Arash Aramesh

Kayhan, a pro-government newspaper with close ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused the leaders of the opposition Green Movement and their supporters abroad of having played a role in levying new sanctions against Iran.

Kayhan’s June 22 “special news” section is dedicated to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ recent interview with Fox News during which he defended the sanctions as an appropriate tool to exert pressure on Iran.

According to Kayhan, which is considered to be Khamenei’s mouthpiece, the West in general, and the US in particular, are the main patrons of the opposition movement in Iran lead by Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, and therefore the entire opposition movement is playing a “traitorous role.”

Moussavi and Karroubi have repeatedly voiced their strong opposition to economic sanctions on Iran, fearing it would make life more difficult for the average Iranian without having any real impact on the ruling elites.

Opponents of such measures inside and outside Iran argued that harsh economic sanctions would allow the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to use these sanctions as a scapegoat for their economic mismanagement and shift the blame to the West. Furthermore, such sanctions would hurt the suffering of lower and middle classes in Iran, leading to more government control of the economy and an even more emboldened economic presence by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Proponents of such sanctions, some of which are very sympathetic to the opposition Green Movement, ignored such pleas and noted that increased economic pressure on the Islamic Republic would result in more concessions made by the Iranian government both on the nuclear issue and on the domestic matters, such as human rights abuses and political freedoms.

The hardliners in power, however, have not only started to blame the West for the ills of the Iranian economy, but they are now using the sanctions as a political tool to increase pressure on the Green Movement inside Iran. As the article in Kayhan indicates, Iranian hardliners are trying to show a link between the opposition and the West and to blame the Greens for harsh economic sanctions against Iran.