In Iran, Mainly Praise for Nuclear Deal as a Good First Step

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

The smiling started early in Tehran on Sunday, when President Hassan Rouhani kissed a young schoolgirl in an Islamic head scarf before dozens of cameras, signaling that Iran’s future had taken a new turn.

After years of seemingly endless bad tidings of more international sanctions, more inflation and more saber rattling, many in this capital received the news of the first nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers in more than a decade like an awakening from a bad dream, and they shared their emotions on social media. “When I checked my Instagram when I woke up, someone had posted a picture of an Iranian and American flag,” said Asal Khalilpour, 29. “After I read the comments saying a deal was made, tears started rolling down my cheeks of happiness. I couldn’t believe it.” People from across the Iranian political spectrum, including many hard-line commanders and clerics who had long advocated resistance and isolation from the West, told state news media on Sunday that the deal that Mr. Rouhani’s negotiating team had made was a good start. One man’s nay could have undone it all. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been working for some time to engineer a way out of the economic and diplomatic quagmire of sanctions. Soon after Mr. Rouhani spoke to reporters, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a short message online saying he considered the deal a success. “The nuclear negotiating team deserves to be appreciated and thanked for its achievement,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency. He added that “their behavior can be the basis of the next wise measures.” Ayatollah Khamenei had spoken of negotiating directly with “the great Satan,” the Iranian ideological label for the United States, as long ago as March, three months before Mr. Rouhani was elected president promising better relations with the West. “I am not opposed,” Ayatollah Khamenei said on the subject during his annual address on the first day of the Iranian year, March 21. “But first the Americans must change their hostility towards Iran.” At the time, few observers thought the remark, made amid a flurry of verbal attacks on the United States, reflected a serious change in policy. But Ayatollah Khamenei apparently allowed a group of Iranian diplomats to begin secret preparatory talks with American officials in Oman, according to an Associated Press report citing American officials. He also assured that the next president of Iran would follow a line different from the prickly hostility of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose comments about Israel and the Holocaust had helped make Iran a pariah. “It is clear that any international outreach could not be handled by someone like President Ahmadinejad,” said Amir Mohebbian, a political strategist who advises Iranian leaders and is often briefed on Iran’s relations with America. “I think the leader helped bring Mr. Rouhani to power to make the public ready for a policy change.” Noting the long friendship between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rouhani, a career diplomat, Mr. Mohebbian said that “nobody is better suited to bring Iran back to the world community than Mr. Rouhani.” He compared the handling of the talks to a construction project, with Ayatollah Khamenei as the architect and Mr. Rouhani as the contractor executing the design. “The leader has shaped this situation and paved the way for Mr. Rouhani to be the right person at the right time,” Mr. Mohebbian said Others in Tehran said they had had inklings of what was coming. “Rumors of secret talks started circulating in Tehran in March,” said Nader Karimi Joni, a journalist and commentator close to Mr. Rouhani’s administration. Mr. Joni said he had heard the rumors from someone in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and that although he could not confirm them at the time, “later it became clear the leader had sent trusted aides, instead of people close to Ahmadinejad, to conduct the talks.” One man who was widely thought to have been involved was Ali Akbar Salehi, a foreign minister under Mr. Ahmadinejad who now heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Asked on Sunday about secret negotiations in Oman, Mr. Salehi appeared surprised; he smiled and said, “You must understand that I cannot comment on this right now.” In the early hours of Monday, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official denied the Associated Press report about secret bilateral talks, the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The agency said the official, whom it did not name, warned the news media against publishing reports that “would create ambiguity over Iran’s clear-cut stances.” Whether Tehran’s change of heart about a deal with the West grew from the pain Iran felt from sanctions or a new strategic calculation about its nuclear program, one factor appears to have been the Obama administration’s publicly stated desire to resolve the issues related to the Iranian nuclear program. Ayatollah Khamenei said in March that “the Americans constantly send us messages, telling us they are sincere.” Though the leader dismissed them in his speech as a public relations tactic, Mr. Mohebbian said, letters that Mr. Obama had sent to Ayatollah Khamenei “created the start of a better atmosphere,” and Ayatollah Khamenei responded. After the country’s Guardian Council, which vets prospective candidates, decided on the field for the presidential race, Mr. Rouhani emerged as the only candidate who was not considered a hard-liner like Mr. Ahmedinejad. Dissatisfied middle-class Iranians who felt alienated by the intrusive security state that Iran had become flocked to Mr. Rouhani’s standard, and he won the election comfortably without a runoff. “I am so happy I voted for Mr. Rouhani at the time,” Sajad Motaharnia, a student of English, said on Sunday as he watched a news broadcast about the nuclear agreement, which was given extensive coverage on state television. “But I’m also sad when I think how we have lived under pressure for the past 10 years because of the bad decisions of some politicians.” Mr. Rouhani himself seemed to want to draw a line under the past, by bringing the families of Iranian nuclear scientists who were killed in recent years to his news briefing on Sunday; the schoolgirl he kissed for the cameras was the daughter of one of them, Darioush Rezai-Nejad. Some opposition to the agreement was evident on Sunday among Iranian hard-liners. The Raja News website quoted several lawmakers warning that Parliament had the power under the country’s Constitution to ratify or reject the agreement, and that they were dissatisfied with several elements of it. One well-known hard-liner, Hamid-Reza Taraghi, an official interpreter of Ayatollah Khamenei’s speeches, was among the skeptics, saying he was disappointed that the deal did not call for the lifting of all sanctions. He dismissed the notion that Ayatollah Khamenei had approved secret talks between Iran and the United States. “What is clear is that the supreme leader did not agree with the way the previous negotiating team operated,” Mr. Taraghi said, referring to the Ahmedinejad administration. “But bear in mind that Ayatollah Khamenei is honest and does not believe in duplicity in politics.”