“..what happened is that Jalili returned from Vienna to a place where the
leadership had systematically made enemies of many in the Iranian
establishment, including the speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani,
who was the former chief nuclear negotiator and who himself has been
regarded as a pretty hard-line guy. Ahmadinejad in the past had
belittled him and said that he was weak, and so now was time for
payback. Everybody who had been angered or frustrated or brow-beaten by
Ahmadinejad turned around and dumped on him. So Mir-Hossein Mousavi,
the leader of the opposition, and Mehdi Karroubi, the other leader of
the opposition, as well as Larijani, all denounced the Vienna accord as
a weak-kneed accommodation to the West, that it was giving away “our
great patrimony.” The deal actually is very good for Iran, and so the
explanation for the turnaround is Iranian politics….”
