Iran's dangerous "moderate"

In an interview with the Tower, a blog of the Israel Project, Soli Shahvar, head of the Ezri Center for Iran and Gulf Studies at Haifa University, explained that the regime clearly wanted Rouhani to win. This is why the roster of choices included more candidates with a hard-line public posture, thus allowing Rouhani to consolidate the votes of those who preferred somebody less bombastic in tone. But why did the regime want Rouhani?

Clearly, the powers that be decided that having a polarizing figure in the mold of outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as the public face of the regime no longer served its purposes. That doesn’t mean that Khamenei is backing off Iran’s nuclear ambitions or abandoning his own hatred of the Great Satan of America or his stated position that Israel is a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut.” Instead, it just means that he’s decided that those aims could be better served by presenting a fresh face to the outside world who gullible (or sympathetic) Westerners would describe as a “moderate.”

In reality, Rouhani is a regime loyalist who has been on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council since 1989 and who served as the nation’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005. In a recent television interview, he boasted that Iran’s strategy during this time was to use the diplomatic process to buy time for the development of the nation’s nuclear program by exploiting a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, thus preventing the United Nations Security Council from taking action. “(America) wanted what we had in nuclear technology not to be completed, and that we surrender what we had already,” he said. “What we aimed to do was to create a space so that this technology is completed.”