First they were for it. Then they were against it. Then they were for it again. Now, Iran’s Supreme Leader, speaking publicly for the first time Thursday on the matter, seems to be against key elements of it.
That’s how the headlines in Tehran have read this week on the question of whether or not Iran’s leaders truly back the “framework” nuclear deal that the Obama administration says all sides agreed to last week in Switzerland.
In a show of how the deal is creating just as much of a political firestorm in Tehran as it is in Washington, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday flatly accused the Obama White House of making false claims about what Iran committed to under the deal.
The White House, said the ayatollah, circulated a “fact sheet” just a few hours after the latest round of negotiations concluded, and “most of it was against the agreement and was wrong.”
The Supreme Leader, the ultimate authority in the Islamic republic’s tangled power structure, took issue with two bedrock points in the document that got emailed to reporters just as President Obama was hailing the agreement as “a good deal” that “meets our core objectives.”
The first involves sanctions, an issue that even American officials conceded still has not been fully settled. The U.S. fact sheet said they will only be lifted after U.N. inspectors have verified Iran’s compliance with the terms of any final deal.
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Ayatollah Khamenei begged to differ, asserting that sweeping sanctions relief should occur immediately.
“All sanctions should be removed when the deal is signed,” he said in a national televised address. “If the sanctions removal depends on other processes, then why did we start the negotiations?”
The second point involves U.N. inspector access to Iranian military installations. The U.S. fact sheet suggested it as a requirement. Mr. Khamenei again contradicted the U.S. interpretation.
“Iran’s military sites cannot be inspected under the excuse of nuclear supervision,” he said.
Asserting that he is “worried,” Mr. Khamenei accused Washington of being “into lying and breaching promises,” and he cited “the White House fact sheet” as an example.
The State Department, which circulated the fact sheet on April 2, pushed back Thursday. Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters there was nothing in the document Iran had not agreed to during negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland. Iran’s top negotiator rejected the fact sheet as spin, but did not directly challenge individual items in the document.
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“That fact sheet reflects the understandings achieved at Lausanne,” Mr. Rathke said.
While disagreement on that seems clear, the Supreme Leader suggested he was not trying to crush the deal — rather that he wants to ensure Iran is not seen to have agreed to things that he actually disagrees with.
“I neither support nor oppose the deal,” he said. “Everything is in the details, it may be that the deceptive other side wants to restrict us in the details.”
He also said: “I trust our negotiators.”
But his speech capped a week in which Iran’s political leaders and state-controlled media have seemed to struggle to find a single coherent narrative over what was agreed to in Lausanne — as well as whether or not the government truly supports it.
The official IRNA news agency reported Tuesday that some 200 hard-liners had staged an unauthorized protests in Tehran against the deal. The report was soon eclipsed by headlines about how the chief commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had publicly endorsed the deal.
Other stories cited an IRNA poll showing some 96 percent of respondents supporting the Iranian negotiating team’s handling of the nuclear talks.
Then came Mr. Khamenei’s speech — and with it the suggestion of significant daylight between the Supreme Leader and the government of President Hassan Rouhani, a strong proponent of the nuclear talks.
In a separate speech Thursday, Mr. Rouhani seemed to directly contradict Mr. Khamenei on the sanctions relief issue.
Iran would still want sanctions relief to be sweeping rather than phased, said Mr. Rouhani, but it could accept a deal in which the relief was dependent on U.N. verification.
How the sanctions relief and U.N. inspections issues are resolved will be a central to the next round talks. Officials from Iran, the U.S. Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China are slated to resume talks during the coming days with the goal of a final accord by the end of June.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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