There is a narrative being pushed out there that says the newly elected leader of Iran – Hasan Rowhani – is of the moderate persuasion. After nearly a decade of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many westerners may be inclined to hope against hope that somehow Rowhani will be much better than his predecessor. According to a former CIA Agent Reza Kahlili, who was born and raised in Tehran, such wishful thinking is, in a word, hopeless.
Via the Washington Times:
As soon as the results of the Iranian elections were announced, the world’s media proclaimed that a “moderate and reformist” cleric, Hasan Rowhani, would become the new president of Iran.
Not so. Mr. Rowhani is every bit as brutal and deceitful as the clerical regime that has murderously cracked down on its people for decades.
For 33 years, the mullahs who dominate Iran have masterfully played leaders of the West as fools over the regime’s illicit nuclear weapons program. Now with the election of Mr. Rowhani, which was preordained by the supreme leader, they are going to try it again.
The president-elect, a Shiite Islamic scholar, attended religious seminaries in the city of Qom, the hotbed of radical clerics. He has served the Islamic republic at the highest levels since
the 1979 Islamic Revolution, among them as the deputy speaker of parliament, the head of the Executive Committee of the High Council for War Support during the Iran-Iraq War, the deputy to the second-in-command of Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (1988-89), a member of the Expediency Council, a member of the Assembly of Experts (the body that chooses the supreme leader), a former nuclear negotiator and, most importantly, the representative of the supreme leader to the Supreme National Security Council (1989 to present).
Mr. Rowhani, as the head of the High Council for War Support, was deeply involved with the regime’s effort to eliminate its opponents and the 1988 mass execution of thousands of political prisoners as ordered by then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In order to accurately analyze the political infrastructure of the regime in Tehran, one must look at the history of its elected officials or, more bluntly, the officials selected by the mullahs to ensure the survival of the regime.
According to Kahlili, Rowhani is nothing short of an interchangeable part in the Iranian propaganda effort to portray a cabal of like-minded mullahs as having moderate elements. Kahlili says it’s just an international brand of good cop / bad cop.
Unfortunately, it looks like this 2010 release from Blurred Vision is as appropriate now as it was then: