Controversy over marketing of last year’s nuclear deal has revived senseless assertions that Iran has no moderates.
Can all of the Islamic Republic’s 77 million citizens be hardliners?
Of course not. The problem is concentration of political power in a clerical leader inclined, like all authoritarians, to rig elections and incarcerate dissidents.
The theocracy has dominated Iranian politics and oppressed Iranians since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The Obama administration seemed credulous, therefore, when it asserted the election of supposedly moderate President Hassan Rouhani in 2013 created the opportunity to negotiate a nuclear deal.
In fact, negotiations had begun at least a year before Rouhani’s election in line with a longstanding goal of Obama for US-Iranian rapprochement.
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, delivered these revelations in a New York Times profile published May 5.
Rather than triggering negotiations, Rouhani’s election gave Rhodes a storyline around which to promote a controversial agreement already under development.
In Iran, meanwhile, democracy continues to function at the pleasure of ruling clerics.
In February, Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, described how theocrats seeded a parliamentary election that month with candidates from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to keep Rouhani in check (OGJ, Feb. 29, 2016, p. 23).
Khalaji also underscored the importance of a parallel election for the Assembly of Experts, which will pick the successor to aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
This month Khalaji interpreted results of a May 24 selection by the assembly of a leader for a 2-year term, Ahmad Jannati, whom the analyst describes as a “veteran hardliner” not favored by Rouhani’s supporters and “the most hardline figure” among three candidates.
The outcome, Khalaji says, “confirmed what many already knew: that the recent election did not change the body’s hardline fabric or the supreme leader’s ability to exert his will over supposedly democratic processes.”
For Iranian moderates—yes, some exist—little in politics has changed. But at least sanctions have eased.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 27, 2016; author’s e-mail: [email protected])