The New York Times’ obituary of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Autocratic Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Is Dead at 86,” Feb. 28) was a mixed bag. On the one hand, authors Alan Cowell and Farnaz Fassihi provide at least some detail on Khamenei’s corruption and oppression of the Iranian people. On the other hand, The New York Times didn’t look much beyond the toll Khamenei’s rule took on his own nation, underplaying Khamenei’s brutality in the Middle East and internationally. Worse, the authors rewrite history to whitewash the ayatollah’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The obituary characterizes President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the 2015 nuclear deal between then President Barrack Obama and the Iranian regime – as having “validated” Khamenei’s longstanding mistrust of the West. This framing turns the Ayatollah into a victim by ignoring the many Iranian deceptions under Khamenei’s leadership, during which Iran repeatedly violated agreements and misled the international community about its nuclear ambitions.
The lies began when Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first exposed. In 2002, an Iranian opposition group reported that Iran had built secret enrichment and heavy water production facilities in violation of treaty commitments. Following extensive diplomacy, Iran signed on to the Tehran Declaration in October 2003, agreeing to “suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities.”
However, in August 2005, Iran resumed its enrichment activities. This led to diplomatic action that resulted in a series of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions imposed on Iran starting with resolution 1696 in July 2006. Iran’s continued defiance of its pledge to halt enrichment led to a series of resolutions including 1737, 1747, 1803, 1835, and 1929. The consequences included monetary sanctions, import and export weapons embargoes, a travel ban on Iranian officials for their support of terror and other proscribed activities, and a ban of the development of ballistic missiles. (Iran often defied these penalties.)
Shortly before his election as president, Hassan Rouhani, who was the lead Iranian negotiator at the time, even boasted that Iran continued enriching uranium in secret.
Instead of coming clean and honoring its commitments, Iran instead sought to circumvent the consequences.
This was accomplished through the JCPOA, negotiated between the U.S., its partners and Iran to remove most of the sanctions. Instead of being penalized for violating its commitments, the agreement rewarded the Iranian regime by giving it a limited capacity to enrich uranium (still violating its original commitments).
The deal was presented as a compromise. Iran would achieve significant sanctions relief in exchange for accepting limitations on its uranium enrichment activities. The JCPOA also included sunset clauses that would have removed all restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment. The ending of restrictions would have allowed Iran to reduce its breakout time for developing a nuclear weapon to near zero in year 15 of the deal (2030).
In May 2018, President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Days earlier, Israel revealed it had seized an extensive Iranian nuclear archive from Tehran. Among the reasons President Trump cited for his decision to withdraw was, “Intelligence recently released by Israel provides compelling details about Iran’s past secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons, which it lied about for years.”
A joint analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Institute for Science and International Security showed that Iran had maintained weapons related work long after claiming to have halted such activities. The documents suggested the nuclear weapons program “never ended—and it could be continuing today.”
The information in the archive, Trump said, showed that Iran “entered the JCPOA in bad faith.”
The New York Times obituary of Ayatollah Khamenei did a reasonable job of recounting his cruelty toward his own people. But that isn’t enough.
Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has been a focus of the regime for most of Ayatollah Khamenei’s time as Supreme Leader. The goal was to ensure the survival of the regime; to protect it against military attack. Iran pursued nuclear weapons in defiance of its NPT obligations and hid its efforts for decades to escape detection of the full extent of its progress. The obituary, instead of exposing Khamenei as a serial cheater in pursuit of a doomsday weapon, characterized him as a victim of U.S. dishonesty.