Iran

The Hill -   Iran has agreed to allow “non-hostile” vessels to pass through the Strait of Hormuz if they coordinate with Iranian authorities and meet safety regulations.  Multiple outlets reported Iran’s Foreign Ministry updated its stance in a letter to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which said it has circulated the statement with its members and nongovernmental organizations. The ministry also shared its note with the United Nations Security Council.

Iran said it has taken “necessary and proportionate measures” to prevent “aggressors and their supporters from exploiting” the strait to conduct hostilities against it. It specifically noted that any vessels, equipment and assets belonging to the U.S. and Israel and others participating in the “aggression” aren’t eligible.

The Hill -  Iran has dismissed an initial 15-point ceasefire proposal from the United States, according to the state-run Fars news agency.

“Iran does not accept a ceasefire,” an “informed person” told the outlet. “Basically, it is not logical to enter into such a process with those who violate the agreement.”

Pakistani officials confirmed Wednesday that the Islamic Republic had received the proposal, according to The Associated Press.

The Iranian military launched more strikes on Israel and the Persian Gulf region overnight, including an attack that sparked a massive fire at Kuwait International Airport.

Pakistani officials told the outlet that the peace plan centered on sanctions relief, civilian nuclear cooperation, missile limits, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program and monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Bloomberg - The US drafted a 15-point plan to help bring the Iran war to a close and delivered it via Pakistan, according to people familiar, but details of the proposal remain unclear. Iran’s long-range missile attacks continued to take a heavy toll as the US is ordered the deployment thousands more troops to the Middle East. China urged Iran to engage in talks as soon as possible.

NPR - President Trump is deploying thousands more American soldiers to the Middle East. At least 2,000 paratroopers have received mobilization orders, as confirmed by NPR. This move coincides with the president’s ongoing focus on diplomatic talks with Iran to end the war, despite Iran so far denying negotiations are taking place. Trump said yesterday that someone who is representing Iran offered some form of “a very significant prize” related to the Strait of Hormuz, but details surrounding what the offer was remain unclear.

• How Trump's Iran war objectives have shifted

What's News - But both sides are still far apart, Arab officials and a U.S. official familiar with the discussion said. Pakistan offered to mediate peace talks, an overture President Trump amplified on social media. The Pentagon is planning to deploy about 3,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, according to two U.S. officials. Meanwhile, Iran attacked Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as Tehran worried diplomatic attempts to secure a cease-fire could be a trap, and Israel hit a Russian-Iranian weapons smuggling route in the Caspian Sea, people familiar with the matter said. Read news and analysis from WSJ reporters on the ground. Oil prices rebounded above $100 today on fears that the war lacks an exit plan.

MS NOW -   President Donald Trump and his administration have taken the country to war in an astonishingly slipshod manner. So much of what has gone wrong so far is the completely predictable result of the White House’s lack of planning, misplaced hubris and erroneous assumptions about what would happen once the U.S. attacked Iran. 

Yet for all the obvious mistakes made by Trump and his advisers, the most glaring is that neither Trump nor his aides offered a clear explanation for what Iran could do to forestall an attack — and once military action began, to stop it.

Usually when you start a war, you give the enemy a sense of what needs to happen for the fighting to end. That simply hasn’t happened. At the outset of hostilities, Trump said the war would end if Iran would utter “those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” Never mind that Iranian leaders have repeatedly said this, including the day the war started. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about the current conflict is how few of the military strikes appear to have targeted Iran’s nuclear program — the nominal reason for going to war in the first place.

Jamelle Boule, NY Times -    If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself, it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning, or even basic strategic thinking, that has gone into it.

Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America’s Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America’s European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support.

It appears that both the president and the White House expected token resistance, followed by the collapse of the Iranian regime, the installation of a pro-American government — or at least one we could tolerate — and a return to the status quo ante: a replay, in essence, of the president’s first intervention of the year, in Venezuela. Now that this replay fantasy has collided with a more complex, indeterminate and difficult reality, Trump is unable to explain his objectives or even give the country a sense of when the war might end. He told Fox News radio that he would “feel it in my bones.” Let’s just say that that is a far cry from traditional political leadership during wartime.  More