the distinction matters…

Posted on Saturday 20 February 2010


Khamenei rejects nuclear weapons
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

February 20, 2010

TEHRAN, Iran — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran deems nuclear weapons to be prohibited under Islam and isn’t seeking to build them. He made the comments after the International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this week that Iran may have been working on a nuclear warhead.

"Our religious beliefs consider such weapons forbidden as symbols of destruction," Ayatollah Khamenei said Friday after he presided at a ceremony where Iran’s first domestically made guided-missile destroyer was put into service from a base in the Persian Gulf. "We don’t believe in atomic bombs and we do not seek one."

Speaking to military commanders and staff, Ayatollah Khamenei said comments in recent days by Western officials that Iran has a nuclear weapons program were "outdated and nonsensical," the state-run Mehr news agency reported.
In spite of the neocon entreaties to the contrary, I tend to believe this report. "deems nuclear weapons to be prohibited under Islam" and "We don’t believe in atomic bombs and we do not seek one" sounds correct to me. Religious axioms aside, it makes no sense to me that Iran wants to conquer the world, or for that matter, that anyone but Texas Oilmen have designs on Iran. Iraq did play with weapons of mass destruction twenty years ago, but that was part of Hussein’s bluster.

The various forms of Islamic "fundamentalism" [Wahhabism, Jihadi SalafisSayyid Qutb, etc.] arose in the Sunni tradition in Saudi Arabia. Iran is a Shia country – a different tradition. I’ll never be able to sort through the crevices of Islam – the tangled complexities complicating the simplest of religions – one God, one Prophet. The confusion seems to hinge on Islamic Law, not the religion itself. And the gist of things for the fundamentalists is that "western culture" is contaminating Islam [probably true].

Recent reports that the Military Republican Guard is actually in control of Iran complicates this formulation, but for the moment, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remains the Supreme Leader of Iran. To me, there’s the same question in Iran as there ws in Iraq. Is the fear of a nuclear Iran a combination of Iranian Bluster and Neoconservative Paranoia [and greed], or is it real? The distinction matters a lot…

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