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Who Is Hassan Rouhani?

(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Steven Ditto - Three months after his June election victory, there is still a knowledge deficit surrounding Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. During the past decade alone, Rouhani has authored at least ten books and forty academic articles on politically pertinent issues, totaling over 7,000 pages of open-source Farsi-language material. Rouhani has expressed support for blatant violations of international law over the past thirty years, including the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover, Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the general use of extrajudicial, transnational violence (e.g., in 1987, he declared that Iranian forces had the capacity to "destroy American economic interests around the world"). What separates Rouhani from traditional ideologues is his belief that certain kinds of political and social reform can facilitate the defense, upkeep, and legitimization of the Iranian regime. On multiple occasions, he has tied reformist ideals such as meritocracy, national unity, and minority rights to the regime's "security" and "capability." In an unusually candid May campaign briefing with Iranian expatriates, he claimed that while he does not wish to see an "increase in tensions" with the U.S., he has no desire to see a "decrease" in them either: "Today, we cannot say that we want to eliminate the tension between us and the United States....We should be aware that we can have interactions even with the enemy in such a manner that the grade of its enmity would be decreased, and secondly, its enmity would not be effective." In light of his background, there will be no moral, political, or intellectual meeting of minds between Rouhani and the West.
2013-10-03 00:00:00
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