Interpreting Iranian Taqiyya

"No facility will be closed; enrichment will continue, and qualitative nuclear research will be expanded. All research into a new generation of centrifuges will continue."
Abbas Araghgchi, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator

"In #Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to Iran's national will."
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani

In this 2010 file photo, the reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant is seen just outside the southern city of Bushehr, Iran. An official in the Islamic Republic has called limiting uranium enrichment and diluting its stockpile the country s "most important commitments". File picture: Majid Asgaripour, Mehr News Agency - Associated Press

There's Iran tweaking the nose of the United States. And there's Iran handsomely getting away with it. Because it can. Blatantly, right out in the open. Watchagonnado? The Islamic Republic of Iran is, for the first time in its history sending warships to the Atlantic Ocean. Iran has always seen itself as a world power. And now the world's sole supreme political and social and technological power has seen fit to invite it to join its status-unconscious position, seating it politely alongside Russia and China.

This is a new, precedent-setting, humble and gracious United States of America. No matter that when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gave a backhand slap to The Great Satan in 1979 by storming and barricading its Tehran embassy and holding its 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days, defying the Vienna Convention in its zeal to deliver a comeuppance to the Crusader-infidels, he gave due warning of the future.

That was a future that in 1980s Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese who took so readily to tutelage in the cult of death and martyrdom courtesy of the Republican Guard Corps who worked assiduously to introduce the latest incarnation of jihad to the newly-formed Party of God. And Hezbollah in turn introduced mass death through massive bombs to the American Marine UN peacekeeping barracks in Beirut (241 dead) and the U.S. embassy (63 dead).

Iran, the world's leading terrorism sponsor, has been given the gift of time by the kindly auspices of the United States agreeing with its other very good friends on the international political-diplomatic scene, Russia and China, to 'give nuclear-bomb-aspiring Iran a chance'. When the moderate new, smiling president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani tweeted Iran's victory over Western sanctions, effectively overlooking Tehran's plans for developing nuclear warheads, triggers and ballistic missiles, another event occurred.

Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif laid a wreath at the Beirut grave of Imad Mughnieh, a Hezbollah commander of huge distinction who masterminded those attacks in Beirut against the U.S. There were many other remarkable and murderous exploits he directed, responsible also for the abduction and murder of CIA station chief William Buckley. Mughnieh's illustrious career began at age 14 when he joined Yasser Arafat's forces as a sniper.

He went on to bomb the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killing 29 people, later directed the bombing of the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina killing 85, the result of a fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was himself killed through the use of one of the deadly devices he was so familiar with when the headrest on the driver's seat of his car exploded. Proof of responsibility has been evasive.

Iran is clearly on a self-congratulatory roll. With the six-month period that was negotiated giving it breathing room, restoring in exchange for a minor adjustment to its nuclear plans, a definite relaxation in its sinking economy, the future looks pretty bright if you're sitting in Tehran. As long as they remain faithfully compliant on the surface with the commitment signed in November they will still be 3 months away from breakout capacity.

Remember: "No facility will be closed; enrichment will continue, and qualitative nuclear research will be expanded...All research into a new generation of centrifuges will continue". That's the word of Iran's nuclear negotiator at those infamous G5+1 talks that the United Nations celebrated as a wonderful breakthrough. For Iran, not for the rest of the world.

Dissembling, giving false impressions is quite legitimate in Islam. It is called taqiyya. In Shia Islam it is seen as quite legitimate, a tool by which someone who feels himself at risk may employ this legal dispensation enabling a believer to deny anything that might impede his aspirations, safety or future plans.

Iranian ayatollahs find great comedy in the sincerity of their interlocutors, easy touches for the Eastern mind so skilled in useful improvisation.