Saudi Arabia urged US to bomb Iran ahead of nuclear deal: John Kerry
Shares
WASHINGTON - The former US secretary of state, John Kerry, says Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt urged Washington to “bomb Iran” before the conclusion of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world countries, with Tel Aviv pushing harder than the rest, Press TV has reported.
Speaking at a forum in Washington on Tuesday, Kerry, one of the architects of the multinational nuclear pact, defended the international document and criticized the new US administration for seeking to undermine it, Israeli media reported.
“Each of them said to me, you have to bomb Iran, it’s the only thing they are going to understand,” he said, referring to former Saudi monarch King Abdullah, ex-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu was “genuinely agitating toward action,” he added.
But that was “a trap,” he said, noting that the same Arab countries would have publicly criticized the United States if it had chosen to go for military action against the Islamic Republic.
Kerry said the proposals came to him when he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a post he filled from 2009 until early 2013.
Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China – plus Germany signed the agreement on July 14, 2015 and started implementing it on January 16, 2016.
