Washington Doublethink And The Iran Deal

First, Biden and his administration have been hot to trot back to the JCPOA from the get-go, despite claims of playing hard to get. One way that they’ve kept up the pretense is to engage in European Union-sponsored negotiations in the Austrian capital, referring to them as “indirect talks” and conducting them through shuttle diplomacy between rooms in a Viennese hotel.

Never mind that American diplomats would have been happy to meet face to face with their Iranian counterparts, but surprise, surprise: Tehran nixed that option off the bat. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his underling mullahs are well-versed in U.S. Democrats’ penchant for appeasement and willful blindness where the JCPOA is concerned, after all. And making a post-Trump America grovel before it lifts sanctions and enables Iran to fund the enrichment of nuclear-bomb-grade uranium is what the regime is seeking.

Second, Rouhani is no “moderate,” whether or not he has less blood on his hands than Raisi. A longtime loyalist of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he has always backed and spearheaded the quelling of popular protests, employing any bloody means to nip them in the bud. The only real difference between him and his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—and now his successor, Raisi—is and has been in his grasp of how to achieve Iran’s objectives by being palatable to the West.

Aware of the facade, his distraught eldest son killed himself in 1992, writing in an accusatory suicide note: “I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double-dealing and your hypocrisy. I am ashamed to live in an environment in which I am forced to lie to my friends every day and tell them that my father is not part of all this—to tell them that my father loves the nation and to know that the reality is far from this. I get nauseated when I see you, father, kissing Khamenei’s hand.”