Report: Qatar Offers Iran Deal to End War with U.S.

Mediators from Qatar reportedly presented Iran with a draft proposal to end its conflict with America and Israel on Sunday, but an Iranian official quickly dismissed the Qatari plan as “unacceptable.”

The existence of the Qatari proposal was revealed to Reuters on Wednesday by “an official briefed on the negotiations.” Reuters did not identify this source, except to say that the official was “not from Iran.”

The Qatari proposal included a “seven-day timeline addressing both Tehran’s and Washington’s concerns,” including “daily confidence-building steps that each side must take.”

The mediators said this plan could begin as early as next week, and would rely on third-party observers as “guarantors” to ensure both sides delivered on their promises.

An official who was from Iran told Reuters the Qatari plan was filled with “unacceptable ideas that did not amount to an offer.” Tehran had not formally rejected the proposal as of Wednesday afternoon.

On the day after Qatar gave its plan to Tehran for review, representatives from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan – the members of the trilateral Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed in August – paid an unusual visit to Tehran to discuss “de-escalation” with Iranian officials.

The visiting countries were ostensibly worried about renewed hostilities between Iran and the U.S./Israel partnership, but the Saudis clearly wanted Iran to make its proxies in Yemen, the Houthis, halt their missile and drone attacks on civilian targets in Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis claimed a missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura oil refinery on Tuesday, so if Iran told them to back down, there was no immediate sign of their compliance.

Qatari officials said on Tuesday they wanted Iran to stop threatening its neighbors, including Qatar, and halt its terrorist attacks on civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz to demonstrate goodwill. Tehran did not respond to this entreaty, so leaving ships in the Strait of Hormuz unmolested might have been one of the elements of Qatar’s peace plan that Iran summarily rejected.

Reuters noted that Iranian officials also seem pleased with their latest strategy to respond to further American or Israeli strikes by attacking undersea data cables, so they might not have felt any pressure to respond to Qatar’s mediation efforts.

The undersea cable scheme was disclosed to Reuters by two Iranian officials on Friday. They did not discuss the strategy in detail, except to say that Iran felt it could disrupt Internet and other communications across the Persian Gulf, and also repair crews from fixing the damage.

“If Iran is attacked, there will be no more red lines … from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones,” one of the officials said, warning the U.S. not to “play with fire.”

An official with Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) added some more dimension to the threat on Wednesday, claiming Iran had plans to disrupt seven major data cables running along the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz.

Internet security experts said such an attack could present regional difficulties, but not major global problems, because less than one percent of the world’s bandwidth passes through the Strait of Hormuz cables.

Another Iranian official threatened to attack data centers and A.I. research facilities across the Middle East as well as undersea cables, and said the owners of such expensive hardware should “hold Washington, not Tehran, responsible for any damage.”

On Wednesday, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi put forth his own vague proposal for a “Gulf Security Pact” that would include Iran and its paramilitary proxies in Iraq and Yemen. Oman was involved as a mediator during talks between the U.S. and Iran earlier this year, but does not currently hold any such capacity.

“The idea of a Gulf security architecture that doesn’t include Iran is inherently unstable, structurally unsound,” he said during a BBC radio interview.

“The U.S. and other friends can still be involved and can invest substantially more in the economic promise of the region. They can be real partners. It is time for a change of emphasis, a transition from the military only to the more lucrative economic sphere for all of us,” he added.