Iranians head to the polls on Friday to elect a new president. The fact that the Islamic Republic holds elections leads some diplomats to deem it a democracy. It is not. Because the unelected Guardian Council winnowed down more than 95% of the field to eliminate those insufficiently loyal to the revolution, the result is analogous to if the Soviet Union held elections, but only Central Committee members of the Communist Party could run.
Four candidates remain in the running. Like clockwork, pundits and the press deem some reformists. This embrace of Iranian reformism is part mirror imaging and part wishful thinking. The implication of the reformist myth is that those labeled reformers truly want democracy, respect human rights, or share liberal values.
This myth afflicted analysis of Iran from the beginning. Richard Falk, long a professor at Princeton University and a human rights activist, for example, assured New York Times readers two weeks after the victory of the Islamic Revolution that concerns about its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were misplaced. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals,” he wrote.
The hostage crisis, Iranian firing squads, and assassinations abroad quickly proved Falk wrong. Still, the hope persisted that Khomeini, rather than the revolutionaries who surrounded him, was the problem. The root of the Reagan-era “arms for hostages” scandal was not the illegality of diverting funds to the Nicaraguan Contras (that came later) but rather a desire to engage so-called centrists or reformists such as Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who assumed the presidency after Khomeini died. President George H.W. Bush was equally optimistic about Rafsanjani and went so far as to issue a national security directive ordering the U.S. government to prepare for an imminent reestablishment of relations. Only when the U.N. envoy later met Rafsanjani in Tehran did it become clear how insincere Rafsanjani’s rhetoric of rapprochement was.
New hope arose in 1997 when a former culture minister, Mohammad Khatami, won the presidency and spoke of a “Dialogue of Civilizations.” Gary Sick, a former Ford and Carter administration National Security Council aide whose leaks contributed to the Iranian hostage crisis and later became an Iranian gadfly (and conspiracy theorist), assured that Khatami was “a reformer with an outspoken commitment to civil society, social justice, the rule of law and expanded freedom.” Yet, Khatami had written that only mullahs and ayatollahs should fully participate in “democracy” and signed off on the 1988 slaughter of political prisoners. His vice president, Masoumeh Ebtekar, was the spokeswoman for the hostage-takers at the American Embassy; to date, she has neither apologized nor expressed regret. The covert nuclear program? Largely built under Khatami’s watch. Khatami’s own aide suggested the goal of dialogue was to deflect attention from Iran’s military goals.
What about the Green Movement? Many apologists for Iran suggest Iranians protesting election fraud in 2009 wanted “reform” rather than an end to theocracy and to amplify the role of “reformists” such as former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the formation of the movement. When the SS Bridgeton, a reflagged Kuwaiti tanker, hit an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, Mousavi commented it was “an irreparable blow on America’s political and military prestige.” So much for reform.
Even outgoing President Hassan Rouhani has received the reformist treatment. Yet, in 2008, he bragged that he outmaneuvered nuclear negotiators by proposing voluntary limits on enrichment only to sidetrack the imposition of mandatory limits. When momentum dissipated, he scrapped the voluntary limits. He legitimized his 2013 presidential run by claiming credit for being the first to recognize Khomeini’s channel to the messiah. His promises to release political prisoners were empty. Executions skyrocketed. And nuclear cheating continued.
No Iranian reformist acknowledges the Baha’i community’s right to exist, denounces Tehran’s commitment to genocide against Israel’s Jews, tolerates homosexuality, believes a woman can be president, or eschews Iran’s terrorism. In reality, reformists are just the good cop to the supreme leader’s bad cop. They seek to confuse or distract the West but have neither the desire nor courage to change regime behavior.
As Rouhani prepares to leave office in August, President Joe Biden will accelerate his diplomacy in order to strike a deal before “reformists” leave office. He shouldn’t bother. To do so will only confirm naivete to the reality of the Islamic Republic.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
