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Iran's New President: What His Memoirs Tell Us
(Washington Post) Ray Takeyh - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's 2011 memoir, available only in Persian, reveals much about the man who was the country's chief negotiator on nuclear policy from 2003 to 2005. Rouhani describes a determined effort to secure nuclear technologies from abroad and complete the fuel cycle. Those efforts were redoubled during Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency in the early 1990s and were sustained by the reformist president Mohammad Khatami. Rouhani has spent the past decade suggesting that Iran used the suspension of the nuclear program in 2004 to establish the technological foundation that enabled its subsequent progress. The writer, a former Department of State official, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.