US Media: Maybe Iran Didn’t Want Nukes After All

The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

Over his decades as Iran’s religious and government leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had consistently rejected nuclear weapons.

Khamenei ruled that these ridiculously violent explosives, with their promise of indiscriminate killing and environmental poisoning, were simply incompatible with Islam.

A devout Muslim might well see it that way.

Mohammed’s “rules of war” cited in the Koran include:

Do not kill any child, woman, aged or sick person

Do not destroy the villages and towns

Do not spoil the cultivated fields and gardens

Do not uproot, burn or cut down fruitful trees

Do not destroy an inhabited place

Do not burn bees and do not scatter them

A nuclear detonation in anger would indeed violate each of those edicts. Even the bees would not be safe! (In fact, we are still finding radioactive cesium in honey, a relic of decades-old atmospheric nuclear test explosions.)

Nuclear weapons have been censured by religious authorities from the Catholic pope to the reform Jews of America, so the ayatollah’s stance was hardly surprising.

And yet, this suggestion — this idea that Khamenei had issued a fatwa, a formal religious ruling, prohibiting nuclear weapons — has often been derided.

For years, it was an “Iranian talking point,” or a trick. If anyone brought it up, they were mocked in American media.

A sample of media and think tank bloviating over the years on how Khamenei’s opposition to nuclear weapons on moral grounds was all some dastardly Iranian trick.

Now Khamenei is dead.

Because, as is always worth emphasizing, our government openly murdered him.

And suddenly, the American pundit class is conceding that the old man’s opposition to nuclear weapons was sincere all along!

As The New York Times reported last week:

“American intelligence agencies believe that Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is far more interested than his father and predecessor in pursuing a nuclear weapon, according to officials briefed on the assessments.

“Ayatollah Khamenei’s father, who was killed at the start of the war in an Israeli attack aided by U.S. intelligence, had sworn off developing a nuclear weapon. While American officials long asserted that Iran wanted to be capable of building a nuclear weapon, many [American officials] believed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hesitancy was genuine. ” …

“If the U.S.-Israeli war has made Tehran more, rather than less, likely to pursue a nuclear weapon, it would amount to one more grave consequence of the killing of the supreme leader. …”

First of all: Where was this reporting before?

We are only being told now that many American intelligence and security officials recognized Khamenei as genuinely committed to a nuclear-free Iran?

That seems like someone we might have pursued more diplomacy with.

Of course, as recently noted , President Donald Trump was told that such diplomacy might “take months,” so instead we just decided to kill everybody.

That seems like someone we might have pursued more diplomacy with.

Second of all: What is the evidence for the new, hyperventilating claim that Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “far more interested” in an Iranian nuclear weapon?

How do we know he’s interested in repudiating his father’s deeply held and publicly stated religious convictions?

As the Times notes, Mojtaba Khamenei “has never publicly called for Iran to build a nuclear weapon,” and also: “American officials caution that most of the intelligence on Mojtaba Khamenei’s views comes from before the war.”

So, we haven’t talked to him, or heard much at all from him.

Instead, we are just assuming he wants nuclear weapons now, because he’s probably angry that we killed his father, his wife, his niece and hundreds of other Iranians, including 120 elementary school kids, in a sneak attack that also left Mojtaba Khamenei himself badly injured.

And who knows, maybe he does want nukes now.

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