The Non-Choice in Iran Don’t expect change or reform from the presidential election.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-non-choice-in-iran-1494285875
Iranian voters head to the polls later this month to elect their next president, without much of a choice. The contest is shaping up as a race between several Islamic hard-liners and one hard-liner whom the Western media prefer to cast as a moderate.
The unelected Guardian Council eliminated more than 1,600 candidates, including 137 women, who are constitutionally prohibited from holding that office. The Council deemed only six candidates morally sound, which in Iran means thoroughly committed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nuclear program and the destruction of Israel.
Among the challengers, Ebrahim Raisi has garnered the greatest attention. The 56-year-old cleric is a protege of Mr. Khamenei, and our sources say he enjoys the support of elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the security apparatus.
Rumors out of Tehran suggest he could succeed the ailing Mr. Khamenei, and he certainly sounds like he has emerged from central theocratic casting. Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was appointed a revolutionary prosecutor—at age 19. A decade later he was one of the prosecutors who oversaw the summary execution of thousands of opponents of the regime.
His rhetoric has invited comparisons with former President and Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The ominous triangle of the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime is the most hated phenomenon among peoples the world over,” Mr. Raisi has said. He has also predicted that “one day soon the filthy stain of arrogance will be wiped not only from Jerusalem but also from the Noble Sanctuaries”—the latter a reference to the Saudis, who administer some of the holiest sites in Islam.
Mr. Raisi also believes the Iranian regime’s borders extend across Syria, “which we consider our frontier for defending the Islamic Republic’s security and identity.”
Mr. Raisi and others will try to oust incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, who is often styled as a moderate despite his record in and out of office. Mr. Rouhani spearheaded the bloody crackdown against the 1999 student uprising and helped oversee a campaign of assassinations targeting dissidents abroad in the 1990s.
As for Mr. Rouhani’s presidential record, domestic repression has intensified. The leaders of the pro-democracy Green Movement remain under house arrest despite campaign promises to free them. Religious minorities continue to face systematic harassment and discrimination, and at least half a dozen American and British dual citizens remain under arrest as hostages.
Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has continued to promote instability, underwriting Bashar Assad’s Syrian slaughter, deepening military cooperation with Vladimir Putin and funding Shiite terror proxies from Yemen to Lebanon. In all these cases, Mr. Rouhani has been powerless or unwilling to change course.
As for relations with the U.S., Messrs. Rouhani and Raisi both support President Obama’s nuclear deal. That accord has granted Tehran a much-needed financial reprieve even as it will leave the regime a threshold nuclear power by the time it sunsets. Hope for averting that outcome will not come through the artifice of Iran’s presidential election.
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