Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed the war has been won.A BBC Middle East expert has said Donald Trump “has lost control” of the war in Iran as America struggles to reach a deal to end the conflict.
Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international affairs editor, said the US president’s decision to launch attacks on Iran on February was “based on flawed assumptions”.
His comments came as America carried out strikes on Iranian military sites in response to the downing of a US helicopter in the Gulf.
The developments are the biggest threat so far to the uneasy ceasefire which has been in place since April.
Speaking on Radio 4′s Today programme, Bowen said: “Donald Trump likes to feel he is the master of all he surveys [but] it is absolutely clear he has lost control of the consequences of his decision to go to war.
“It was based on flawed assumptions about Iran’s weakness and its will to fight, and his assumption of easy victory, reinforced by what [Israeli president Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to have been telling him, meant that the whole thing was not properly thought through.”
Bowen said Iran any peace deal to include a recognition of their control of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as an end to sanctions which have been imposed on the Tehran regime.
But with Trump unwilling to agree to those terms, he said that could lead to “perma-crisis” in the Middle East with potentially terrible economic consequences for Britain and the rest of the world.
He said: “Unless the US is prepared to make concessions to it - and that is something Trump would be loathe to do because he doesn’t want to be compared to Barack Obama and the deal that he made with the Iranians – then what’s the other option?
“The other option is a long period potentially of an attempt to contain Iran and keep forces in the region. The risk is that would escalate in multiple dangerous ways, further destabilising the Middle East.”
“If they can’t do a deal with the Iranians, then either there is this attritional process of perma-crisis or a continuing, really dangerous time and that has awful implications for the economies of the United Kingdom and many other countries.”
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