Yemen gov’t condemns Houthi missile attacks on Aden airport
Erdogan updates Trump on Mecca Defence Alliance diplomatic efforts to end Iran war
US President Trump has discussed the regional security situation, including Turkiye’s role in the Mecca Defence Alliance, with Turkish President Erdogan in a phone call on Wednesday.
According to a statement, the two leaders were closely following developments in the Strait of Hormuz, and in Yemen, as well as the recent diplomatic efforts by the Mecca Defence Alliance members – which include Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, in addition to Turkiye, to diplomatically resolve the US- Israeli war on Iran.
Conflict implications easier to calculate than diplomacy for US and Iran, says former Pakistani army commander
The US might be forced into another round of hostilities with Iran because President Trump “is caught between the commitments of his own rhetoric and the limitations imposed by the realities on the ground”, says a former Pakistan army commander.
“The fundamental problem is that a decisive military offensive would not necessarily produce a decisive political outcome,” retired Lieutenant General Tariq Khan, former commander of the Pakistani army’s Frontier Corps, told Al jazeera.
“Trump may conclude that military action is necessary to demonstrate that his threats were not empty”, said adding that the upcoming midterm elections in the US, “may influence the timing of any such decision”.
“If neither side is prepared to accept the compromises required for a lasting settlement, the alternative may be a confrontation in which both discover that the destruction they can inflict is considerably easier to calculate than the political outcome they can achieve.”
US is the ‘real threat’ to region’s security
The US, not Iran, is “the real threat” to security in the region, and a decades-old narrative of an Iranian threat has been used to sell weapons to Arab states, according to Hamid Reza Gholamzadeh, director of the Tehran-based think-tank DiploHouse.
Speaking to Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, Gholamzadeh said that “for more than four decades, Americans have told the story to Arab countries to push them to buy weapons, while Americans benefit from the petrodollars, only to turn them against Iran.”
“There is no problem between Iran and the countries in the region,” he said. He said Americans, “who can’t even protect their own establishments, or their own bases in the region,” are the real source of insecurity.
“They are the real threat, but making Iran the enemy benefits them.”
If the US left the region and Arab and regional countries worked together with Iran, “there would be no threat to the region, and the region can work together. It’s that simple,” he said.
He said the narrative was “successfully sold” as regional countries have a “natural rivalry” with Iran and “do not want to accept that Iran is a power in the region, but that is the reality on the ground.”
Gholamzadeh also warned against a military campaign. “Iran has managed to survive against the furious attacks from Israel and the US, so this country is not something you want to deal with in a military campaign,” he said.
