January 31-2014
Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif has launched a fight with the United States, accusing it of distorting the interim nuclear agreement and lying about its contents.
The charge has been picked up by others—for example, by Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani at Tehran Friday prayers—and paraded from one end of the country to the other.
Zarif’s anger is with the use of the word “dismantle” in a White House summary of the agreement. Zarif said Iran “did not agree to dismantle anything” as part of the agreement. “The White House tries to portray it as basically a dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program,” Zarif said several times, starting with an interview with CNN in Switzerland last week. “That is the word they use time and again.”
He urged the world to look at the actual text signed in November. “If you find a single word, a single word, that even closely resembles dismantling or could be defined as dismantling in the entire text, then I would take back my comment.”
Zarif was complaining about a White House fact sheet on the agreement that was issued late in November. Zarif did not explain why he waited two months to complain about it.
That fact sheet says: “Iran has committed to halt all enrichment above 5 percent and dismantle the technical connections required to enrich above 5 percent.”
That is the sole place in the document where the word dismantle is used. There is no suggestion in the document that Iran is required to dismantle all of Iran’s nuclear program, as Zarif said hyperbolically,
What is perhaps strangest about Zarif’s complaint is that he objected to the word “dismantle” two days after photographs showed IAEA inspectors dismantling the connections between centrifuge cascades that enabled Iran to enrich above 5 percent. (See photo on Page One of last week’s Iran Times.)
Zarif said, “The White House version both underplays the [American] concessions and overplays Iranian commitments.”
Most analysts would undoubtedly agree that that is true. But Zarif and other Iranian officials have done the very same thing in an effort to sell the agreement at home. It is the norm for politicians to minimize what they give up and maximize what they get in describing a compromise.
But some might argue that the Islamic Republic has actually gone overboard—as when President Rohani’s Twitter feed sent out the message that the Big Six had “surrendered” to Iran by siging the agreement.
Washington did not engage in an argument with Zarif. One US official told CNN, “We expected that the Iranians would need to spin this for their domestic political purposes and are not surprised that they are doing just that.”
Zarif waited eight weeks to complain about the word “dismantle” and brought it up even though the Iran Times has not seen any of Zarif’s critics raise the word as an issue.
