Iran Cleric Calls Deal ‘Biggest Victory’

A senior Iranian ayatollah said Friday that the turmoil in Washington caused by the revelations of a U.S. arms deal with Iran was Tehran’s “biggest victory in the world’s political arena.”

The Ayatollah Abdulkarim Moussavi Ardabili, in a sermon at Tehran University, said disclosure of the arms sale was an “explosion” in Washington and that the U.S. government was “now trying not to let the fire catch its skirt.”

His comments were broadcast by state-run Radio Tehran, which was monitored in Nicosia.

Ardabili said: “The Islamic republic must be proud of this victory, because the pride in victory does not only involve the military. Sometimes political victory is a hundred times more valuable than military victories.”

He said that, as a result of the revelations and their political effect, the Muslim people and the poor were united against “world arrogance and enemies of Islam.”

Another leading cleric, the Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, was quoted as saying Iran should never trust the United States.

Montazeri, 64, the chosen successor of the 86-year-old revolutionary patriarch, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was quoted by Radio Tehran as saying the United States “never wants our good.”

“Therefore, we should not trust it. . . . If today they speak of peace, they are thinking of their own good and interests,” Radio Tehran quoted him as saying.

Montazeri’s remarks were made in the holy city of Qom.