Rohani's playbook is clear: Fool the West while buying time

Here's an interesting snippet from a New York Times report, February 8. 2004:

In part because of their desire to avoid another confrontation in the Middle East, Britain, France and Germany won American approval in October for a diplomatic initiative in which Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment activities at Natanz, which it maintains is a peaceful facility, and to accept additional inspection protocols.

Some American officials fear that compliance with that pledge may be slipping, and that, in any case, a confrontation over Natanz is virtually certain. ''The European deal may have postponed the reckoning, but unless the Iranians give up their program, it's not going to avoid the reckoning,'' said a senior American official.

Even many Europeans say they are not sure of Iran's intentions. A senior European envoy said that after a meeting recently with the leader of Iran's national security agency, Hassan Rohani, it was not clear whether Iran truly intended to end its weapon program or was simply playing for time.

''We are very suspicious of their intentions,'' he said, adding that it was often hard to tell even in meetings who was a reformer and who was a hard-line cleric.

Today, the Western media and even most politicians have almost unanimously declared this same Hassan Rohani to be a reformer, a moderate, someone the West can do business with!

On what do they base this? Well, on nothing, except that Rohani isn't as bombastic as Ahmadinejad.

Yoel noticed something notable in Rohani's press conference on Monday, that was not reported anywhere.

This "moderate reformer" stated that "If sanctions have any benefits, they will only benefit Israel. It has no benefits for others. We will make the enemy [Israel] understand that it has no option but to bow its head in front of the great Iranian nation and not wave its ax [at it]."

Are these the words of a moderate?

As TOI notes:

According to Ze’ev Maghen, an Iran scholar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University and Jerusalem’s Shalem College, Rowhani is himself convinced of the necessity of an advanced nuclear weapons program, and interested in using soft language merely as a stalling tactic in best Iranian negotiating tradition.

“Rowhani is a dyed-in-the-wool Khomeinist and part of the consensus on Iranian nuclear energy, which is a code word for nuclear weapons,” Maghen told The Times of Israel on Monday. And “he is no friendlier on Israel than [outgoing President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. The only difference between the two is one of style.”

A few months after the 2004 NYT article above, Rohani made a speech where he said:

If one day we are able to complete the fuel cycle and the world sees that it has no choice -- that we do possess the technology -- then the situation will be different. The world did not want Pakistan to have an atomic bomb or Brazil to have the fuel cycle, but Pakistan built its bomb and Brazil has its fuel cycle, and the world started to work with them. Our problem is that we have not achieved either one, but we are standing at the threshold.

Rohani has a track record of putting a smiling face on Iran's buying time to build a nuclear weapon. Now he has the best platform possible to do so.

And the Iranian regime is playing the Western world like a flute.