One of the more dangerous fairy stories of our time, popular with politicians and journalists, is that Iran’s new president, Dr Hassan Rouhani, is somehow a “reforming moderate” we can do business with – as in that deal last week whereby Iran supposedly agreed not to continue developing nuclear weapons in return for a reduction in the UN sanctions that are damaging its economy.
What those who fall for this overlook is that the Rouhani regime is imposing as ruthless a reign of terror on its unhappy people as ever: nearly 400 hangings since he was elected; teenagers publicly having their eyes gouged out; Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards still spreading terror across the Middle East, playing a crucial part in helping Syria’s President Assad to wage war on his people. And that vaunted nuclear deal is no more worth the paper it was written on than a similar deal in 2004, when Rouhani was Iran’s chief negotiator, later boasting how he had fooled the West while Iran secretly carried on developing a nuclear bomb.
As a puppet of Iran’s real “Supreme Leader”, the Ayatollah Khamenei, Rouhani may rejoice at having once again deceived the West. But the partial lifting of sanctions has bought Tehran a little more time to prop up a faltering dictatorship which Rouhani has no more intention of “reforming” than had any of his predecessors.