Why Americans just don’t get the Iran issue
We have been reporting on the complexities of Iran and the nuclear issue for what feels like an age. We sound a little like Churchill in his ‘Wilderness Years’ on this issue. However, there is an abundance of hype and mainstream media nonsense that gets in the way of most Westerners understanding the situation in actuality, and we are trying, in our own way, to help identify the complexities of the matter. There is a large degree of anger and rhetoric on the debate in the West, but precious little of it is either fact-based or insightful.
So what makes it such a ‘hot button’ topic? Firstly, there is the issue that the Iran nuclear debate is being actively managed as a press campaign by those who want to make a complex issue simple, and just a case of good guys and bad guys, which it isn’t. There is then the flimsy moral superiority that many present, seemingly as self-evidenced truth , that Iran joining the nuclear club is akin to Armageddon, which again, it isn’t. Then there is the actual chance that Iran is truthfully primarily pursuing nuclear power for civil use and will not defy the 2004 Fatwa against the creation of nuclear weapons as declared by their Supreme Leader in a theocratic regime. Then there is the to and fro of the Israeli-Iran rhetoric to consider, where there is both equal measures of truth and duplicity on both sides of the ideological divide.
It is not just us that the mainstream nonsense of the Iranian nuclear debate is driving crazy, consider the recent uncharacteristically snarky comments of the respected author and futurologist Tom Barnett, who had to let fly on the debate. So just imagine how refreshing it feels to see an op ed by the ever-objective and internationally respected Fareed Zakaria saying much the same thing. In the West, as Zakaria says and we concur, you just don’t understand Iran – its fear of regime change, and by how rattling the saber in their direction it just makes them ever more intransigent:
Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes - Zakaria: What You Know About Iran is Wrong | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com.
