For the past three years, the West has been tricking itself into seeing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a country undergoing a gradual process of reform. The outcome of Friday’s two elections — one for the Majlis (parliament) and the other for the Assembly of Experts — is serving as the latest mirage in the delusion.
In 2013, when Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, the United States and Europe took it as a sign of a new dawn. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the chief mullah controlling Iran’s “elected” leader, came to understand that Rouhani was preferable to the volatile and fanatic Ahmadinejad, whose repeated pronouncements about wiping Israel off the map before attending to America were not serving Tehran in good stead.
Rouhani’s appearance on the international stage provided particular fantasy-fodder for supporters of a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and to guarantee its regional, and eventually global, hegemony.
Those people today feel vindicated for two reasons. The first is that world powers finally did reach a nuclear deal with Iran. The second is that Rouhani’s “pro-deal” camp emerged victorious in the latest parliamentary election, and two of the most hard-line ayatollahs were voted out of the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with appointing the supreme leader. And considering Khamenei’s advancing age and questionable health, this clerical assembly, which sits for eight years, is likely to end up selecting his successor.
To understand why the above is no cause for celebration, two crucial things need to be kept in mind: the only thing the nuclear deal accomplished was to enable Iran to step up its nuclear program, but with lots more money at its disposal; and Rouhani is no moderate.
Indeed, Iran continues to assert its right to nuclear power, while flexing its military muscles nearly daily by testing missiles and threatening the West not to intervene. In addition, celebrations less than three weeks ago marking the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic state included chants of “death to America,” “death to Israel” and a reenactment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s humiliation of U.S. sailors who had strayed into Tehran’s territorial waters.
A review of Rouhani’s record also leaves little room for optimism. Though the Shiite cleric was not Khamenei’s preferred choice, he would never have been approved as a candidate in the first place if his revolutionary credentials had not been impeccable. And they certainly were.