Rouhani in the footsteps of Saddam

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani criticised the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait accusing them of causing the decline in oil prices. In a televised address he said: “Other oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will suffer more than Iran suffers as a result of the decline in oil prices.”

Prior to this speech by Rouhani, Iran described Saudi Arabia’s refusal to intervene in order to arrest the decline of oil prices as a strategic error. In fact, all that is left for Rouhani to do is to reiterate the famous maxim: “Severing necks rather than severing sustenance”. And in this way he would become like Saddam Hussein who reiterated that phrase in the early 1990s when oil prices reached $12 a barrel. At the time, Saddam accused Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates falsely of manipulating oil prices. This loose statement by Rouhani is good for gossip. It does not rise to the level of a statesman’s rhetoric let alone the rhetoric of a serious chairman of a company’s board.

Instead, Rouhani should have been frank with his own people about the true causes of the crisis that led to the decline in oil prices, as did, for instance, the Saudi monarch King Abdullah bin Abd Al-Aziz when he was a Crown Prince in the 1990s and oil prices slumped. At the time, King Abdallah said to the people of the Gulf, and not just the Saudis, that the age of the boom was over and that it was time to tighten the belt. This is what the role of the leader and statesman is about; it is about facing the facts rather than placing the blame squarely on others. The Rouhani government should have done what the Saudi Finance Minister did, who spoke several days ago about the challenges of oil price decline and the proposed solutions. Or as did the UAE Minister of Petroleum, who spoke frankly and openly about the crisis, about the difficulty of reducing production and the justifications for this.

As a head of state, Rouhani was supposed to talk about his country’s desire to end its international isolation. He should have behaved like a statesman, or as board chairman, or as a CEO of a company that is facing challenges, and resort to reducing unwarranted costs. This is what serious companies would do when going through financial crises, let alone what real states might do. Had Rouhani been a true moderate, he would have reduced Iran’s absurd expenses topping the list of which is funding violence and fanning with it the flames of fire in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon. This would also apply to Iran’s illegitimate projects in Africa. Had Rouhani been a statesman and a moderate his priority would have been to reduce the cost of Iran’s adventures in the region and to search for a peaceful path for cooperation with the neighbours and with the international community instead of the damaging sectarian path Iran has been pursuing. Which is more important for the Iranian citizen: funding Hassan Nasrullah or building a factory inside Iran? Funding Al-Assads’s crimes or constructing roads and building universities and hospitals inside Iran itself?

These are not difficult questions to answer by any real statesman, or even by a professional financial management clerk. So, why is Rouhani running away from facing the facts and is talking just like Saddam talked when he occupied Kuwait? The answer is simple: there is no difference between Saddam’s Iraq and the Iran of today. Iran’s regime is even worse now because its damage is not restricted to Iran from within; it is harming the entire regime and international community.

Translated from Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, 15 January, 2015

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.