A demonstration and an offer of peace -- that's the way President Donald Trump handled the initial strikes against Iran back in late February and early March, according to one Iranian official.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says in a new documentary that he was surprised by a missile strike against the compound he was sitting in outside the Iranian city of Tehran, in which Israeli weapons destroyed one portion of the building -- the portion in which the supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini was sitting -- while the other portion in which Abbas was sitting, remained unharmed.
"That is President Trump’s whole doctrine in a single strike — he does not want a war of occupation, he wants to show that the United States can reach the center of a hostile regime with precision and then offer it a way out," Mohammed said, referring to an offer President Trump made after the airstrike for peace negotiations.
There were 39 others killed in those initial strikes by Israel and the United States on February 28th, the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, most of them Iranian leaders such as Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh and IRGC Commander Mohammed Pakpour, among many others.
But the precision of the US-Israeli strikes that killed the Ayatollah Khameini show the intricate planning the US possesses, Mohammed said in the documentary recently aired on the Lebanon-based, Hezbollah-backed Al Mayadeen television network, and the mistaken hubris of Iranian leaders who refused American offers to negotiate for peace.
"The real story is not that Iran is strong," Mohammed continued. "It was shown the precision of American power and the door was held open, and it chose to widen the war instead."