According to Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is not an agent of change. In fact, Rouhani “represents the resilience of Iran’s revolutionary elites and their resolve to preserve their grip on power.”
In Ottolenghi’s analysis released last week, Not-So-Revolutionary Rouhani, he observes that despite Rouhani’s “soft-spoken, sophisticated and elegant” demeanor and a willingness to make token gestures of conciliation and friendship to the West, the new president and his appointees are very much insiders within the regime that has ruled Iran with an anti-American mien since 1979.
Yet behind the veil of this new-found bonhomie, his line-up of ministerial appointments and government companies’ management is filled with loyal servants of the Islamic Revolution who toppled the Shah in their twenties, helped build the Islamic Republic in their thirties, ran government companies and held ministerial positions in their forties, took a break in their fifties when Ahmadinejad ran the country, and are now back, mostly in those same positions, in their sixties.
Ottolenghi profiles a number of Rouhani’s appointments, including his vice-presidents.
The other vice-president, Mohammad Shariatmadari, is par for the course. He was minister of commerce under Khatami at a time of tentative economic liberalisation. But he is also a close associate of Ayatollah Mohammad Reyshahri — Iran’s much-feared first minister of intelligence who was for many years the head of a religious foundation and its sprawling economic empire fronted by the Rey Investment Company, a target of US sanctions. Shariatmadari’s association with Reyshahri goes back to the early days of the Iranian revolution, when he took an active part in the establishment of the ministry of intelligence. This closeness came with financial benefits — Shariatmadari has been doing business with other Rey Investment officials in Germany on the side.
None of the appointees enumerated by Ottolenghi represent new blood. Each has an extensive history at the center of power of the regime often going back decades.
The change from Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is really “a turf war between rival factions of the same power structure, not an effort to change course.”
In his article that appeared in the September 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Iran is *Really* Good at Evading Sanctions, Ottolenghi observed that Rouhani’s election didn’t reflect a desire for reform on the part of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but a strategy to “smile and negotiate with Europeans for as long as possible, or necessary, while racing ahead with the military nuclear project.”
[Photo: The Israel Project / Flickr ]