Iran has been the loser in this conflict – but its isolated leader may still reject a deal
Tehran, 20 June: A supporter of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei holds up his picture at a rally | Image by: Pacific Press Media Production Corp. / Alamy Stock Photo
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It is the Iranian leadership's almost pathological hatred for Israel, rather than the possession of nuclear weapons per se, which has made it imperative that Iran should never possess such weapon systems
You can still find on YouTube the Pathé newsreel of the shah of Iran’s visit to Britain’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell (south of Oxford) in 1959. Iran was a crucial trading partner. We sold the Iranians everything we could, not least arms – and we were hoping to sell them nuclear technology too. In the event, it was the USA, Germany and France which received the orders for the start of Iran’s nuclear power programme.
Iran didn’t really need nuclear power, except as a vanity project. It has huge oil and gas reserves – the third largest in the world.
Suspicions rose back then that the shah’s real motive was to gain the know-how for a nuclear weapon. In a 1974 assessment, the CIA said that if the “shah is still alive in the mid-1980s, and if other countries [particularly India] have proceeded with [nuclear] weapons development, we have no doubt Iran will follow suit.”
However in 1979 the Islamic Revolution took place, with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at the head of a theocracy, in place of the shah’s secular but authoritarian government.
We are as clear as we can be that the revolutionary government in Iran continued the shah’s covert development of a viable nuclear weapons system, but the evidence is that was suspended in 2003, when international negotiations (in which I was heavily involved) over this programme first began. Around this time, the supreme leader issued a fatwa – a religious prohibition – against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
No other nation that I can think of seeks the complete elimination of a neighbouring country
The Iranians have, as it were, dined out on this fatwa ever since. However, there is in Shi’ism – the principal form of Islam in Iran – a doctrine of taqiya, which allows for dissembling for the greater good. It would have been naive in the extreme for the international community to have ignored other, hard evidence which pointed to a nuclear weapons programme. What had been 200 centrifuges running in 2006 had gone to 18,000 by 2014. Until last week Iran was enriching uranium to 60 per cent. It needs to be at that level only for weapon purposes.
Historically, Jews and Iranians (Persians) were friendly. The Old Testament records how Iran’s Cyrus the Great (600-530 BC) had allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. Under the shahs the two nations actively co-operated. Iranians are not Arab.
Even under Khomeini relations weren’t bad. Israel was the only reliable Western supplier of arms to Iran during the terrible Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. All other Western powers and the Soviet Union actively supported Iraq.
It’s only been under Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Iran’s leadership has developed an almost pathological hatred for Israel, with the explicit aim of eliminating the “Zionist entity”. They cannot even utter the word ‘Israel’. No other nation that I can think of seeks the complete elimination of a neighbouring country. It’s this, rather than the possession of nuclear weapons per se which has made it imperative that Iran should never possess such weapon systems.
As I write, President Trump has effectively imposed a ceasefire on Israel and Iran. He has been sufficiently angry about breaches by Israel, as well as Iran, that this ceasefire may well hold.
Iran has been the loser in this conflict, and the wider war triggered by the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023. Iran’s air defences have gone. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is no more; Hezbollah and Hamas are on their knees. If Iran’s leadership has any sense, they will now agree a deal with Mr Trump. But they may not. Khamenei is 86, isolated, and paranoid.
Jack Straw was foreign secretary 2001-2006 and is author of The English Job: Understanding Iran
