Is the New Iranian President a Moderate?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Everyone has seen the “Peanuts” cartoon where Lucy is holding a football that Charlie Brown is about to kick. As he runs towards it, she pulls it away at the last minute. She’s done it many times, yet Charlie Brown never learns.

Iran held its presidential election on June 14, won by an ostensible “moderate,” 64 year old Hasan Rowhani. But we’ve seen this movie before. All I can say is, “Here we go again.”

Western observers have been waiting for signs of moderation in the Islamic Republic run by the 12-member Council of Guardians, now under the control of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, for more than three decades.

But no such saviour has ever arrived, and the hardliners have gone from strength to strength, supporting Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria in the ongoing civil war in that country, destabilizing Iraq, and, most ominously, working towards acquiring nuclear weapons in order, many believe, to defeat Israel.

Like the other five candidates in the race, the newly-elected Hasan Rowhani, who won 50.7 per cent of the vote, first had to meet with the approval of Iran’s real rulers, the mullahs. Still, Rowhani’s backers, such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president between 1989 and 1997 and another supposed reformer, urged Iranians to cast ballots and abandon plans to boycott the election in protest -- even though the mullahs vetoed Rafsanjani’s own attempt to get on the ballot.

Himself a cleric and long-time acolyte of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the theocratic state in 1979, Rowhani has been a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic from its inception and supports Iran’s nuclear program.

He is no outsider – he has been a lawmaker for 20 years and the country’s lead nuclear negotiator between 2003-2005. In a 2004 speech he stated that even when Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, it was able to make its greatest nuclear advances because, he remarked, the pressure was off.

Rowhani’s conservative opponents, Iran’s Supreme Leader and even the Revolutionary Guard have all issued statements in support of the president-elect, who will take office on August 3.

I don't think they were unhappy that Rowhani won. The mullahs will now resume the good cop-bad cop routine, with this “moderate” and more “pragmatic” president becoming the benign face of Iran, thus allowing U.S. President Barack Obama and others to breathe a sigh of relief and resume negotiations. “We have to enhance mutual trust between Iran and other countries,” said Rowhani after his victory.

Already Iranian intellectuals are touting Rowhani as a leader who is wary of a purely ideological approach to foreign policy. In an article in the June 19 New York Times, on “How to End the Stalemate With Iran,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Mohammad Ali Shabani, a contributing editor at the Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs, argued that “Rowhani’s victory demonstrates that there is now real momentum toward the initiation of direct talks between Iran and the United States.”

The mullahs need Rowhani to ease tensions with the United States in order to reduce the tough sanctions that have crippled the economy. Suzanne Maloney, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has suggested that Khamenei has allowed Rowhani’s victory in order to repair Iran’s frayed relations with the world, one that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade. It’s the strategy of two steps forward, one step back. Rowhani’s power is limited by Iran’s other institutions, many of which are in conservative hands. Since an Iranian president has little real power, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it working? Maybe. Obama has already said that voters in Iran “rebuffed the hardliners and the clerics in the election who were counseling no compromise on anything, anytime, anywhere.”

The Council of Guardians also didn’t want a repeat of 2009, when a fixed election resulted in mass demonstrations against incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In today’s volatile Middle East, that would be too dangerous.

The real winner four years ago, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has been under house arrest since 2011, after he called his supporters onto the streets for a rally in support of the uprisings in the Arab world. Even his daughters were detained this past February.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who retains the final word on Iranian policy, including its nuclear program, issued “necessary guidelines” to Rowhani during their first meeting after the vote.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.