An interesting piece "Rouhani: The new friendly face of Iran - or is he?" in The Independent on the new man in Iran. It details something of the person, where he seems to be headed and wants to "do" with the West - and the pressures he faces inside the country from its real leaders.
"Most ordinary Iranians are mightily sick of the anti-Western verbiage that has been the soundtrack to their lives for more than 30 years. But they are also sick of juggling two jobs to pay for food and of seeing family members die in hospital wards starved of vital cancer medicines by savage sanctions. By launching a charm offensive with the West and exchanging letters with Barack Obama over Syria – a contact which may produce the extraordinary outcome of the first bilateral talks between Iranian and American leaders since before the Islamic revolution – Rouhani speaks to his own people too.
An urbane and sophisticated man who has travelled (he studied for a time in Britain), Rouhani has surrounded himself with media-savvy figures who are at ease with the grammar of international diplomacy. His Minister for Foreign Affairs, Javad Zarif, is US-educated, another keen tweeter in English and an enthusiastic user of Facebook (ironic given that most Iranians have no access to social media). Together they have used the Syria crisis to present Iran as less of a threat than a respected and crucial power in the region.
The German media reported on Monday that Rouhani’s intention, having buttered up his Western interlocutors, will be to offer to decommission the most-feared nuclear plant in Iran, an underground facility in the mountainous territory near the holy city of Qom, capable of withstanding bunker-busting bombs, in exchange for the lifting of a ban on Iranian oil exports. That would be, as Der Spiegel noted, sensational.
But two things are troubling. The first is how carefully Rouhani will have to navigate within Iran if he is not to fall foul of the Supreme Leader and his allies in the Revolutionary Guard. The second question to ask is, will any of this have a bearing on political freedom or human rights within Iran, the things that could really disarm Iran’s hardliners?
Iran Inc. is in the mood for negotiations, but Khamenei wants them to be conducted from a position of strength and will never surrender the country’s right to enrich uranium. Whatever meetings take place in whatever gilded Geneva meeting rooms or in the corridors of the UN in New York, the most dyed-in-the-wool Iranian conservatives will continue to fear that America’s real agenda is regime change.
Already there are signs of internal tensions. It was deemed significant that Rouhani failed to show up recently to a big regime funeral attended by most of the elite. If they suspect Rouhani’s pragmatism is threatening their power and financial interests, which depend on the survival of the current set-up, they won’t be long in reining him in. That’s when we will start seeing more of those mixed signals.
The second worry? One possible outcome is that by striking a nuclear/sanctions deal Rouhani could actually solidify the regime. How? By taking the heat off the internal pressure cooker of suppressed dissent and conferring renewed legitimacy on the clerics. It is perfectly possible that the new president, although he is clearly what we like to call “a moderate”, desires such an outcome.
But neither he nor the Ayatollah can have excluded from their calculations the risk that once they open things up, loosen travel restrictions – in both directions – ease censorship, start talks with the Americans and come in from the cold, anything, as we know from the plotlines of the best novels, can happen."
"Most ordinary Iranians are mightily sick of the anti-Western verbiage that has been the soundtrack to their lives for more than 30 years. But they are also sick of juggling two jobs to pay for food and of seeing family members die in hospital wards starved of vital cancer medicines by savage sanctions. By launching a charm offensive with the West and exchanging letters with Barack Obama over Syria – a contact which may produce the extraordinary outcome of the first bilateral talks between Iranian and American leaders since before the Islamic revolution – Rouhani speaks to his own people too.
An urbane and sophisticated man who has travelled (he studied for a time in Britain), Rouhani has surrounded himself with media-savvy figures who are at ease with the grammar of international diplomacy. His Minister for Foreign Affairs, Javad Zarif, is US-educated, another keen tweeter in English and an enthusiastic user of Facebook (ironic given that most Iranians have no access to social media). Together they have used the Syria crisis to present Iran as less of a threat than a respected and crucial power in the region.
The German media reported on Monday that Rouhani’s intention, having buttered up his Western interlocutors, will be to offer to decommission the most-feared nuclear plant in Iran, an underground facility in the mountainous territory near the holy city of Qom, capable of withstanding bunker-busting bombs, in exchange for the lifting of a ban on Iranian oil exports. That would be, as Der Spiegel noted, sensational.
But two things are troubling. The first is how carefully Rouhani will have to navigate within Iran if he is not to fall foul of the Supreme Leader and his allies in the Revolutionary Guard. The second question to ask is, will any of this have a bearing on political freedom or human rights within Iran, the things that could really disarm Iran’s hardliners?
Iran Inc. is in the mood for negotiations, but Khamenei wants them to be conducted from a position of strength and will never surrender the country’s right to enrich uranium. Whatever meetings take place in whatever gilded Geneva meeting rooms or in the corridors of the UN in New York, the most dyed-in-the-wool Iranian conservatives will continue to fear that America’s real agenda is regime change.
Already there are signs of internal tensions. It was deemed significant that Rouhani failed to show up recently to a big regime funeral attended by most of the elite. If they suspect Rouhani’s pragmatism is threatening their power and financial interests, which depend on the survival of the current set-up, they won’t be long in reining him in. That’s when we will start seeing more of those mixed signals.
The second worry? One possible outcome is that by striking a nuclear/sanctions deal Rouhani could actually solidify the regime. How? By taking the heat off the internal pressure cooker of suppressed dissent and conferring renewed legitimacy on the clerics. It is perfectly possible that the new president, although he is clearly what we like to call “a moderate”, desires such an outcome.
But neither he nor the Ayatollah can have excluded from their calculations the risk that once they open things up, loosen travel restrictions – in both directions – ease censorship, start talks with the Americans and come in from the cold, anything, as we know from the plotlines of the best novels, can happen."
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