Harsh comments by Khamenei have reined in hopes of better cooperation in the wake of the nuclear deal
Istanbul, Turkey – The key to unlocking decades of mutual US-Iran hostility – and to ending the 15-month imprisonment of Washington Post reporter– was once widely believed to be the historic nuclear deal agreed to last July.
But instead of a new era of budding US-Iran cooperation, a retrenchment is under way in Tehran that favors hard-line suspicions of the West, and especially the United States.
Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, has set the tone, referring since September to America as the “Great Satan” that used the nuclear negotiations only to “penetrate” and damage Iran, “open the way for imposition” of its influence, and “change” the calculations of Iranian officials.
Khamenei has explicitly forbidden any further negotiations with the US, and has accused President Barack Obama of lying about not wanting to overthrow the Iranian regime. In a letter that conditionally accepted the nuclear deal Wednesday, he pointedly told Hassan Rouhani that the US “has shown nothing but hostility” toward Iran and will always do so.
Those moves reportedly include the arrest of another US-Iranian dual citizen last week.
Negotiators from both the US and Iran had indicated to each other that the nuclear deal could herald a broader though limited cooperation on thorny regional issues like the self-declared Islamic State and the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. And in September, Rouhani said it was “an impossibility” to think that US-Iran animosity would continue “until the end of the world.”
But Khamenei’s comments have halted any forward dynamic for now, underscoring the challenge of moving beyond the entrenched distrust of the US that has been a pillar of clerical regime for decades.
Conservatives have ’upper hand for now’
Iran has laid out a red carpet for Western investors hoping to tap into an emerging market bonanza when sanctions begin to ease early next year. Other, so called ’modest steps’ – such as allowing a handful of American citizens into academic programs – point to what is pursued to be progress in opening Iran to the outside world.
Khamenei warned about the risk of cultural and political intrusion a month ago, and said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “should prevent the infiltration powerfully.”
In addition a recent news reveals of another unnamed dual citizen being arrested last week – if true, raising to four the number of Iranian-Americans known to be in Iranian custody. An Iranian website reported that “a dozen plainclothes agents raided the family home” of the visiting businessman and took him to Evin Prison.
Extracted from an article by Staff writer of the Christian Science Monitor October 23, 2015
