Oman's Foreign Minister Said Badr bin Hamad bin Hamud Albusaidi, who played the role of mediator in the negotiations between Iran and the United States, accused the administration of US President Donald Trump of "allowing itself to be dragged" into the war by Israel at a stage when concluding an agreement seemed "truly achievable", Agence France-Presse reported, BTA reported.
In a statement published today for the British publication "The Economist" Albusaidi abandoned his usual diplomatic reserve to more directly describe the conflict in Iran as a "catastrophe".
Washington and Tehran were "one step away from concluding a real agreement on the Iranian nuclear program for the past nine months", he said.
"It was a shock, but not a surprise, when on February 28, just hours after the most important round of negotiations, Israel and the United States once again launched an illegal operation against peace, which for a short time seemed truly possible", Albusaidi said.
He accused the administration of US President Donald Trump of "allowing itself to be drawn into this war", assured by Israeli officials that "after the initial attack, an unconditional surrender would quickly follow". In his words, the American side has thus reached "the biggest error in its judgment".
"Friends of the US must be able to tell the truth", stressed Albusaidi, calling on the US to acknowledge "the extent to which they have lost control of their own foreign policy".
The British daily "The Guardian" published on Tuesday this week that British National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell attended the latest round of US-Iranian talks on February 26 and considered that Tehran's proposals "had enough weight to avoid a premature war".
The first round of Iranian-American talks took place in June last year before the start of Israel's 12-day war, in which the US intervened by bombing Iranian nuclear program sites. The second round took place in February this year just before the start of the Israeli-American military operation that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, thus expanding the new war across the entire Middle East region, AFP recalls.