Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani said that with his election his country had entered an era of cooperation and would take concrete steps to resolve its nuclear standoff with the West—promises that would require a shift by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But that's not really true, if by "nuclear standoff" the WSJ means "a situation in which Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons." The official position of Khamenei, and therefore of the Iranian government, since 2006, is that production, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam -- and is therefore against Iranian law.
The US government's "nuclear standoff" with Iran is entirely a function of US policy. The Iranians really have nothing to do with it; they've just been conscripted as a US propaganda hobgoblin. Or, to put it a different way, there's not really anything that Khameni, or any other Iranian, could do that would predictably have the effect of causing the US government to stop lying about them.
