On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Briefing,” NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel stated that Iranian officials told him “they didn’t want a conflict,” and “There are hardliners in Iran who were stressing that this was a waste of time, that the U.S. was just trying to fool Iran, was playing to sort of expose their weaknesses, that they would be duped in the end, that the Iranians shouldn’t go down this path, and those hardliners will be proven right.”
Engel said, “[T]he Iranians made it clear to me — both the Iranian people and the Iranian government — that they wanted to avoid this. They were engaged in the peace talks with the Trump administration in the hopes of avoiding this exact scenario. … The government officials told me, repeatedly, they didn’t want a conflict, they wanted to reach a negotiated settlement.”
He added that it’s “very likely that Iran will retaliate, because the Iranian government was also somewhat divided over this negotiated process. There are hardliners in Iran who were stressing that this was a waste of time, that the U.S. was just trying to fool Iran, was playing to sort of expose their weaknesses, that they would be duped in the end, that the Iranians shouldn’t go down this path, and those hardliners will be proven right. Those who were pushing for negotiations are going to be in a very difficult position right now in Iran when they see what has just happened and what is apparently still going to be happening. So, it seems very likely that Iran will respond, if only because of the domestic politics that it faces, because there are hardliners who said that this was the result that was coming, that this was something that Prime Minister Netanyahu was always going to do, and that the negotiations were fig leaf cover for this.”
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