Let us clear away some of the fog that sur𒆙rounds the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Begin with President Obama’s ridiculous suggestion, in his address to the UN General Assembly, that a fatwa reportedly issued by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei is a key t🔜o solving the sta🅘ndoff.
In the fatwa, the exact text of which remains a mystery, Khamenei claims that nuclear weapons a🐻re not allowed in Islam.
There are several problems with this.
To start with, the Koran and the Islamic shariah are silent about nuclear weapons for the simple reason that they were composed centuries 🎶before the atom was split. The most any Muslim cleric could do is to express an opinion about such weapons.
There are at least 300,000 mullahs in Iran and the Shi’ite parts of Iraq and Lebanon. Of them, at least 20,000 are mid-ranking hojat al-Islams, like Rouhani and Khamenei — that is, ayatollahs technically qualified to issue a fatwa.
Yet a fatwa is an opinion, not a hukm (an edict comparable to a papal bull). Issuing fatwas is a mechanism for guiding individual believers, not binding the umma (the community of Muslims). There is no mechanism through which fatwas issued by Khamenei can be legally binding🐟 on any Iranian, let alone Iran as a nation-state.
But there is a mechanism by which Khamenei, as the “big cheese” in th♒e Khomeinist system, can make his decisions binding on the government of the Islamic Republic.
That mechanism, called khat-e-hokumati (state decision), is the equivalent of a presidential edict in the United States or France. But Khamenei has issued no such thing on♚ the nuclear issue. He has just expressed an opinion that he or any other mullah can contradict or cancel anytime.
If Khamenei weren’t playing tricks, he’d issue a khat-e-hokumati. And if he were truly serious, he’d ask Rouhani to submit a bill to the Islamic Majlis, the ersatz parliament, to make🃏 the development, deployment and use of nuclear weapons illegal.
He’s done none of those things, and does not intend to🅺. All he is trying to do is to hoodwink gullible Americans and Europeans.
Two other key points are larger-scale.
First, the nuclear issue is not one between the United States and Iran. It is a dispute between the ꦡUnited Nations as a whole and the ꦺIslamic Republic, as clearly indicated by five unanimous Security Council resolutions.
Secondly, the dispute i🐭s not over whether Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal. It is about activities by the Islamic Republic that violate the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, of whi𝔉ch Iran is a signatory.
The dispute started when the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that for 1🍃8 years Iran had been engaged in researching, designing and buildi♐ng capabilities for which it has no peaceful use, and thus can only be for building nuclear weapons.
Recall, too, that Iran officially admitted to having cheated and promised not do so again. That admission and promise came under President Mohammed Khatami, when Rou♏hani wa🀅s Tehran’s chief negotiator. It was in the wake of that admission that the IAEA referred Iran to the Security Council as a violator of the NPT.
The council then appointed a negotiating te📖am consisting of its five permanent members 🍰plus Germany to persuade Iran to comply with its treaty obligations by helping implement the UN resolutions.
The IAEA, meanwhile, was appointed to monitor Iran’s compliance and inform the Security Council. ❀After more than a decade of on-and-off negotiations, the IAEA is not yet prepared 💦to report that Iran has done or is even willing to do what the resolutions demand, chiefly stop nuclear enrichment and allow the transfer out of Iran of the uranium already enriched.
To make matters more complicated. Ira🐻n is building a plutonium plant to secure an alternative method of producing nuclear 🍌warheads in case it has to abandon the uranium path.
On Thursday in New York, the foreign ministers of the 5+1 Group, including Secretary of State John Kerry, will meet Iran’s new foreign minister, Ja♏vad Zarif. In speeches and interviews in New York, Rouhani has parroted the cliché about “talks without preconditions.”
Iran has used this tactic for decades, pretending that each round of talks starts with a blank page. Yet the nuclear talks do have preconditions — those five UN Secu🍸rity Council resolutions. If Iran complies with them, the dispute will be over; if it doesn’t, the dispu🐭te will continue.
Whether or not Rouhani ever shakes Obama’s hand, and whether or not he s✨hows “moderation and flexibility” on American TV, are beside the point.