Iran Elects A 'Moderate'?? Please,My Sides

 

What passes for elections in Iran is over, and the usual suspects are touting this as a major change in Iran's stance on things like it's nuclear program.

The new president is Hasan Rowhani, formerly Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and national security council chief.And the key word used to describe him by the legacy media is 'moderate'. As a matter of fact, Rowhani himself has used that word to describe himself on occasion, cleverly feeding this deception.

Let's look at a few things.

Iran is a theocracy. It is run currently by Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei under a system devised by the Ayatollah Khomeini known as villayat-e-fiqh. No one is allowed to run for any office without being approved by the Supreme Council of Guardians, the clerics whom rule the country. That includes all elective offices from the local mayors to the majlis (parliament) up to the presidency. And as we saw in the last elections, no one wins without the OK of the Supreme Council of Guardians.

Rowhani was hand picked to run and win by the Ayatollahs.

With all that, rather than denouncing this as the sham it is, the Obama Administration issued a congratulatory message, with the small caveat that, while it respected the vote, the election occurred "against the backdrop of a lack of transparency, censorship of the media, Internet, and text messages, and an intimidating security environment that limited freedom of expression and assembly."

At least the UK's PM David Cameron uncharacteristically saw things a little more clearly, saying, in an interview with CNN's Richard Quest:"We have to remember this is always only an election between a restricted number of candidates, it's not democracy as we know it."

"We have a very clear message to the Iranian government, which is that there is an option that gets Iran back into the international community, back into the family of nations. But it's got to be proper cooperation on this nuclear dossier, where so little progress frankly has been made. Otherwise, we will continue with the sanctions."

As for how 'moderate' Rowhani is, aside from the fact that he was endorsed by outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he was also endorsed by another 'moderate', former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who openly called for the use of nuclear weapons against Israel.

Rowhani himself is an iron clad loyalist to the regime, an outspoken devotee of the founder of the Islamic Republic, the Ayatollah Khomeini.During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a Basij militia commander like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordering child soldiers as young as twelve years old with plastic 'keys to Paradise' hung around their necks imported from Taiwan by the Ayatollah Khomeini to act as live minesweepers for the Iranian tanks .

He served under Rafsanjani as national security chief and was Iran's chief negotiator with the west on Iran's illegal nuclear program from October 2003 to August 2005, a period marked by broken agreements, deception and postponements designed to play for time while the centrifuges began to spin. Anyone who expects Rowhani to do anything but dissemble and play for time in his new position is badly mistaken.

If there was even the remotest suspicion by the regime that he was going to do anything else, he never would have been allowed to run for office or to win.

Khamenei once again has shown that Iran is playing an advanced game of chess while the West play tiddlywinks.

Ahmadinejad needed to be removed because he had become a little too open and outspoken about the regime's real intentions, and had given himself a sew too many airs above his station as the Ayatollah's mouthpiece.

The switch to Rowhani is designed to buy more time and fool the West into thinking there really is a 'moderate ' in charge and that things are going to change. And Rowhani, who unlike Ahmadinejad speaks English, German, French, Russian and Arabic can be relied on to understand how to make ambiguous and misleading statements in these languages. He also has a scientific background that will allow him to toss around a sew terms to further obscure things.

Finally, unlike Ahmadinejad he is a member of the clerical class who can be relied on to be more of a team player and take direction.

First steps? Expect the clueless West to cooperate with Iran's goal of buying time by giving the regime a honeymoon period to allow the new president to settle in.

And don't be surprised if in a few weeks time Iran's current chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili gets ousted from his position. Jalili ran for president this time out and was defeated, just as he was undoubtedly intended to be by the regime. That will be used as a convenient excuse to remove him and appoint someone new as nuclear negotiator, and that will eat up another few months at least, just as it did when Jalili replaced Ali Larijani, who is now Iran's foreign minister.

Larijani, as an aside wrote an article for the Iranian press entitled "How I fooled the West" after his stint as chief nuclear negotiator. If the West continues to hide its head in the sand, look for Rowhani to write a similar article after a successful Iranian nuclear weapons test.