November 29 2013
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi publicly and swiftly endorsed the nuclear deal signed Sunday with the Big Six before Iranian hardliners could mobilize to oppose it.
“The nuclear negotiating team should be thanked and appreciated for this achievement. God’s grace and the support of the Iranian nation were the reasons behind this success,” he said.
The speed with which Khamenehi endorsed the deal was unprecedented. Khamen-ehi’s normal modus operandi when anything big happens is to disappear and stay mum for days until he can assess public reactions in Iran.
But this time, Khamenehi was out in front, demonstrating that he was willing to expend some political capital to cement a deal with the major powers.
In a televised speech, President Rohani tried to make the deal palatable to Iranians by saying that the agreement meant that sanctions would soon crumble. That is an analysis created by hardliners in the United States who opposed the deal.
“The sanctions regime will begin to shatter with the (implementation) of this agreement,” Rohani said, adding that the talks in Geneva had sparked “cracks” in the structure of sanctions.
Whether they will crumble is at best debatable, but those both supporting and opposing the deal between the Big Six and Iran will be watching to see if there is any shift in compliance with the sanctions in the coming months.
Rohani also said, “Iran’s right to uranium enrichment on its soil was accepted in this nuclear deal.” He harped on that point. Actually, the agreement permits enrichment up to 5 percent to continue, but it does not recognise that Iran or any other country has any “right” to enrich—a technical point that many in the Islamic Republic have curiously chosen to make a central concern.
Rohani went way overboard in other parts of his speech as well. He said some of the banking restrictions on Iran would be lifted under the accord, which is not true. He was apparently trying to frame the return of some frozen Iranian assets as the lifting of banking restrictions, all of which will remain in place.
Misinformation was the name of the game. Both the Islamic Republic News Agency and the Mehr news agency reported that the agreement ends the sanctions on Iranian oil sales, a mistatement of huge proportions.
In a minor error, Rohani said that “more than 40 countries currently enrich.” Actually, only nine in addition to Iran do so: China, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, Britain and the United States.
The Tehran press—especially the Reformist part of it—was largely supportive, even enthusiastic about the agreement. But some hardline newspapers sniffed at the agreement. Oddly, the main issue they took up was Iran’s “right to enrich.”
Significantly, the critics have not—at least through the first two days after the agreement was signed—taken after the puny financial benefits Iran will gain. That would appear to be the weakest part of the deal from Iran’s standpoint.
The pro-reform Arman daily said, “Zarif must be given a gold medal,” while Aftab ran a full-page photo of Iran’s foreign minister with the headline: “Smiling diplomat, we thank you.”
“This is Iran; Everyone is happy,” the reformist Etemad said, highlighting that many people had stayed awake through the night to hear the news.
Among the two dozen newspapers, the hardline Kayhan and Vatan-e Emruz papers adopted a more critical tone.
Kayhan said the agreement had already been violated by “untrustworthy” Washington, pointing to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that nowhere in the deal is Iran’s so-called right to enrichment recognized. Interestingly, Kayhan did not feel it could attack the Rohani Administration for falsely saying the nuclear “right” was recognized. So, it went through the back door, informing its readers of the prevarification through its attack on Kerry.
Vatan-e Emruz’s headline read: “Zarif insists, Kerry denies” — in reference to whether Iran’s right to enrichment was enshrined in the accord.
In Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu denounced the agreement as a “bad deal,” while much of the media denounced Netanyahu. The right criticized him for failing to torpedo the deal while the left criticized him for risking relations with the United States by being downright nasty to President Obama in his criticism.
Around the Persian Gulf, to the surprise of many, all five Arab states issued statements supportive of the agreement, even Saudi Arabia, which said, “This agreement could be a first step toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear program.”
In Ottawa, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird did not criticize the Big Six for signing the deal but said Canada would not change any of its sanctions. “We have a made-in-Canada foreign policy,” he said. “We think past actions best predict future actions. And Iran has defied the United Nations Security Council. It has defied the International Atomic Energy Agency. Simply put, Iran has not earned the right to have the benefit of the doubt.”