Iran’s Top Leader and U.S. Counter Criticism of Talks
By THOMAS ERDBRINK and JODI RUDOREN
Published: November 3, 2013
TEHRAN — With talks over Iran’s nuclear program set to resume in Geneva this week, both sides engaged in a bit of public diplomacy Sunday: Iran’s supreme leader moved to quiet hard-liners in his country by expressing support for his negotiating team, while the chief American negotiator reiterated in an Israeli television interview that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”
Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader, via Associated Press
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the American negotiator Wendy Sherman spoke before nuclear talks resume this week.
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The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds Iran’s final word on the nuclear talks, told a group of students here that he was not optimistic the negotiations would succeed, but he also sent a negative message to the conservative clerics and military commanders who in recent weeks have attacked the diplomatic initiative.
“No one has the right to see our negotiating team as compromisers,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to a recounting published on his personal website. “They are our own children and children of the revolution. They have a difficult mission, and no one has the right to weaken an official who is doing his job.”
On Thursday and Friday, Iran and the so-called P5-plus-1 group of world powers are scheduled to hold their second round of negotiations since Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran’s president in June. Mr. Rouhani has pledged a resolution on the nuclear issue within a year in the hope of easing sanctions that have crippled his nation’s economy.
During two days of talks last month, Iranian negotiatorspresented an unusually detailed proposal whose contents were not revealed publicly but led Western leaders to suggest progress was possible.
In a lengthy interview with Channel 10 News in Israel that was broadcast Sunday night, Wendy Sherman, who leads the United States delegation to the nuclear talks, sought to reassure a skeptical ally of “President Obama’s commitment that Iran not obtain a nuclear weapon.” She stressed that Israel, which is not a party to the talks, would be informed and “have consulted with us” about any possible deal “because Israel’s security is bedrock, and there is no closer security relationship than what we have with each other.”
As she did during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee early last month, Ms. Sherman, a senior State Department official, suggested a two-stage process: first, to stop the advancement of Iran’s nuclear program, then to “negotiate a comprehensive agreement.” But she did not indicate how the United States and the five other powers — Britain, China, Russia, Germany and France — could be certain the nuclear program was not advancing. And she suggested that some sanctions might be eased during the negotiations, something that Israel’s leadership has staunchly opposed.
“If we can, in fact, stop the program from advancing further while we negotiate a comprehensive agreement and offer very limited, temporary, reversible sanctions relief,” Ms. Sherman said in the interview, taped Friday in Washington, “but keep in place the fundamental architecture of the oil and banking sanctions — which we will need for a comprehensive agreement, not for a first step — then I think we are starting to make progress.”
Ms. Sherman twice repeated Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” and said Mr. Kerry’s recent criticism of people using “fear tactics” to derail the diplomatic initiative had not been directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as many Israelis believed. As the interview was broadcast, Mr. Kerry was on his way to Saudi Arabia, another critical American ally that has been incensed by the warming of relations between Washington and Tehran.
Monday is the 34th anniversary of the seizing of the United States Embassy in Tehran and the capture of 66 hostages in a crisis that lasted 444 days. The episode froze relations between the countries until Mr. Obama’s September telephone call to Mr. Rouhani. Iranian hard-liners were organizing nationwide events for Monday, emphasizing the “Death to America” slogan that characterized the embassy takeover and ensuing Islamic revolution.
Ayatollah Khamenei, who had not appeared in public in over three weeks, had his own harsh words on Sunday for the United States, particularly for its close relationship with Israel, which he calls “the Zionist regime.”
“Do not trust a smiling enemy,” he told the students in something of an echo of Mr. Netanyahu’s warnings against Mr. Rouhani. “On the one hand, the Americans smile and express their desire to negotiate, but on the other, they immediately say that all options are on the table,” a reference to a military strike.
“The Americans have the most consideration for the Zionists, and they have to consider them, but we do not have this consideration,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “We have said from the very first day that we regard the Zionist regime as an illegal and illegitimate regime.”
Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that the fact that some Iranians refer to the anniversary of the hostage-taking as Death to America Day “makes it clear that pressure on the Iranian regime must be continued.”
“Iran is continuing to try and arm itself with nuclear weapons: It has not changed its goal — its method maybe, but not the goal — and it has not changed its ideology,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of Israel’s weekly cabinet meeting. “The pressure has brought them to the negotiating table. I am convinced that if the pressure is maintained and not relaxed, Iran will dismantle its military nuclear capabilities, and if the pressure is relaxed, Iran will advance toward this goal.”
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