![\"hassan-rouhani-005\"](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/07\/hassan-rouhani-005.jpg\" "\\"hassan-rouhani-005\\"")
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Western governments are naive to think that the Iranian regime’s president Hassan Rouhani is a moderate, renowned British columnist Christopher Booker wrote in The Sunday Telegraph.<\/p>\n
“Since it is now the West\u2019s party-line to regard Rouhani as a ‘moderate’ and one of the ‘good guys’, it is yet again timely to recall the reality of the regime he represents. For a start the real power in Iran lies not with Rouhani but with its Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, who is directly responsible the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iran\u2019s equivalent of the old Soviet KGB, imposing ruthless order at home and supporting terror across the Middle East,” Mr. Booker wrote in the January 24 edition of The Sunday Telegraph.<\/p>\n
He added that \u00a338 billion of Iranian assets unfrozen \u2013 in return for Iran’s regime agreeing to scale back its nuclear weapons programme – would be used by the IRGC to carry out its nefarious activities.<\/p>\n
“Not only has the IRGC been the chief prop since 2011 of the Assad regime in Syria, barrel bombs and all. It also runs more than 50 per cent of the Iranian economy, so that those \u00a338 billion of unfrozen assets will go straight into IRGC coffers through the mass of businesses it controls.”<\/p>\n
“Since the ‘moderate’ Rouhani took office in 2013, Iran has embarked on what Amnesty International calls ‘a staggering execution spree’, giving it the highest per capita state-killing rate in the world. The targets for murder and imprisonment include journalists, Christians and anyone who can be viewed as a political or religious dissident \u2013 in obedience, as Rouhani said in 2014, to ‘God\u2019s commandments’.”<\/p>\n
“That November deal, which Rouhani did not even bother to sign, may have been celebrated in the West and Tehran as a triumph. But it leaves too many questions unanswered (Iran has only agreed to cut down its number of nuclear centrifuges by two thirds). And this would not be the first time Rouhani has succeeded in running rings round the West.”<\/p>\n
“In 2006 he boasted in Tehran of having ‘fooled the West’ in that earlier ‘nuclear deal’ he negotiated in Vienna in 2004. And back in 1986 there was the ‘Iran-gate’ scandal, when America secretly supplied Iran with arms in return for the release of seven US hostages taken by Iran\u2019s IRGC agents in Lebanon. The missiles were delivered to Iran, but only three hostages were initially released \u2013 and three more Americans were promptly seized to replace them.”<\/p>\n
The paper added: “Iran\u2019s chief negotiator in that deal was Rouhani, even then being hailed in the West as ‘a moderate’. When the whole fiasco erupted into the greatest scandal of the Reagan era, the Washington Post published a storming editorial headed ‘The Moderate Fantasy’, excoriating the West\u2019s naivete in imagining that there were ‘moderates’ in the Iranian regime, somehow different from the all-powerful Supreme Leader. If only the US had not fallen for this delusion, the paper concluded, it might have ‘avoided a titanic and costly misjudgement’. Thirty years later it seems this lesson has still not been learned.”<\/p>\n