which they were prohibited from in the JCPOA, because this isn’t a nuclear deal. This is a deal to end the war and reopen the Strait, both of which existed from way before the US and Israel went to war.”
On Gaza, Phyllis stresses that any genuine region-wide ceasefire must address the ongoing genocide: “There is still a question of how many people are killed every day. It’s no longer around one hundred people every day, thankfully, but it is still seven people, eleven people, four people, seventeen people, every day. People are still dying under Israeli bombs.”
She closes with a stark reminder of how this crisis began: “All of this is rooted in a decision by the United States and Israel to go to war on February twenty-eighth in a way that was completely illegal. This was a war of aggression. There was no claim of self-defense. This was nothing that was authorized by the United Nations. It was a clear violation of international law.”
Her bottom line on the memorandum itself: “We have our government having signed something forty-eight hours ago and we don’t know what’s in it. That, in itself, is a commentary.”
Listen to the interview here:
