RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Barack Obama’s current diplomatic effort with Iran is founded upon the hope that its new president, Hassan Rouhani, is in fact moderate and will agree to forfeit Iran’s goal of building nuclear weapons. Obama ought to have first revisited Iran’s most critical position paper — the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It best defines the Iranian regime’s policies and true intentions.

The 1979 constitution speaks clearly for itself. Explaining the roots of the Iranian Revolution, it notes that previous revolutionary attempts to defeat the U.S.-backed shah failed because they lacked an “ideological and Islamic nature.” Ayatollah Khomeini’s plan for government initiated the “process of intellectual and ideological evolution toward the final goal, i.e. movement toward Allah.”

Intensifying “the struggle of militant and committed Muslims both within the country and abroad,” its mission is to “realize the ideological objectives of the movement and to create conditions conducive to the development of man in accordance with the noble and universal values of Islam.” The document references the people’s cries of “Independence! Freedom! Islamic Government!” as reflecting their desire to be independent from non-Islamic rule and free to pursue the path of Allah.

Significantly, it envisions its Islamic rule expanding worldwide, “ensuring the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad.” “The Constitution will strive with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community (in accordance with the Quranic verse ‘This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me’ [21:92]), and to assure the continuation of the struggle for the liberation of all deprived and oppressed peoples in the world.”

The goals of Iran’s defense forces are also global. They “will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.”

The leadership’s fundamental role lies “in ensuring the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam.” Among its goals is “framing the foreign policy … on the basis of Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unsparing support to the freedom fighters of the world.”

Ominously, the document reveals the Islamic republic’s constitution was framed “with the hope that this century will witness the establishment of a universal holy government and the downfall of all others.” While this goal was not reached by the end of the 20th century, Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons must be assessed in light of this fundamental drive for global dominance.

Unfortunately, meaningful moderation is virtually impossible. While Iran’s constitution offers a mechanism for amendment, the exceptions swallow the rule. Virtually all bedrock provisions, including those “related to the Islamic character of the political system,” “the basis of all the rules and regulations according to the Islamic criteria,” and the “objectives of the Islamic Republic,” are “unalterable.” Just as much of the Muslim world has difficulty reconciling with modernity because the Quran defines itself as immutable, the constitution thoroughly binds the regime, leaving little room for apparent “moderates” to effectuate what the West seeks.

For more than three decades, the U.S. has been at war with the revolution institutionalized through Iran’s constitution. This is true because the regime has declared it so and has acted to the best of its relative power to prosecute that war, directly and via proxies, fueling global terror and acts of war against civilians and noncivilians alike. It is also true because the U.S. best satisfies the constitution’s narrative need for opposition to the “ideological mission of jihad in God’s way.”

Perhaps it is the West’s progressive instincts that often lead it to discount fundamental underpinnings of an “ideological and Islamic nature” in favor of the appearance of modern practicality. These instincts often lead Westerners to project their view of their own “outdated” constitutional requirements upon the diplomats of many Islamic organizations (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority). Once nuclear weapons are introduced and Iran’s relative power is transformed, however, these instincts become reckless if not suicidal.

While negotiations between the West and Iran focus on inspections and centrifuges, the menacing principles that motivate, direct and constrain the regime are overlooked in the hope that this regime has become something it has not. Those principles ensure that the regime actively advances its worldwide Revolution and, Rouhani’s words notwithstanding, they alone will dictate the regime’s performance of any agreement. They demonstrate why no cost is too great to prevent nuclear weapons from assisting the regime in fulfilling its stated mission: global jihad and the downfall of all other governments.

More importantly, they demonstrate why it is the regime and its constitution, not just its nuclear program, that must be dismantled — peacefully or otherwise — for the world truly to be safer.

Bill Siegel is the author of “The Control Factor: Our Struggle to See the True Threat” (Hamilton Books, 2012).