by Kenneth R. Timmerman
The Iranians are clearly not negotiating in good faith, and they never will.
President Trump this week called Iran's new leaders "lunatics," because they just didn't seem capable of making a deal.
As he told Fortune magazine,
"[T]hey make a deal, and then they send you a paper that has no
relationship to the deal you made. I say, 'Are you people crazy?'"
The latest Iranian response to the U.S. was "leaked" to the Saudi daily al Arabiya
on Thursday, and it's as much a non-starter as every other Iranian
"plan" to end the war. The U.S. makes all the concessions, and Iran gets
all the goodies.
If you read the details, it doesn't even mention Iran's nuclear weapons material, its enrichment capabilities, or its missiles. Talk about arrogant!
At the same time, the Iranians were telling the Saudi media of their
agreement to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz they published their own map,
which showed them claiming the entire Strait -- right up to the
shoreline of the United Arab Emirates and Oman -- was in Iran's
territorial waters.
They are behaving like the Barbary Pirates.
Remember them? They were the ones who prompted President Thomas
Jefferson in 1802 to dispatch the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps because
they were raiding U.S. commercial ships plying the Mediterranean and
taking U.S. sailors as slaves. So we landed "on the shores of Tripoli," and the rest is history.
I say it's time to treat the Iranian regime the same way. Let's call it “the shores of Kharg and Lavan Island.”
Leader Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly told his followers that there was no way he would agree to send Iran's stockpile of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) out of the country.
President Trump said that's not what the negotiators told him. But alas, all he knows is what the negotiators tell him.
The Iranians are clearly not negotiating in good faith, and in my
view -- I know my Iranians -- they never will. Why? Because they are
terrorists.
The only good news this week has been reports from inside Iran of growing tensions between the IRGC and the artesh, Iran's conventional army. How credible those reports are, alas, is anyone's guess. But they are persistent.
So is the recent video of Hamid Resai, a cleric and member of
parliament, who questioned the government decision-making process and
even the legitimacy of the new Supreme Leader in a public address.
So what is the plan?
The president seems willing to give the Iranians a bit more time to come to their senses. How much is anyone's guess.
They have already filled the oil storage tanks at Kharg Island and have been bringing thirty-year old crude carriers out of mothballs to serve as floating storage so they can keep on pumping oil.
The Saudis called the president this week and asked him to delay any return to hostilities until the end of the annual hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) which begins on May 25) and extends through Friday, May 29.
The Iranians have said they are preparing to launch a pre-emptive strike -- presumably against the UAE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia -- if they sense the U.S. and its allies are preparing to resume hostilities.
Perhaps they don't know what the centuries-old U.S. military term "locked and loaded" means.
The president has indicated that we have been learning a trick or two from the Ukrainians, and that our forces used the past month's ceasefire to install Ukrainian (and U.S.) counter-drone technology in theater to protect the oil fields, refineries, storage tanks, and pipelines on the Arab side of the Gulf.
Presumably, those protections will extend to the Gulf Arabs' massive desalination plants as well.
Those desalination plants could present an even more tempting target than the oil fields to an Iranian regime that sees itself going down. If they were taken out, it would be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.
Such an attack by Iran would just solidify the impression that they have become the Barbary Pirates of the 21st century. It would also unify all the Gulf Arabs with the United States and Israel against them.
Image: U.S. Navy
Kenneth R. Timmerman's 14th book of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered from Amazon.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/the_new_barbary_pirates.html
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