Newsweek on why we should trust Iran

The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What's the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were "un-Islamic." The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini's statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Iran isn't a dictatorship. It is certainly not a democracy. The regime jails opponents, closes down magazines and tolerates few challenges to its authority. But neither is it a monolithic dictatorship. It might be best described as an oligarchy, with considerable debate and dissent within the elites.

Zakaria blunders when he repeats some of the usual myths about the birth of the Palestinian refugee issue. He refers to "the forced expulsion of most Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948."

Such a broad generalization undermines his credibility. If he has read the works of historian Benny Morris that he cites, he knows that the answer to what caused the flight of Arabs from the territory of Israel in 1948 is a lot more complex than that simple phrase. Some were forcibly expelled. But most of those who fled did so before any Jewish soldiers appeared on the scene. Arab refugees were caught in the crossfire of a war that had been fomented and launched by their own leaders. Those leaders refused to countenance any sort of Jewish state in any part of the country and never tried to build a Palestinian state in the areas allotted for one by the same United Nations resolution that called for a Jewish state. As in many other wars of that era, the factor that mandated flight was fear, not an actual direct threat.

And let's not forget that hundreds of thousands of Jews fled or were forced from their homes in Arab countries as the result of pogroms and discrimination. They were largely resettled in Israel or elsewhere in the world. By contrast, Palestinian refugees remain stateless so as to keep alive the Arab and Islamic world's war to wipe Israel off the map.