You were elected on a platform of “moderation’’ and “wisdom,’’ with a mandate to forge a nuclear deal so that the stifling sanctions on Iran’s economy may be removed. But Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a coterie of hardliners, who employ hostility to the Great Satan as a legitimating principle, would not allow you to make the concessions needed for a nuclear deal by the original deadline of Nov. 24, 2014.
Those hardliners, some of whom made fortunes by grabbing a slice of the illicit oil market resulting from sanctions, are now crowing that Iran stood firm against “world arrogance.’’ Their American counterparts, in line with Saudi and Israeli positions, insist that a nuclear pact must not leave Iran with even a token number of centrifuges able to enrich uranium. But you are too shrewd to take at face value the pretenses of either camp.
You give no credence to Revolutionary Guard commanders and hardline clerics who pretend that Iran can become a great power while pursuing a nuclear weapons capability and suffering under oil-export and financial sanctions. You recognize that if Iran were to become a nuclear power, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and others would follow suit. So rather than enhancing Iran’s security, pursuit of a nuclear weapon would be more likely to increase threats to Iran’s security. Therefore, though you can hardly say so in public, you know that it hardly matters whether, in a comprehensive nuclear agreement, Iran is permitted to keep 1,000, 4,000, or 40,000 centrifuges spinning to enrich uranium. What matters most for Iran is the schedule for lifting sanctions.
As you forge ahead, trying to coax the Supreme Leader into a nuclear accord apt to transform US-Iran relations, you are constantly mindful of how his hardline advisers blundered in their pursuit of regional dominance. Not even the Americans under Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush were able to make such a mess of the Middle East.
Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s clerical regime, wanted Iran to lead a non-sectarian Islamic Revolution. But actions promoted by hawks around the Supreme Leader, who say they are following Khomeini’s line, have caused Sunnis across the Mideast to become bitter enemies of Iran — and of all Shi’ites.
It is left to you to put out the fire set by those “strategists’’ who sent Iran’s Qods Force commanders to direct Lebanese Hezbollah militiamen in slaughtering Syrian citizens in order to keep Bashar Assad’s mafia family in power. That fateful decision has not only contributed to a sectarian bloodbath in Syria, empowering the Sunni jihadists of ISIS; it also persuaded Arabs in Lebanon and elsewhere that Hezbollah’s true purpose was not to lead Arab resistance to Israel, but to serve as obedient pawns of Shi’ite Iran in its drive for regional dominance.
Your hawkish rivals committed another boomeranging folly when they arranged for the paranoid, sectarian Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki to serve a second term even though his party finished second in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Then, intending to checkmate the despised Americans, Tehran’s deciders acted behind the scenes to prevent Iraq from signing an agreement that would have kept US military advisers in Iraq after 2011. As soon as the American advisers left, Maliki fired Iraq’s competent military commanders and replaced them with corrupt and incompetent loyalists.
Your domestic enemies are the sorcerer’s apprentices whose blunders gave rise to the ISIS threat in Iraq and Syria. You understand that if US fighter jets were not acting as Iran’s air force in Iraq and Syria, you would have to put Iranian boots on the ground — first to defend Baghdad and then to prevent ISIS fanatics from sacking the sacred Shi’ite shrines of Najaf and Karbala.
You are Hassan Rouhani. Your job is to clean up the mess made by fools — whether those in Washington or Tehran.
Alan Berger is a retired Globe editorial writer.