Washington DC [US], May 30 : Retired US Army Colonel and geopolitical risk advisor Douglas Macgregor on Saturday remained bewildered over the US' demand for Muslim countries to join the Abraham Accords.
Macgregor said in a conversation with ANI that joining the Abraham Accords is akin to genuflecting to Israel, and the question looms- why would countries like Saudi Arabia do that?
"Well, what does that mean? That means effectively bow, bend the knee to Israel. That would help me so much. Please, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Please, you know, whoever. Field Marshal, whatever. All these people. Doesn't matter. Please bend the knee to Israel for me. If you do that, then I can do things and we can get this over with. What incentive is there for any Muslim leader anywhere in the world today to do anything for Israel?" Macgregor said.
He said that the countries were baited of wealth if they joined the Gaza Board of Peace, and no one has talked about it since.
"Well, that's very meaningful. How much money have they made as a result of joining the board? I don't know. But that, you know, one billion dollars to join it. And then you were promised great wealth down the line. So everybody rushed up and then they saw what it really was. And since then, nobody's talked about it," he said.
Macgregor added that the Israeli military is overstretched, and the war has become an existential crisis for Israel.
"Keep in mind that the Israeli Defense Force is in a lot of trouble. Their ground force is overstretched. It's overwhelmed. It's exhausted. Their reservists are not showing up. The chief of the Israeli Defense Force tried to tell everyone, look, we're in a very serious position right now. We cannot continue on the path that we're on. But that doesn't make any difference to Netanyahu, along with Smotrich and Gvir. These people, they have, as we say in English, the bit between their teeth, and they're going to run and run and run this horse until it finishes or drops dead, because that's what they put themselves into. This has now become an existential fight for Israel," he said.
He referred to a popular cartoon depicting a gangster, underneath him written 'would you buy a used car from this man?' meaning, would you trust him? For Iran, he said, this is the issue of trust.
"Well, there used to be this funny cartoon, and it showed, I think, one of the world's most well-known gangsters, Al Capone, and the question beneath it was, he's pointing to an automobile, and said would you buy a used car from this man. So if you're in Tehran, and you look around your country, and you see the devastation that has been brought to your country, and you've dealt with these people in the past remember the Iranian government said, please don't send them back," he said.
"We don't want to talk to them. And what did we do? We sent them back. Why? Because they represent the people who are really in charge. So the question is, are you going to buy a used car from these people? I don't think so," Macgregor added.
His comments come as the Joint Maritime Information Centre (JMIC), a multinational body monitoring maritime security in the Indian Ocean said that the threat level in the Strait of Hormuz remains "critical" due to the ongoing US maritime blockade against Iran-linked port facilities.
The UKMTO Operations Centre shared the report in a post on X.
https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2060659162523095491?s=20
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would remove the blockade amid wobbling trust from Iran. Mohsen Rezaei, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said that Trump is "betraying diplomacy for the third time" by continuing a naval blockade imposed on Iran and making what he described as excessive demands in negotiations, as per Al Jazeera.