Iranian Supreme Leader: U.S. Has Taken Military Option Off the Table
TEHRAN, IRAN (Worthy News)-- Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asserted that the Obama Administration had taken the option of a military intervention against the Islamic republic off the table.
"They realized that military attacks are as dangerous or even more dangerous for the assaulting country as they are for the country attacked," Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a New York Times report.
A "military attack is not a priority for Americans now," he concluded. "They have renounced the idea of any military actions."
Ayatollah Khamenei's speech took place on the 25th anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic.
Iran is currently engaged in negotiations with world powers, which want guarantees that the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful.
However, Iranian demands the ability to produce fuel for its Bushehr nuclear power plant remains a point of contention. Negotiators point out if Iran was allowed to produce it own nuclear fuel, and then the breakout time to produce enough highly enriched uranium for an atomic bomb can take place in a short period.
The negotiations will resume in mid-June in Vienna, with Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – plus Germany.
The difficulty in assessing anything Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei says is like navigating a lab rat’s maze. Just when you think you smell the cheese, you hit a dead end. So it’s like with anything Khamenei says. Unfortunately since the Iranian constitution vests him with final authority over all foreign policy matters, what he does say has real import, it’s just hard to figure out what he is really saying. In the case of his comments last week, he pronounced alive and well Iran’s jihad against America and Western culture and declared absolute Iran’s commitment to maintaining its nuclear infrastructure and expressed confidence in the West eventually caving in to Iran’s demands to lift sanctions. Now in his most recent comments, Khamenei lays claim to the recent Arab Spring revolts in Muslim nations against totalitarian regimes (with the convenient exception of Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria) and claims the U.S. would never attack Iran. Too bad he can’t make the same claim against Israel.
But those comments point to one of the chief issues bedeviling Western negotiators dealing with Iran over nuclear issues. Just who do we believe? Do we believe a Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister in Zarif, long loyal apparatchiks of Iran’s military and intelligence services, as born-again moderates? Or do we believe a Supreme Leader who’s rants remind the West uncomfortably of the slightly psychotic rants of past president Ahmadinejad. The tea leaf reading is eerily reminiscent of Western analysts poring over May Day photos of the old Soviet Politburo membership to find out who was calling the shots based on where they stood. Couple that with Iran’s horrific human rights record under Rouhani with grisly public hangings of political dissidents (over 800 and counting so far), the arrests and crackdown on social media and internet access and the funding of foreign adventures in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Lebanon to name a few. It all adds up to a disturbing picture that has caused the West to pause, and rightly so, in these negotiations.