Similarly, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Lindsey Graham addressed an open letter to the US president warning that "However, whatever nice words we may hear from Mr. Rouhani, it is Iranian action that matters."
Earlier this year, Menendez and Graham presented a resolution in the Senate urging Washington to give a green light for an Israeli military strike on Iran and for the US to provide "diplomatic, military and economic support" to the Israeli regime in the event of such an attack.
Their response to Rouhani's overtures dovetails with that of Israel. Last week, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a statement dismissing Rouhani's offers to negotiate. "The true test is not Rouhani's words, but rather the deeds of the Iranian regime, which continues to aggressively advance its nuclear program while Rouhani is giving interviews," it said.
Like the unsubstantiated charge that Syria used chemical weapons against its population, the allegations about the Iranian nuclear program have never been anything more than a pretext for aggression against Iran, which is viewed as an obstacle to the imposition of US imperialist hegemony over the oil-rich and strategically critical regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
Whatever negotiations Washington enters into will be aimed at extracting concessions that would further cripple Iran, leaving it more vulnerable to future US military intervention.
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