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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.
Last week we had the annual summit of the heads of states from the G7 countries and Zarif suddenly turned up in France and Macron said there is a possibility of Trump meeting with Rouhani.
But both sides put forward some conditions for the meeting to take place and later backtracked from the idea as a whole. What is your take on this? Was it just mediation by Macron or the whole thing was a misunderstanding?
Mohsen Sazegara:
I followed the news in Washington and Tehran and asked a few of my close friends who knew something about this.
It is Iran that is pressing France for the mediation and in his meeting with Macron Zarif had requested that Iran be allowed to have the exemption from the oil sanctions to sell 700,000 barrel of oil per day and at the same time as a gesture of goodwill France offers a 1.5 billion Euro credit to Iran as a back up for the INSTEXT project.
In return Iran would agree to stop any further retreats from the nuclear deal.
Macron had discussed these arrangements with Trump privately and he had agreed to them. In Tehran Rouhani had said that he is willing to meet anyone if it helps the national interests of the Iranians. Surely he had been in touch with Zarif all along.
Some people think that Khamenei opposes Rouhani on this matter but that is not true. He is just a timid dictator who sits back and waits to see if the policy fails he can then say that it was not his idea.
However Trump had disagreed with lifting of the oil sanctions and made it conditional to regime changing some of its policies before hand. As such Tehran had become angry and soon Rouhani reacted by saying he is not prepared to take part in a photo opportunity with Trump to boost his position in US politics.
Then Pompeo and Bolton repeated Trump’s position and Pompeo once again said Iran could only come to a negotiating table after accepting and implementing his 12 conditions. So at the end, it was much ado about nothing!
The Iranian regime believes US is after the same policy for it that it has towards North Korea and Trump is only trying to have a winning card for his 2020 re-election by forcing Tehran to come to a negotiating table.
