Begin To Doofus. My Minimal Contributions. Off To Tybee. One More Marble Slab In Our Tombstone and Other Missives.

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Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Senator Joe "Doofus"Biden, in June 1982, who threatened to cut off US aid to Israel:

“I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
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If it were up to Weissman, he would probably bring perjury charges against his recent boss. (See 1 below.)
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Off to Tybee for 45th year.

For the past few days, though the weather has been clear,  our home has been hit by three named  tornadoes - Blake, Dagny and Stella.  Max has also been here but he just cries, eats, poops and sleeps.

My contribution to helping Lynn and Tamara has been imperceptible. I did watch Blake bathe one evening in our whirlpool tub. However, my main job was to go around and turn off lights.
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I always maintained Oslo would be a disaster. (See 2 below.)
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Why the U.N is scandalous and amoral.  It reflects the world and embodies the nations that have caused nothing but tragedy. (See 3 below.)
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Another take on The Mueller Tragedy. (See 4 below.)
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Iran: Stop the squeeze please? (See 5 below.)
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A last departing thought.

One day I suspect we will be in a confrontation with China.  Should that occur, and we continue to spend beyond our means, we will be in need of additional funding to finance any such event.  What does that mean if the nation we are confronting is our biggest creditor and purchaser of our debt. This is just another reason why the "D.C spending whores" must be thrown out and replaced by those who are more like Sen. Kennedy of La.  Kennedy is a wise "ole" country boy who lives by his principles. 

Nations are simply a composite of many family dinner tables.  If you eat beyond your means and spend beyond your means there will be a reckoning day and that generally occurs when you are at your most vulnerable.

I am no economist but I know a financially undisciplined nation is eventually doomed.

The  recently agreed upon budget is simply one more slab of marble in our future tombstone.
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Dick
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1) Did Mueller PERJURE Himself?

While under oath, Robert Mueller indicated that he was not “familiar” with Fusion GPS being the firm that produced the Steele dossier which sparked the whole Russia investigation. The Daily Caller reports:

Former special counsel Robert Mueller said Wednesday that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier. 

Mueller revealed his surprising lack of familiarity with the firm during an exchange with Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot, a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee.

“When you talk about the firm that produced the Steele reporting, the name of the firm that produced that was Fusion GPS, is that correct?” Chabot asked.

“I’m not familiar with that,” said Mueller, while scouring through his 448-page report of the Russia probe.

Either Robert Mueller is lying, in which case his entire report is compromised… or he is a puppet that his Democrat deputies have been keeping in the dark and confirms the theory that this whole investigation was a political hit job to refight the 2016 election on the part of the swamp.

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2) An Israeli Liberal Says That Palestinians Killed Oslo and the Hope for Peace

One of the two original architects of the Oslo Accords, Yair Hirschfeld, performed a fascinating autopsy in Fathom to explain the failure of the agreements. He wrote his piece in response to the blame-Israel-first book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History From Camp David to Oslo by Seth Anziska

Hirshfeld, for those who don’t know, is a secular left-wing academic sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and a believer in the two-state solution, which makes his analysis especially trenchant.

Like the Palestinians and so many of their apologists, Anziska believes peace can be achieved if Israel ends the “occupation.” The response of Palestinians to this idea is likely one you have never heard before. According to Hirschfeld, when he, Shimon Peres, and Yossi Beilin asked Palestinians whether Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, they were told, “We Palestinians will first kill each other, and then we will start to kill you.” This is what many Jews believe, and a major reason for Israel’s reluctance to offer the Palestinians additional territorial concessions, which also explains their pessimism about the prospects for peace.

I have long argued that the Palestinians were foolish to reject Menachem Begin’s autonomy offer at Camp David, because it would have put them on an almost certain path to statehood and stymied the settlement movement. Hirschfeld says that Peres made this point to the Palestinians. “‘You would obtain a veto [he later changed the word to ‘vote’ on the transcript] on what we do in the West Bank and Gaza,’” he said, which would have prevented the number of settlers from growing from 6,000 to 450,000 today (Hirschfeld says 600,000, apparently counting East Jerusalem Jews as settlers).

Hirschfeld relates that Israel and Jordan feared the creation of an irredentist Palestine state that would be influenced by jihadists. Interestingly, he quotes Peres’ statement from his memoir, Battling for Peace, where the dreamer had a rather apocalyptic vision that he largely ignored in the 1990s:

In our view, a Palestinian state, though demilitarized at first, would over time inevitably strive to build up a military strength of its own, and the international community, depending upon massive Second and Third World support at the United Nations, would do nothing to stop it. That army, eventually, would be deployed at the very gates of Jerusalem and down the entire, narrow length of Israel. It would pose a constant threat to our security and to the peace and stability of the region.

Read that paragraph again.

It exposes one of the major fallacies of the advocates of a Palestinian state — namely, that it can be demilitarized, and, consequently, pose no threat to Israel. I’ve always found this talking point preposterous. The Zionists would have never accepted demilitarization; in fact, they didn’t in the 1940s, and the Palestinians should not be expected to do so either. Regardless, they cannot be prevented from arming themselves as we’ve seen from Israel’s inability to disarm Hamas.

Hirschfeld argued that it was necessary “to break the vicious circle of violence,” which he proposed to do by creating a Middle Eastern Security Organization and a Middle Eastern Economic Community for Water, Energy, and Trade, which he said were necessary before solving the core issues of the conflict.

Sounds a lot like the logic behind the much-maligned Peace to Prosperity plan that the Trump administration presented in Bahrain, doesn’t it?

According to Hirschfeld:

We believed that in order to attract foreign investment, develop a flourishing economy, and establish the necessary state institutions, the Palestinian people have a vested self-interest to give up armed resistance, marginalize militant forces within the Palestinian political system, and build a functioning working relationship with all neighbors, including of course, Israel.

A natural response would be that this approach failed during Oslo, so why should Trump expect it to work now?

Hirschfeld listed a series of reasons for the failure of Oslo:

1. Arafat undermined the “local” leadership that was creating the political infrastructure for statehood.
2. Decades before the antisemitic BDS movement was created, the Palestinians adopted the policy of “anti-normalization.”
3. The Palestinians disowned the Beilin-Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) agreement, which offered a solution to the status of Jerusalem by proposing that the Palestinian capital be established in the suburb of Abu Dis (where the Palestinians subsequently built a parliament building that stands empty today).
4. The economic development plan failed in part because it was co-opted by Yasser Arafat, who undermined the efforts of other Palestinians and ultimately stole hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid.
5. Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians were supposed to cooperate to provide security that would give Israel the confidence to withdraw from the West Bank; however, the Palestinians balked.
6. After President Clinton and Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a state in roughly 98 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, Arafat rejected the deal.
7. The second intifada resulted in more than 1,000 Israeli deaths, devastated the economy, traumatized the public, and “destroyed the fabric of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.”
8. The Palestinians wasted the opportunity to build the infrastructure for a state following the disengagement from Gaza. Hirschfeld leaves out the impact of the violence that followed, as terror and rocket attacks escalated from Gaza, and the extremists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad seized control of the area from the Palestinian Authority. This marked the death of the land for peace formula, and shifted the Israeli electorate to the right, bringing about the collapse of the political left and the ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu.
9. In 2008, Ehud Olmert met with Abbas numerous times and offered him a deal like the one proposed to Arafat in 2000. Abbas rejected it by never giving an answer. Hirschfeld fails to mention that this was at least the eighth time the Palestinians had rejected an offer of statehood.
10. The Palestinians have never accepted any American peace initiative and, during the Obama administration, Abbas refused to negotiate with Netanyahu. Hirschfeld points out that Abbas rejected proposals floated by John Kerry and the Quartet, and declared his opposition to Trump’s “ultimate deal” before seeing it.
11.  As Hirschfeld notes, the entire territorial conflict is limited to just 10 percent of the West Bank. Deciding its fate should not be impossible. He concludes, however, that “the main task of establishing the State of Palestine falls upon the Palestinian leadership and people. Saying ‘no’ to every Israeli proposal or engaging in violence does not build a state. It has only caused tragedies and repeated setbacks.”
12. 
    

Mitchell Bard is Executive Director of AICE and Jewish Virtual Library.

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3) UN Singles Out Israel as World’s Only

Violator of Women’s Rights; Iran, Saudi 

Arabia & Yemen Among the Voters

GENEVA, July 24, 2019 — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan were among members of the UN’s 54-nation economic and social council, a principal organ of the world body, who voted to single out and condemn Israel yesterday as the only country in the world that violates women’s rights.

The Jewish state was harshly and repeatedly condemned in a resolution, adopted 40 to 2 with 9 abstentions and 3 absent (see breakdown below), for allegedly being the “major obstacle” for Palestinian women “with regard to their advancement, self-reliance, and integration in the development of their society.”

Out of 20 items on the UN Economic and Social Council’s 2018-2019 agenda, only one — Item No. 16 against Israel — focuses on condemning a specific country. All the other focus areas concern global topics such as disaster relief assistance and the use of science and technology for development.

The resolution completely ignores how Palestinian women’s rights are impacted by their own governing authorities—the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza—nor does it mention how women are discriminated against within patriarchal Palestinian society.

Moreover, ECOSOC concluded its annual session by ignoring the world’s worst abusers of women’s rights, refusing to pass a single resolution on the situation of women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, or DR Congo, all of which ranked in the top ten worst countries in last year’s Global Gender Gap Report, produced by the World Economic Forum.

Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, condemned the delegates’ abuse of the UN body as a forum to target Israel.

“The UN reached new heights of absurdity by singling out Israel alone on women’s rights, yet saying nothing on Iran holding women’s rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh behind bars, Saudi Arabia jailing and torturing women’s rights activists, and subjugating women under harsh male guardianship laws, or on Yemen denying women hospital treatment without the permission of a male relative,” Neuer said.

“When you have Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen among the UN council members accusing Israel of violating women’s rights, you are in the theater of the absurd.”

Shortly after adopting the text, ECOSOC then condemned Israel in a second resolution for allegedly violating the economic and social rights of Palestinians.

Discussion of the resolutions followed the presentation of a biased report by Tarik Alami, representative of the Beirut-based Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, the UN regional body for the Middle East that includes 18 Arab states, but not Israel. Alami accused Israel of preventing Syria and the Palestinian Authority from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Voting Record: Resolution Condemning Israel for Violating Women’s Rights

YES: Andorra, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Benin, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Mali, Malta, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, South Korea, Russia, St. Vincent, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yemen.

NO: United States and Canada

ABSTAIN: Brazil, Cameroon, Germany, Jamaica, Mexico, Romania, Togo, Ukraine, and United Kingdom

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4)

Robert Mueller’s Beltway Cover-Up

By using the justice system as a political weapon, Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe: We are not all equal under one law.

News that special counselor Robert Mueller has turned his attention to Erik Prince’s January 11, 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian banker, a Lebanese-American political fixer, and officials from the United Arab Emirates, helps clarify the nature of Mueller’s work. It’s not an investigation that the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading—rather, it’s a cover-up.

After all, Mueller took his job not at the behest of the man who by all accounts he is likely to professionally and personally disdain, Donald Trump, but of the blue-chip Beltway elite of which he is a charter member. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him nearly a year ago to lead an investigation without parameters. That’s because Mueller’s job is to obscure the abuses of the US surveillance apparatus that occurred under the Obama administration.

The fact that someone at the level of former FBI director was called in to sweep up the mess left by bad actors in the bureau and Central Intelligence Agency and other parts of the intelligence bureaucracy suggests that the problems are even worse than previously thought. And that means the constituency for Mueller’s political intervention is enormous.

Mueller is said to believe that the Prince meeting was to set up a back channel with the Kremlin. But that makes no sense. According to the foundational text of the collusion narrative, the dossier allegedly written by former British spy Christopher Steele, the Kremlin had cultivated Trump himself for years. So what’s the purpose of a back channel, when Vladimir Putin already had a key to the front door of Mar-a-Lago?

Further, the collusion thesis holds that the Trump circle teamed with high-level Russian officials for the purpose of winning the 2016 election. How does a meeting that Erik Prince had a week before Trump’s inauguration advance the crooked election victory plot? It doesn’t—it contradicts it.

Erik Prince may well be involved in questionable practices that would make people’s blood run cold. For one thing, he owns and operates a private army, which he rents to unsavory characters—as well as the US government. Maybe Prince was trying to drum up some sort of business with Russia, energy-related, or mercenary-related. Who knows?

The idea that whenever anyone who supported Trump, or even voted for him, met with a Russian national the dish on the menu was treason is the stuff of Cold War B-movies. But it is also evidence of something more than prosecutorial overreach. The fact that Mueller has zeroed in on Prince points to a key motive behind his ongoing investigation.

Prince was thrown into the middle of Russiagate after an April 3, 2017 Washington Post story reported his meeting with the Russian banker. But how did anyone know about the meeting? After the story came out, Prince said he was shown “specific evidence” by sources from the intelligence community that the information was swept up in the collection of electronic communications and his identity was unmasked. The US official or officials who gave his name to the Post broke the law when they leaked classified intelligence. “Unless The Washington Post has somehow miraculously recruited the bartender of a hotel in the Seychelles,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee in December, “the only way that’s happening is through SIGINT [signals intelligence].”

Mueller presumably knows whether Prince’s name was indeed unmasked and then leaked to the press—and that the leak was a crime. Mueller certainly knows that most of the case he has regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election was built by abuses of the foreign intelligence surveillance apparatus and other related crimes that are punishable with jail time. The identity of Trump’s short-tenured National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was swept up and leaked to the press in the same way as Prince’s. It was leaked to the same newspaper, the Washington Post.

As I explained last week, the identity of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was also unmasked from intelligence intercepts and leaked to the Washington Post. The fact that the FBI had secured a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page was also leaked to the Post. The warrant on Page was secured on the basis of the findings in the Steele dossier, an unverified piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee.

As director of the FBI during the post-9/11 period, when foreign intelligence surveillance and its abuses made regular front-page headlines, Muller knows exactly how the system can be abused—and what the penalties are. He also recognizes that Russiagate is evidence of how it was abused, and who abused it—including some of the same people he worked with during his 12-year tenure as FBI director.

The purpose of the Mueller inquiry is therefore not to investigate the mostly ludicrous-seeming charges in the Steele dossier, but to protect the institution of the FBI, former colleagues, as well as the national security surveillance system. Therefore the inquiry has to cover up the sinful origins of the collusion narrative itself—which was born in repeated abuses of power and subsequent crimes committed by US officials in the intelligence bureaucracy and the Obama administration.

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Robert Mueller is a man of integrity, an honorable public servant—both Republicans and Democrats say so. Yes, Mueller served the American public and helped protect it at a time when American nerves were frayed. And his tenure as FBI director shows signs of how that strain took a toll on him both personally and professionally.

Mueller oversaw one of the bureau’s biggest cases ever, the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and infected another 17. “The director was always the leader of the anthrax investigation, period,” the former head of the FBI’s Washington field office Michael Mason told the Los Angeles Times. Focusing on a virologist named Steven Hatfill, Mueller was certain he had the right man. As he told congressional leaders in January 2003, a bloodhound had identified Hatfill as the terrorist. Hatfill was cleared in 2008, and won a $5.8 million settlement from the U.S. government. Having wasted millions of dollars without ever arresting the actual criminal, Mueller refused to ever admit that he or the bureau had erred.

Mueller critics cite the Hatfill case as evidence of his sometimes unhealthy zeal and refusal to change course in spite of the facts. Another episode from the post-9/11 period goes directly to the heart of the investigation he is currently conducting.

In March 2004, Mueller’s longtime colleague and friend James Comey raced to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft to prevent the then Attorney General from reauthorizing a surveillance program. According to a 2007 Washington Postaccount, Mueller was one among several US officials, along with then deputy attorney general Comey, who threatened to resign if the George W. Bush White House reauthorized a “warrantless eavesdropping program.” The program allowed, explains the Post, “the NSA to monitor e-mails and telephone calls between the United States and overseas if one party was believed linked to terrorist groups.”

Or, that’s the standard account. A 2013 article by Julian Sanchez argues that Mueller and Comey’s concerns were related to a different program authorizing the indiscriminate collection of Internet metadata, even where there were no overseas connections. They believed the program could not be defended by the legal rationale employed by the Bush White House. The Bush administration solved the problem by putting that program under a different authority.

In other words, Mueller did not object to the ethical and political concerns the program should rightly raise in a democracy, only its legal basis for existing. That program existed until 2011. The program that the Post and other media believe Mueller was willing to resign over, the warrantless monitoring of e-mails and telephone calls between the United States and overseas, continued in some forms until 2015.

Some Mueller critics suggest that in threatening to resign he was simply showboating. Under his tenure, they note, the FBI was responsible for countless surveillance abuses.

Past and present FBI officials who broke the law may be seen to have the largest stake in Mueller’s investigation continuing as long as possible. The inquiry has plenty of other constituencies as well. National security hawks are rightly worried that the abuses of foreign intelligence surveillance may jeopardize programs that are designed to keep Americans safe from terrorism. For the time being, Mueller’s probe has managed to help obscure the fact those programs have sometimes been used to spy on Americans.

The press also has an interest in prolonging the Mueller probe. Russiagate is good for business, mesmerizing viewers with a grand political spectacle featuring one of the media’s biggest draws for the last several decades—Donald Trump, the boss villain who is now in the White House. Maybe most prominent among the interested media organizations is the paper that has colluded with lawbreakers in publishing the names of US persons whose identities have been illegally leaked by intelligence officials and political operatives—the Washington Post.

Coincidentally, the owner of the Post also has a major stake in letting Mueller do his work to preserve America’s surveillance and spying complex. In 2013, the same year that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought the paper that broke Watergate for $250 million, Amazon Web Services landed a $600 million deal with the US intelligence community. According to a 2017 Washington Post story, AWS created a “cloud storage service designed to handle classified information for U.S. spy agencies,” including the CIA. The cloud technology  was to “usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily.”

And now some intelligence and data experts believe that the CIA cloud is how the Obama administration could have minimized its trail after unmasking US persons. “The NSA database, with its large and ongoing collection of electronic communications, can be accessed through the NSA’s cloud,” says one former senior intelligence official. The NSA can audit it and find out if analysts are violating rules. The NSA does not audit the CIA’s cloud, which is audited by the CIA’s IT people and Amazon Web Services employees who are given security clearances. Says the former official: “There are people in the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Council staff who can move information from the NSA cloud into the CIA cloud. That seems the likeliest scenario to explain how Obama officials first unmasked US persons and then shared information without leaving a trail that could be audited independently, or immediately, at every step. Since unmasking, by itself, is authorized for lawful purposes, it’s the processing and sharing, as with Susan Rice’s spreadsheets, that tell us if the information was being misused.”

Presumably, the owner of Amazon is not eager to have Amazon customers see that the company with their credit card data and buying and viewing habits on file may have facilitated the US government’s spying on American citizens to advance a campaign of political warfare.

Mueller’s assembled constituents—from spies to political operatives, and from the press to big data/big business—must look something like what some on the left as well as the right have called the “Deep State,” a sinister-sounding phrase conjuring up dark images of cutthroat Turkish paramilitary operatives. But that’s not really what happened here—even the top spooks involved in Russiagate, like former CIA director John Brennan, have spent most of their careers inside Washington mastering nothing darker than the bureaucratic arts of ass-covering and blame-mongering.

These are the Beltway insiders whose privileges Trump threatened on the campaign trail. Sure, they told each other, what Trump said about immigrants was rotten. But the real issue was that Trump—a vulgar businessman, a bestselling author with a short attention-span who never read a book in his life—had denigrated them, honorable civil servants and reputable journalists who answer to a higher calling than a reality TV star. He called us losers. And then he declared that the Obama administration and the intelligence community were spying on him.

As an intelligence bureaucrat who was never held accountable for the enormous public failure that the Hatfill case represented, Robert Mueller was the natural choice to be the public face of a campaign designed to protect the interests of an unaccountable ruling class. The range of his inquiry is dictated not by the ostensible purpose of his appointment, but by the nature and scope of the abuses and crimes he’s covering up. Should the wheels of the Mueller probe ever stop grinding, his entire constituency immediately becomes vulnerable. The public will understand what happened, who’s responsible, and who covered it up.

That’s why the investigation can’t stop; it can only keep expanding. Let Mueller do his work, Democratic and Republican elites chant together, like a mystery cult. We don’t know what Mueller knows. Somewhere, someone must have committed a crime, or told a lie, and then something that Trump did or someone who worked for him did will prove that someone did something, or that someone lied to the people in charge of the cover-up.

The problem is that by using the justice system as a political weapon to attack the enemies of the country’s elite, Robert Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe. That in spite of all the fine rhetoric, we are not all equal under one law. There is in fact a privileged class, a ruling class that sees its own interests as identical with the public good, and never pays a price for its failures, its abuses, and its crimes.

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5)

Iran offers to return to nuclear deal even if U.S. doesn't

By TZVI JOFFRE

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has told French President Emmanuel Macron that the Islamic republic is ready to return to its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal if the US dials back sanctions, even without returning to the JCPOA deal, Radio Farda reported on Thursday.Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi conveyed the offer from Rouhani to Macron in Paris as an alternative to the "freeze-for-freeze" plan proposed by the French president. In Macron's plan, Iran would stop increasing its nuclear activities and the US would hold sanctions at the current level to allow for dialogue to resume, according to Politico.

In Rouhani's alternative plan, Iran would not demand that the US return to the JCPOA, but would expect sanctions on Iran's oil exports and international banking to be revised. In return, the Islamic republic would stop reducing its commitments to the nuclear deal, including exceeding the 3.67% uranium enrichment limit.

"If European countries stop wrong measures such as detaining an Iranian oil tanker at Gibraltar, they will see an appropriate response from Tehran," said Rouhani on Wednesday, referencing the seizure of the IranianGrace 1 oil tanker.Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed on Wednesday that the UK had sent a mediator to Iran to free the British-flagged Stena Impero oil tanker that was seized by IRGC forces last week. Britain denied the report.

In a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Rouhani said that Iran and other Gulf countries are in charge of maritime safety in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. "The Strait of Hormuz is no place for joking or playing with international regulations," said Rouhani.

"The world must be grateful to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps for securing the Persian Gulf," added the Iranian president.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced on Monday that the UK will also form a European-led maritime protection mission to support safe passage of both crew and cargo in the region. Discussions will be held later this week concerning how to best complement the plan with a recent US proposal for an international maritime coalition in the area.

The foreign secretary emphasized that the mission would be focused on “free navigation,” and would not be part of the “US maximum pressure policy on Iran,” as Britain is still committed to preserving the nuclear deal with Tehran.

“We have taken every available opportunity to reduce misunderstanding whilst standing by our rock-solid commitment to the international rule of law, which is the foundation of global peace and prosperity – but we must also react to the world around us as it is, and not how we would wish it to be,” said the foreign secretary in the House of Commons.

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