Iran's Supreme Leader Doubts Nuclear Talks Will Succeed

The second stage of P5+1 nuclear talks begin tomorrow (Tuesday) and Iran's top leader celebrated by announcing his doubts the talks will amount to anything.  Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he had accepted the talks at the behest of some Iranian leaders, but claimed that eventually the United States will screw them up.

"The nuclear issue is an excuse," Khamenei said in a speech broadcast on state TV. " Even if one day, against all the odds it is solved based on the Americans' expectations, then Americans will seek another issue to follow it. Just pay attention to the spokespersons of the U.S. government, who have also raised the issue of human rights, missiles and arms." said Khamenei.

"The job that foreign ministry has started will be continued," he said however. "Iran will not violate what it has promised but Americans are hostile toward the Islamic revolution and the Islamic Republic."

Iran has already announced that it would not do anything that would reduce its ability to enrich uranium, which was the whole purpose of the talks:

Iranian figures continued this week to lengthen the list of red lines they intend to take into comprehensive nuclear negotiations, weeks after statements by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani – in which the revolutionary-era cleric rejected destroying nuclear enrichment centrifuges - had already led CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to declare that he wasn’t sure what negotiators could even talk about “if these are the opening positions.”

Rouhani’s red line against dismantling enrichment equipment was subsequently underlined by a range of top Iranian officials, and reemphasized by the president himself. On Wednesday, Hamid Babaei, a spokesman for Iran’s delegation to the United Nations, also ruled out downgrading Iran’s heavy water reactor at Arak, which once it is activated will be able to produce enough plutonium for one to two nuclear bombs per year.

The first stage of the talks has turned out to be much more beneficial than the President promised. The White House said Iran would receive no more than $7 billion in relief, however experts say that a rise in oil exports and other economic spikes will give Iran “well more than $20 billion.