By Al Ahed Staff, Agencies
US President Donald Trump confirmed that he would be “honored” to meet Ayatollah Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei, newly-elected Leader of the Islamic Revolution, if a deal is reached to end the war between the two countries.
“I’d be honored to meet him,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, adding, “If we make a deal, it’s possible that I would meet… I’d be okay with that.”
The remarks come weeks after Ayatollah Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei was elected Leader of the Islamic Revolution by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, following the martyrdom of his father, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, in a cowardly US-“Israeli” strike targeting his residence in Tehran on February 28.
Trump’s expression of willingness to meet the new Leader marks a notable shift in tone, even as Washington continues to impose an illegal naval blockade on Iranian vessels and ports. Tehran has repeatedly slammed the act as a violation of ceasefire which took effect on April 8 in Islamabad.
Also on Thursday, Trump claimed that he had considered and ultimately rejected a covert special operations mission to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, citing the risks of a prolonged presence in a war zone.
“There was a time at the very beginning when we thought about doing that, because they would have not been watching, but they would have found out,” he said.
Trump invoked the memory of the 1980 failed US mission in Iran - widely associated with President Jimmy Carter’s political downfall - as the reason he stepped back.
“I didn’t want to be Jimmy Carter. I didn’t feel like being Jimmy Carter,” he told reporters, adding that retrieving Iran’s uranium would require weeks on the ground with heavy equipment.
“It’s not like Venezuela, like you go in, you’re there for a matter of minutes and you’re out and everybody’s waving goodbye,” Trump said. “You need massive equipment to airlift the equipment, and you’re in a war zone.”
His remarks comes as the US faced a strategic defeat in April following an attempt to have American troops in Isfahan, in early April.
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