Don’t Get Too Excited Over Rafsanjani’s Run

News over the weekend that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has entered the race for Iranian president produced surprise and elation in some quarters that politics in the Islamic Republic are not completely dead.

But assuming Rafsanjani survives vetting by the system’s clerical-run Guardian Council, his chances for victory against conservatives supported by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should not be overestimated. Any enthusiasm for Rafsanjani’s candidacy should be tempered by his uneven past record as president in domestic and foreign affairs, Iran’s bipolar political system and the difficulty facing any Iranian leader in dealing with the country’s sharp downward trajectory.

Compared to the reckless Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who defeated Rafsanjani in a runoff election in 2005, the wily old pol –— known as “the Shark” for his guile and his wispy beard –— might seem like a welcome return to pragmatism. A “pillar” of the 1979 revolution, Rafsanjani, who won two terms in 1989 and 1993, has more experience than anyone in the system — including Khamenei, who Rafsanjani helped promote to supreme leader in 1989 –— in managing Iran’s relations with the West and boosting the nation’s economic performance.

His proto-party, the “Servants of Construction,” engineered Iran’s recovery after the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when oil production and revenues slumped to their lowest point. Rafsanjani also made overtures to the United States and helped to free US hostages in Lebanon. Those overtures were unsuccessful, however, in large part because of Iran’s support for anti-Israel groups and acts of terrorism. Iran has been blamed for the 1992 assassination of Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant, the destruction of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina that killed more than 80 people and an attack on a US barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed 19 Americans. At home, Rafsanjani presided at the start of so-called “serial murders” of 80 Iranian writers and dissidents.