WHAT can be made of the sudden resignation of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a resignation which after two days, President Hassan Rouhani refused to accept? At first blush, it is very tempting to see this as another of Tehran's exercises in smoke and mirrors, which signify precious little, if anything at all. The speculation over what prompted Zarif to quit has focused on the visit this week of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, which it appears was not organized by the Iranian foreign ministry. In his opaque statement on Monday, Zarif said that he hoped his ministry would be allowed to reclaim its "proper statutory role". It appears that Zarif was not invited to join meetings that Assad had with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Rouhani, meetings which came as a complete surprise to the foreign ministry. This suggests there has been a rift between Zarif and Rouhani, both supposedly pillars of the "moderate" political establishment, which allegedly opposes the hardline ayatollahs and their key enforcers, the Revolutionary Guard. Rouhani took all of 48 hours to reject Zarif's resignation. This may have been designed to indicate the president had to struggle with hardliners to keep Zarif in the job or maybe persuade his angry foreign minister that he and his ministry would be respected in future. Zarif is no mean diplomat, who ran rings around President Barack Obama and his unimaginative Secretary of State John Kerry during the long-drawn out talks that led to the Geneva nuclear agreement. Hardliners were supposed to have been incensed that Zarif cut a deal which imposed minor limitations on the Iran nuclear weapons program. But as has been demonstrated, this moratorium, which in any event was only for 15 years, has already been disregarded. Zarif himself surely knew this from the outset, thus the alleged fury of the deeply conservative ayatollahs was always phony. It is of course possible that Zarif had tired of the foreign ministry and seized the Assad visit as an excuse to quit public life. However, it is far more likely that this ruction was contrived, to bolster the feeble narrative that somewhere inside the aggressive Iranian state, there are some good guys struggling to get out and bring the country back to moderation and reasonable relations with its immediate neighbors and the international community as a whole. Since President Trump tore up Obama's useless nuclear deal, Tehran wants the world to believe that Rouhani, Zarif and other "moderates" have been struggling to keep it alive, courting in particular the Europeans in a currently successful effort to have them break ranks with Washington over the re-imposition of sanctions. The story then runs that the hardliners are intent on scrapping the Geneva accord and once again going head-to-head with the United States. Given that Obama's deal was almost entirely window-dressing and has caused little more than inconvenient interruptions to Iranian nuclear plans, this version of events is plain nonsense. When all is said and done, Zarif and his immediate boss Rouhani, along with the ayatollahs led by Khamenei are two sides of exactly the same coin. They reject genuine compromise and instead are engaged assiduously in malign and bloody interference in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and even in Eastern Province. Whether Zarif stays or goes does not matter in the least.
