Don’t Be Fooled, Rowhani is Not a Moderate

Iran’s newly elected president Hassan Rowhani is being widely hailed by the international media as a moderate and a sharp contrast to outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Such a claim is not only untrue but also impossible given Iran’s election system, according to experts Michael Rubin and Harold Rhode on Monday’s Secure Freedom Radio.

In the recent Iranian election, about 680 would-be-candidates filed papers requesting permission to run. Of that number, several were in fact very liberal in the western sense of the word, says Rubin, who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. But a deeply hardline, religious council under the control of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei then vetted the applicants, and in the end permitted only eight to run for the office of president.

This vetting and approval process means that it is impossible that Rowhani, or any other candidate, would be a true liberal, Rubin argues.

Even if incredibly a true liberal managed to slip through the cracks and get elected, it would not matter much, says Rhode, a former Pentagon analyst who is currently with the Gatestone Institute. “The only decision maker in Iran is Khamenei, the leader. The president is not a president as we understand a president. He must do as he’s told. He doesn’t have a choice.”

This fact is something that historically the US government hasn’t understood, Rhode says, turning to the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution as an example. “We decided the Iranian president had the same powers [as the America president]. So we started negotiating with him, a powerless man. The real power was Ayatollah Khamenei,” Rhode explains. “And while we negotiated with him and gave in on all sorts of things to look nice, to look moderate, the rest of the Muslim world saw that Iran was shaming the United States, and Khamenei’s popularity among Shiites, Sunnis, among the entire Muslim world skyrocketed. Are we going to do the same again now?“

When it comes to what little power Rowhani does have, the United States shouldn’t take him at his word, warns Rubin. “What’s actually quite interesting however is while the West uses flexibility with Rowhani and describes him as a moderate, when he talks to Iranian newspapers and describes his actions, his motivations are far from moderate.”

Rowhani is a former nuclear negotiator for Iran, and at one point agreed to suspend uranium enrichment. The acclaim he received from the international community for this agreement showed just how fooled the world was, says Rubin.

“While we may consider him a moderate…because he suspended uranium enrichment way back when, when you actually look at his explanation of why he did so, he said, ‘Look, we had to install more centrifuges into our processing plant anyways, so why not gain some credit for suspending enrichment. All the while we can expand our plants.’ And really what he does is he claims the credit for bringing Iran’s nuclear program to the point it is today.”

Rather than being a sign that Iran is finally growing more willing to negotiate over its nuclear program, Rubin believes that “Iran is approaching its nuclear endgame. And Hassan Rowhani is if you will the relief pitcher who from the Iranian perspective can bring home the victory. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that the United States has the strategy to counter him yet. We’re fooling ourselves if we think he’s a moderate.”