Ayatollah Vows: Those Who Want to 'Humiliate' Iran Will be 'Faced with an Equal Blow'

Our nuclear negotiating partner issued some new thoughts around an imminent framework today:

A US official said that sanctions have trapped Iranians; on #Bahman22 (rally on anniv. of #Revolution), they’ll receive a decisive answer.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 10, 2015

U.S. failed in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan & Pakistan.It’s you who is stuck with failures; years of successive failures!

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 10, 2015

God willing, on #Bahman22, Iranian nation will show that whoever wants to humiliate them will be faced with an equal blow.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 10, 2015

Incidentally, the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, tomorrow, was the original day that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress.

Administration officials regularly dismiss the Ayatollah’s tweets, geared toward an English-language Western audience, as just meant for public consumption in Iran.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) emerged from a closed-door administration briefing on Iran no less concerned about the ongoing negotiations.

“Well, look, I can only categorize the following, that one of my major concerns all along that is becoming more crystal clear to me, is that we are instead of preventing proliferation, we are managing proliferation. And for decades when we saw the world headed in the wrong direction as it relates to countries seeking nuclear power for nuclear weapons, we have worked to prevent proliferation,” Menendez told reporters.

“If we enter a new world order where we are going to manage proliferation, where in fact a country could be a year away from the possibility of breaking out nuclear capabilities for nuclear weapons, that’s a different world and a far more challenging world.”

Menendez said lawmakers must be thinking about that “as we see where these negotiations end up.”

“And there are many elements to this that are going to be critical if one could say that actually moving into a new world of proliferation — of managing proliferation versus preventing it, that we can actually manage it in a way that provides for the security of our country and for the security of the world,” he said. “And that’s the challenging question we have.”