Some in the Islamic Republic have tried to make an international incident out of a simple transcription error last Wednesday.
In a television interview, Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif said the UN sanctions on Iran should be lifted if the Islamic Republic agrees “to do something at Arak,” the site of a plutonium-based nuclear reactor now under construction.
But both the state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) and the Fars news agency, believed owned by the Pasdaran, misheard Zarif and thought he said “Iraq” rather than “Arak.”
Reuters and Agence France Presse saw the Mehr and Fars reports and sent stories all around the world saying Zarif had demanded that UN sanctions be lifted if Iran was to cooperate with the world in doing something about the advances of the Islamic State troops in Iraq.
It only took a few hours for the transcription error to be discovered and corrected and no harm was done.
But the Iranian Foreign Ministry couldn’t let the minor incident pass without shouting about it. Spokeswoman Marzi-yeh Afkham blamed the international news agencies for the error, not Fars and Mehr. She called the foreign reports “totally baseless,” but said not a critical word about the Iranian news agencies that made the error to begin with.
This is standard operating procedure in the Islamic Republic where foreign news agencies picking up erroneous news stories from the Iranian media are routinely blamed for the error rather than the Iranian news agencies that originated the error.
IRNA’s story on Zarif’s interview said: “If we agree to do something in Iraq, the other side in the [nuclear] negotiations will need to do something in return. All the sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear activities should be lifted in return for its help in Iraq.”
The US State Department, however, was watching Zarif’s TV interview and didn’t make the error. Spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “We’ve looked at the language a couple of times and think he was not linking, in that specific quote, fighting ISIS in Iraq to the lifting of Western sanctions. He was talking about making progress on Arak, the nuclear facility…. Our Farsi speakers have taken a bunch of looks at it.”
The Fars news agency never admitted to its error. It reported, “Several Western news agencies, including AFP and Reuters, misquoted Zarif’s comments by substituting the word ‘Iraq’ for ‘Arak,’ which the foreign minister had actually used.”
And PressTV, the English-language arm of state broadcasting, made a giant conspiracy out of the simple goof. It said, “Western media have twisted” Zarif’s remarks. It accused AFP and Reuters of having “distorted Zarif’s comments.”
It dismissed the thought that there could have been a simple transcription error. “The final sounds of ‘Arak’ and ‘Iraq’ are quite distinct from each other in Farsi and distinguishable.” The final sounds are indeed different, but can easily be confused if not enunciated.
All of this left wide open the question of what point Zarif was trying to make to begin with. On Saturday, Zarif again addressed the issue and was quoted as saying, “In any deal the P5+1 member states must commit to removing the sanctions. The condition for a final agreement is the removal of sanctions against Iran at the UN Security Council by passing a resolution.”
But that is not a demand by Iran. It is simply a statement of what was agreed to last November in the Joint Plan of Action that set up the talks searching for a comprehensive solution to the nuclear dispute. That plan states: “This comprehensive solution would involve a reciprocal, step-by-step process and would produce the comprehensive lifting of all UN Security Council sanctions, as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program.”
But, oddly, Zarif only mentioned UN sanctions and not the much tougher US and EU sanctions. Some wondered if he was conceding a point US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman made a few weeks ago, when she said the US would not lift its sanctions on signing an agreement but only suspend them bit-by-bit over time as Iran was seen to comply with the agreement. Zarif may be accepting that and trying to get Iranian critics to shift attention to a demand that all UN sanctions be ended immediately when the agreement takes effect.