The West must set a clear path to steer through Rouhani’terms second Tom Ridge
Tom Ridge is a former US secretary of homeland security and governor of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he served six terms as a member of the US House of Representatives.
As Hassan Rouhani commences his second term as president, the West must realize that he is not and has never been an agent of change in Iran. In the run-up to his election, Rouhani routinely invoked “violence and extremism” in his campaign rhetoric to bolster opposition to his leading opponent, Ebrahim Raisi, in the ongoing roleplay where the incumbent represents a more moderate approach than his acknowledged hard-line alternative. This is despite the fact that Rouhani had already demonstrated during his first term that he had no intention of challenging the violence and extremism of the clerical regime.
Many Iranians boycotted the presidential election to draw international attention to the fundamental lack of choice in a system where even self-described moderates like Rouhani are vetted by unelected clerics and judiciary officials based on their loyalty to the supreme leader and the ruling theocracy.
The Iranian people have always recognized Rouhani as a veteran regime insider, as a senior security official during the systematic execution of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, many of whom were supporters of the main opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).
In 2015, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany brokered a deal with the Iranian regime, imposing restrictions on the Iranian regime’s nuclear program in exchange for tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. The agreement has rightly been criticized for offering too many concessions to Iran’s ruling theocracy, while effectively abandoning the original goal of definitively halting permanently the mullahs’ march to nuclear weapons.http://www.arabnews.com/node/1121666
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