Vice President Vance has bragged about “the deconfliction channel” Washington and Tehran agreed to set up during talks in Switzerland. Representatives from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the US Army’s Central Command are to sit together — where else? — in Qatar: “One of the things we wanted to come out with [was a] channel on the Iranian side [for reducing conflict], which we did,” Vance said in an interview with UnHerd, which took place while Vance flew back from the talks in Switzerland on Monday.
“They were like, ‘OK, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes,” Vance said.
The American military “hanging out” with a designated foreign terrorist organization should be big news, but I haven’t seen much about it in the American media. I read about it here in the Times of Israel.
There should be a whole lotta deconflictin’ goin’ on with Vance’s new IRGC buddies. The New York Post reports this morning that Iran claims to have launched a series of retaliatory strikes on US military assets in Kuwait and Bahrain Saturday night and Sunday morning — after the US hit them earlier in the day as part of a rising series of strikes and counter-strikes. CNBC has more here.
The Iranians continue to test President Trump. They want to take advantage of his intense desire for peace in the Strait by showing their intention to exert control over it. See the June 27 ISW Iran update (“Iran has continued to use force to try to deter the United States from undermining Iranian efforts to control the Strait of Hormuz”).
We were supposed to have resolved this issue for the immediate future with the Memorandum of Understanding. The thugs have reneged approximately since day one. How far will they go? Perhaps they think they can sell a peaceful resolution to us a third time with a little help from Vance’s friends in the “deconfliction channel.”
