Jeremy Scahill

And again, this is Iran's narrative.

We're going to see what happens when we see the formal text.

But what they're claiming is that there was a flurry of activity.

The mediators on behalf of Trump were begging the Iranians not to actually bomb Israel.

And the Iranians claim that they were able to win some last minute concessions in some of the language.

One of them involved Israel.

a more swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the pullback of some American military assets from the region.

The other is that they say that mediators told them that the United States was going to compel the Israelis to pull their troops out of southern Lebanon.

That was not in the draft text that I saw a few days ago.

If the Iranian version of this is right,

What they're saying is that Trump is saying he's going to force the Israelis to pull out of southern Lebanon.

And what's most significant, I think, about the structure of this proposed memorandum of understanding is that the Iranians seem to have been able to build in terms that if the United States doesn't complete them or enforce them, the Iranians can say, well, then we're not going to move toward the 60 days of negotiations on the nuclear issue.

On a basic surface level, if you look at this, this does look

largely like a Trump capitulation because the Strait of Hormuz was open before.

This idea that it's some great victory to get the Iranians to say that they won't develop or seek in any way to acquire a nuclear weapon.

If you go back and read the preamble to the 2015 JCPOA, that was in there.

And so on one level, you can look at this and say,

The Iranians have managed to set things back to the state that they were prior to the war, but with more leverage.

On the other side, Iranians' prize here would be a comprehensive lifting of sanctions.

Yes, they're going to get some of their assets unfrozen, but it's really a relatively small amount of money compared to what they would get