Mohammad Reza Bahonar, Iran's deputy parliament speaker, told Iran's official IRNA news agency that Iran "doesn't accept" yesterday's draft deal with the IAEA.
Discouraging -- but Bahonar doesn't speak for the government, so we shouldn't read too much into a single statement from a single official.
A more upbeat assessment came from Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the IAEA, in an interview with Iran's Arabic-langue al-Alam television network.
"The Vienna talks are a new chapter in cooperation between Iran and the other participating states... We will be waiting to see whether they will stay true to their words and promises," Tehran's envoy to the UN nuclear watchdog told Al-Alam news channel.
"The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be a witness to the other states' behaviors when it comes to technical cooperation on using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes," said Ali-Asghar Soltaniyeh.
What's encouraging is that Soltanieh is portraying the deal as a victory for Iran. This might seem like an odd contention to a Western audience, since the deal is designed to temporarily take away Iran's ability to enrich its own uranium.
But it makes sense from an Iranian perspective -- assuming this deal has some support within the government. Soltanieh is trying to put a positive spin on it to drum up support from skeptical politicians and the public. If Iran's government totally disagreed with the draft, it would simply dismiss it as a product of Western imperialism/Zionism/whatever.
As Michael Singh writes in Foreign Policy today, there are some dangers to the regime casting this as a win. The IAEA deal blunts some of the criticism of Iran's hidden Qom facility, for example. But I'm okay with the Iranian government scoring a small propaganda victory here if this deal lays the groundwork for more meaningful negotiations.
Meanwhile, Israel's national security adviser, Uzi Arad, has ordered government officials to keep quiet about the deal for a few days. This seems like a very prudent course of action. Arad said the gag order is designed to make sure that media reports on the deal are accurate -- to make sure the Israeli government knows the details of the deal before it responds. But I'm sure he also recognizes that any public endorsement of the deal by the Israeli government might scotch any chances of the Iranian government approving it.
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Categories: Diplomacy, Iran, Proliferation, Regional News
Tags: Ali Asghar Soltanieh, IAEA, Iranian nuclear program, Mohammad Reza Bahonar, Qom facility, Uzi Arad
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