As the war with Iran enters week number three, the left wing media has managed to keep up the narrative that it is a war that we can not win, a war that will have chilling effects on our homeland both economically and otherwise, and perhaps the most hyped narrative, a war that should never have have been started by President Trump. That last point was discussed Saturday on MS NOW's Velshi.
Ali Velshi played part of an interview that fellow MS NOW Host Ayman Mohyeldin conducted earlier that morning with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who represented Iran in the three way talks with the U.S. and Oman in the days leading up to the start of the war, and questioned the honesty of our men in the room.
MOHYELDIN: Do you believe Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were good faith negotiators conveying accurate information back to the White House about Iran's position during these negotiations? There's been some reports that you shouted at Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that you threatened that you had enriched uranium to make 11 nuclear weapons. I want you to set the record straight on on those negotiations in the final days before the war.
ARAGHCHI: Well, I don't know what they have conveyed to their boss. What I know is that on 26th February, when we met in Geneva, we were able to make a good progress as Omani Foreign Minister the intermediary said it was a significant progress....They want to justify and unjustifiable act of aggression. So they are trying to make some excuses for themselves. I never said that we are going to make bombs.... We are ready to dilute them to down, blend them into lower degrees.... But how they have interpreted that, I don't know, maybe, maybe because the lack of enough knowledge, maybe because of, you know, their intentions to justify, as I said, the act of aggression which cannot be justified.
So Mohyeldin trusts a spokesman for a tyrannical regime that's slaughtered thousands of protesters as the straight shooter in any negotiation, not the Trump team.
That account is not how Witkoff heard it. And as he began his interview with Ben Rhodes, former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor, and MS NOW Contributor, Velshi failed to mention that Rhodes, according to a 2016 House Oversight Committee Report, "made misleading statements about the ability of inspectors to have “anytime, anywhere” access to Iranian nuclear facilities" under the JCPOA which President Trump withdrew from in 2018. Nor did he mention the $400 million given by Obama to Iran in 2016. And Rhodes didn't disappoint, eventually praising Araghchi, while trashing Witkoff and Kushner, after Velshi made a surprising remark about Araghchi.
VELSHI: You know this, but the the Iranian diplomatic corps and their foreign ministers tend to be very sophisticated. And so it becomes hard to know what they're whether what they're saying is true or not, it becomes hard to parse that. From day one of this war, we've had conflicting reports about what happened in Geneva between the Americans, the Omanis and the Iranians. The Omanis seemed to back up the the Iranian, the Iranian position that there was progress being made. How do you interpret that exchange that Ayman just had with the Foreign Minister?
RHODES: I mean, it's, it's pretty plausible to me, Ali, in part because it's backed up by other information. And first of all, Araghchi the Iranian Foreign Minister, he was the lead negotiator for the Iranians during the negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, under the Obama administration. He's been and I this is relevant because, number one, he's been in negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program for well over a decade, right. Steve Witkoff was, you know, selling real estate like a year and a half ago, right.
And Araghchi also was a part of a government that could be tough negotiators. They could have shifting positions, but they actually kept their commitments under the JCPOA. Right. It was Trump who pulled out of it. So this is a guy who knows what he's talking about. On the substance of nuclear negotiations, much more than Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who found themselves in that room for reasons that we still don't understand. Were they just there as a smokescreen because Trump was going to bomb all along? Certainly feels that way to me, Ali, because we were moving the largest military force to the region since the Iraq war while this negotiation was going on. Right. So you don't have to like Araghchi's politics to think he's a more credible voice on these issues than Witkoff, who seemed to not know what the International Atomic Energy Agency was before he walked into this negotiation.
We are at war, and treating the authoritarian enemy as the more credible source of information in all this is simply obscene.
