Over the past few days, the US-Israeli war on Iran has seen yet another escalation that threatens to derail peace talks. Strikes by the United States on Iran have killed at least 18 people and injured dozens. The fate of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), which the US and Iran signed as a framework for peace talks, is now increasingly under question.As anger grows among the regime’s own base, official rhetoric is increasingly pointing to one individual responsible for the perceived failure: President Masoud Pezeshkian. Blaming the president is not only an attempt to offer the Iranian public a scapegoat but also to cover up internal divisions within the ruling elite.The architecture of a blame gameDays after the MoU was signed, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei offered his first public statement on the deal. In it, he wrote that he had “a different view” on the agreement. He had permitted it only because the president, “as head of the Supreme National Security Council”, had made a commitment to safeguard the rights of the Iranian nation and the “Resistance Front” and had “explicitly accepted responsibility for it”.Importantly, the statement did not name the man who actually negotiated the deal. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament and head of the negotiating team, appears nowhere in the text even though Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told …
