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ISTANBUL Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was reelected to a second term by a landslide, the interior minister declared Saturday, presenting him a resounding endorsement of his plans to end Iran's pariah status and rejoin the global economy.

With 57 percent of the vote, Rouhani defeated his hard-line rival, Ebrahim Raisi, who had the backing of the ruling clergy and allied security forces. He also won a clear mandate to push through domestic reforms and pursue talks with the West, building on the nuclear deal he negotiated with world powers. That agreement, which Rouhani and his cabinet clinched during his first term, constrains Iran's nuclear program in exchange for international sanctions relief.

The landslide victory gives Rouhani a mandate he did not have during his first term, said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of Eurasia Group, a political risk firm.

He'll remain a centrist, Kupchan said. But will be more aggressive in pursuing reforms.

Rouhani and his reformist backers also dealt a devastating blow to Iranian conservatives, most of whom supported Raisi and scoff at the soft power of the incumbent leader's diplomacy.

Turnout reached roughly 70 percent, with about 40 million Iranians casting ballots nationwide Friday. At stake was whether Iran would continue to open up to the world or return to the diplomatic and economic isolation of the past.

Raisi and his supporters appeared to favor policies associated with former president and populist firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was under his leadership that the United Nations began sanctioning Iran for failing to halt its uranium enrichment program.

[Former president Ahmadinejad wanted to run. Irans election vetters said no. ]

But while Rouhani managed to remove sanctions, economic growth remains slow and unemployment high. Many Iranians still live in poverty, and Raisi, who heads Iran's largest religious endowment, seized on the discontent to appeal to the poor and run a populist campaign. The effort, though, ultimately failed.

Despite poor economic conditions, [Iranians] said no to populism and empty promises of government subsidies, said Reza H. Akbari, a researcher on Iranian politics at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

This is especially refreshing given the recent rising populist trends in Europe and the U.S.," he said. The Iranian system is far from fair and balanced. However, Iranians demonstrated their belief that the most effective path to reform is ... through the ballot box.

Iran's president commands the state's vast bureaucracy and also has the ability to shape foreign and domestic policy. But all matters of the state must eventually be approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Guardian Council, a body of theocrats.

There were worries before the vote that Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's shadowy but most powerful security institution, would rig the results to ensure a Raisi win. In the 2009 election, widespread suspicions of fraud led to a grass-roots protest movement by reformists against the state and then-president Ahmadinejad. The demonstrations were brutally quashed, and the opposition leaders including Mir Hossein Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest.

Its very noteworthy that Khamenei did not force a Raisi win, Kupchan said. There has been speculation that Khamenei had chosen Raisi as his potential successor.

The erstwhile successor to the leader took a body blow tonight, he said. And the path to a more moderate successor to Khamenei is now at least somewhat clearer.

On the international front, Iran will have to confront the more bellicose administration of President Trump. As presidential vote in Iran took place, Trump landed Saturday in Saudi Arabia, which is Iran's main rival. His administration has placed the nuclear deal under interagency review and recently imposed new sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program.

[Trump campaigned against Muslims, but will preach tolerance in Saudi speech]

Still, Rouhani has pledged to continue to negotiate with the United States to persuade them to lift non-nuclear sanctions. Despite the tensions, Rouhani sees Iran as benefiting from the West and from foreign investment. And, apparently, Iranian voters agree.

Iranian voters sent a resounding message to the Trump administration, Akbari said. They are committed to the path of diplomacy and moderation. They stand behind Rouhani's attempts to break the country's isolation.

At home, Rouhani will probably struggle with more progressive political reform. He has failed to secure the release of Mousavi, Rahnavard and Karroubi from house arrest. Iran enjoys greater access to social media and the Internet, and reformist publications and Facebook pages flourished. But activists and journalists are still detained and jailed. Even with his strong mandate, it is unclear how much he will be able to achieve.

Rouhani will continue to face an uphill climb on political reform, Kupchan said.

According to Akbari, The moderate and reformist elements within the society are fully aware of Rouhani's shortcomings when it comes to human rights and guaranteeing social freedoms.

However, they decided to give him a second chance to deliver on his promises, he said.

Read more

Analysis: No matter who wins Irans election, hell have a fight with the supreme leader

Analysis: Whats really at stake in Irans presidential election

Opinion: Theres no clear winner for America in Irans presidential election

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Iranian President Rouhani wins reelection by a landslide - Washington Post

The Pentagon said Friday that a rare U.S. airstrike against pro-government forces in Syria targeted a convoy of Iran-backed troops, appearing to mark an important shift in the country's war.

The attack Thursday struck militants fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad as they advanced toward an air base manned by U.S. Special Forces and Washington-backed rebel groups close to the Jordanian border.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the attack was necessitated "by offensive movement with offensive capability of what we believe were... Iranian-directed forces inside an established and agreed-upon deconfliction zone."

If confirmed, it would be the first U.S. strike on Iranian proxies during seven years of war in Syria, signaling a possible escalation against Assad's most important ally.

Under the Obama administration, U.S. forces steered clear of direct confrontations with Iran and its proxies across Syria, Iraq and Yemen, prioritizing the upholding of Washington's nuclear deal with Tehran above all else.

"If U.S. troops are now engaging directly with Iranian militias, escalation in the absence of a well-wrought plan could inflame the conflict in Syria and further afield," Thanassis Cambanis, a fellow at the Washington-based Century Foundation, wrote in a research note published Friday.

Rebel commanders said the convoy, made up of Syrian and Iraqi militiamen who now form the bulk of Assad's fighting force, retreated after the U.S. attack and had not attempted to advance again by sunset Friday.

The airstrike comes at a time when the U.S. presence in Syria has become increasingly visible. Last month, the Trump administration launched the first direct U.S. attack on Assad targets, striking an air base in the central province of Homs in retaliation for a chemical attack that killed scores of civilians in the country's northwest. On the ground, the U.S. presence in Syria is also becoming more visible, as American troops back Kurdish-led forces fighting the Islamic State.

Aerial bombardments have ebbed across Syria since early May, after Russia, Iran and Turkey backed a deal to freeze fighting between government and rebel forces across four "de-escalation zones."

In areas outside of that pact, the cease-fires have freed up resources on all sides and triggered a scramble for influence around the fringes of Islamic State-held territory in eastern Syria.

The area is home to lucrative energy and agricultural sites that will be vital to Assad's government if it is to win economic independence from its Russian and Iranian backers.

Control of eastern Syria also includes the power to block or link up Iranian supply routes from Tehran to its most important proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

"Regime-allied militias advanced from the west and got bombed when they tried to enter our area. They have been advancing in recent weeks, bombing us heavily as they came," said Col. Muhannad al-Talla, a commander of Maghawir al-Thawrah, a Pentagon-backed rebel group at the al-Tanf air base.

Syrian officials bridled at Thursday's airstrike. On state television, an unnamed government official described it as a "flagrant aggression" by the "American-Zionist project in the region."

In Geneva, a fresh round of talks between Syrian government and opposition officials made little headway this week as the two sides refused to meet in the same room and none of the agenda's main issues was discussed.

Missy Ryan in Washington and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report

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US airstrike in Syria targeted forces directed by Iran: defense secretary - Chicago Tribune

So its a good win for the Iranian regime and its enormous population of young people and a bad win for Trumps regime, which would far rather have had an ex-judicial killer as Iranian president so that Americans would find it easy to hate him. Maybe Hassan Rouhanis final-week assault on his grim rival candidate and his supporters those whose main decisions have only been executions and imprisonment over the past 38 years paid off. Who among Irans under 25s, more than 40 per cent of the population, would have wanted to vote for Ebrahim Raisi whose hands had touched the execution certificates of up to 8,000 political prisoners in 1988?

So the man who signed Irans nuclear agreement with the United States, who struggled (often vainly, it has to be said) to reap the economic rewards of this nuclear bomb truce with the West, who believed in a civil society not unlike that of former president Mohamed Khatami who supported him in the election won with 57 per cent of the vote, backed by 23 million of the 41 million who cast their ballot. The corrupt and censorious old men of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the bazaaris and the rural poor the cannon fodder of the Iran-Iraq war as they often are in elections have been told they no longer belong to the future.

But what a contrast this election has been to the vast congress of dictators and cut-throat autocrats greeting Donald Trump in Riyadh just as the Iranian election results were announced. Save for Lebanon and Tunisia and Pakistan, almost every Muslim leader gathered in Saudi Arabia treats democracy as a joke or a farce hence the 96 per cent victories of their leaders or an irrelevancy. They are there to encourage Sunni Saudi Arabias thirst for war against Shia Iran and its allies. Which is why the Saudis will be appalled that a (comparatively) reasonable Iranian has won a (comparatively) free election that almost none of the 50 dictators gathering to meet Trump in Riyadh would ever dare to hold.

There are those who will remember, of course, that executions proceeded apace under Rouhanis previous presidency though not on the Golgotha scale of the 1988 executions and that Rouhanis revolutionary credentials are clear: just before Saddam Husseins Iraqi invasion of 1980, he managed to re-organise Irans tattered post-revolutionary army. But if Raisi symbolised the repressive past, Rouhani, however imperfectly, represents the future. For now.

Because everything depends on how he will respond to the madness of the Trump regime and its willingness to support the Sunni war machine with more than $100bn of weapons against Iran and its allies and friends. Rouhani must pray that Irans response can be political he does at least have the satisfaction of knowing the voter turnout in Iran this week was 70 per cent against Americas miserable 58 per cent in the Trump-Clinton election last year. Iranians are a very political people and take their presidential polls seriously, even if only six out of 1,600 potential candidates were allowed to stand.

As they will the next man to be chosen as Supreme Leader when Khamenei departs. This critical position without any precedent in Islam, it is now regarded as untouchable could go to Ayatollah Sayed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a man who, as head of the judiciary, reduced some of Irans more vicious punishments without being a true reformer. But this was true of old Hashemi Rafsanjani, the ex-president and Richelieu of Iran who died earlier this year. No one in Iranian politics can talk of reform and civil society without acknowledging the revolution and the martyrs of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

It was in the aftermath of this First World War-style conflict that the mass executions began. The only prominent cleric to stand against them was Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, whose courageous and moral decision cost him the Supreme Leadership. He spent the rest of his life under virtual house arrest. Khamenei took his place. And among the brutal men who then showed their Islamisism in the execution chamber, a massacre of prisoners that came to be known as the national disaster, Raisi could not expunge his name. Perhaps his only compensation today is that many of the Sunni Arab leaders gathered in Riyadh to applaud Americas mad President have almost as much blood on their hands. But they got elected.

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Rouhani's victory is good news for Iran, but bad news for Trump and his Sunni allies - The Independent

As Iran's chief nuclear envoy, Hassan Rouhani earned the nickname "diplomat sheikh" when negotiators in 2004 reached a deal that saw the Islamic Republic halt all its enrichment of uranium.

Over 10 years later, it would be Rouhani as president who would strike a bargain with world powers to again limit Iran's atomic program, showing once more the cleric's pragmatism in slowly engaging with the West.

But Iran's contested nuclear program represents only one part of the identity of the 68 year old, who decisively won a second term on Saturday. He opposed the reign of Iran's shah in the entourage of the Islamic Republic's founder Ruhollah Khomeini, held sensitive defense posts during the country's long 1980s war with Iraq and allegedly served on a committee that targeted government opponents abroad for assassination.

Rouhani, while opening Iran to the world, remains firmly a part of its small, clerically ruled power structure. And yet while not promising widespread changes, he increasingly has criticized hard-liners, showing a deft touch for balancing the various competing powers within Iran.

"I said it is good for centrifuges to operate, but it is also important that the country operates as well and the wheels of industry are turning," Rouhani said during his first presidential campaign in 2013.

Born in Nov. 12, 1948, Rouhani grew up in Sorkheh, a small town in Iran's northern Semnan province. His father, who supported the Shiite family with profits from a small spice shop, was one of the first in their town to perform the hajj, a religious pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia required of every able-bodied Muslim once in their life.

Rouhani joined the seminary and soon fell under the sway of Khomeini. At 16, he became a spokesman for the exiled cleric. Rouhani would become a law school student at the University of Tehran and lived for a time in London before returning to Iran, then under the sway of Khomeini's Islamic Revolution.

Rouhani soon had many roles in the new Islamic government, including serving as a lawmaker, reorganizing the military and overseeing Iran's state broadcaster, a valued mouthpiece for Khomeini.

After Iraq started the 1980s war with Iran, Rouhani held several defense positions, including serving as the head of Iran's National Air Defense Command. He later joined the Supreme National Security Council, a powerful body overseeing defense and security issues, reporting directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He also served as a national security adviser to then-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose realist attitude toward the world Rouhani later would emulate.

During this time, rights group allege Rouhani served on an extraconstitutional committee that planned the assassination of opponents and exiles abroad. Rouhani during this time also reportedly told an Iranian newspaper that the country "will not hesitate to destroy the activities of counterrevolutionary groups abroad." Rouhani has not addressed the allegations.

In 2002, after then-U.S. President George W. Bush described Iran as being in the "axis of evil," details of Iran's nuclear program were revealed by the Iranian exile group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. Rouhani soon became Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and reached a deal with European nations to suspend uranium enrichment.

But the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threw those negotiations into disarray. After heated arguments with Ahmadinejad, Rouhani resigned as negotiator. Ahmadinejad resumed the program, leading to a series of crippling international sanctions.

After authorities stopped Rafsanjani from running for president in 2013, Rouhani became his standard-bearer. He squeaked out a first-round victory. He entered office at an auspicious moment, as U.S. President Barack Obama earlier had agreed to secret talks with Iranian officials in Oman to see if negotiations were possible.

Rouhani seized the opportunity. In September 2013, he and Obama spoke by telephone, the highest-level exchange between the two countries since the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover and hostage crisis in Tehran. By 2015, the deal with world powers was struck.

Speaking later that year at the United Nations, Rouhani said he viewed the deal as "not the final objective but a development which can and should be the basis of further achievements to come."

"I say to all nations and governments: We will not forget the past, but we do not wish to live in the past," Rouhani said. "We will not forget war and sanctions, but we look to peace and development."

The nuclear deal led to Airbus and Chicago-based Boeing Co. to sign multi-billion-dollar deals with Iran for airplanes and sent Iranian crude back into many markets. But Iran's weak economy and high unemployment stubbornly remained, in part over foreign firms' trepidation about entering Iran.

Meanwhile, hard-liners and the Revolutionary Guard continued to detain dual nationals, as well as artists and journalists in a crackdown on dissent. The Guard also launched ballistic missiles, including two that had "Israel must be wiped out" written on them in Hebrew.

During his re-election campaign, Rouhani began criticizing hard-liners more stridently than he had in his four-year term. His rallies also saw people chant for detained leaders of the 2009 Green Movement, which challenged Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 re-election. Freeing those men had been a promise from his first campaign, one that remains unfulfilled.

But for Rouhani, pragmatism has long been a way of life. Rouhani served as a military conscript under the shah though opposing him. He also recounted in his memoir sneaking into Iraq at age 18 to visit Khomeini in exile. A smuggler demanded he be low profile and take off his turban, something other clerics may have refused. Rouhani didn't hesitate in removing it.

'We arrived safely, and that is what mattered," Rouhani recounted.

Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jongambrellap .

His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .

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Rouhani, a man of the Islamic Revolution, opens Iran to West - ABC News

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Washington And The World

President Trumps first foreign trip could undermine an agreement that has kept Americans safe, nine former top Obama administration officials warn.

May 18, 2017

It wont get the banner headlines of the latest outrage in the Russia investigation or North Koreas most recent missile test, but we have entered perhaps the most consequential week for American policy toward Iran since implementation of the nuclear deal more than a year ago. As the Trump administrations May 17 decision to extend sanctions waivers related to Irans nuclear program clearly attests, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is workingeven in the eyes of its harshest critics. But several upcoming eventsincluding the Iranian presidential election, Trumps first overseas trip and potential Iran-related action in Congresscould change this picture. In isolation, each has the potential to stress, or even unravel, the multinational agreement that has successfully constrained Irans nuclear program through diplomacy and without recourse to war. Together, they risk creating a perfect storm.

On Friday, Iranian voters will head to the polls in the first round of a presidential election widely viewed as a referendum on the nuclear deal and economic benefits President Hassan Rouhani pledged it would deliver. This is perhaps the most consequential eventand the one furthest from U.S. control. Polls have consistently favored Rouhani; while all current candidates, including the hard-liners favorite Ibrahim Raisi, have endorsed the JCPOA, Rouhani would be the most committed to preserving it. But the electoral outcome is not a foregone conclusion; the hard-liners have been frantically mobilizing support for Raisi in recent days, his most serious conservative rival has dropped out, massive rallies have been held in his support, and the regime might well decide to rig the outcome in Raisis favor. Raisis election would, at a minimum, complicate efforts to preserve the JCPOA, particularly if it were met with escalation by Washington.

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The same day, President Donald Trump heads to Saudi Arabia and then to Israel, for meetings that almost certainly will focus on those countries deep and justified concerns about Irans destabilizing activities in the region and steps to counter them. As the recent visit by Chinas President Xi Jinping and countless other encounters demonstrate, Trump is highly impressionableand he is likely to return from his Middle East trip determined to escalate pressure on Tehran and provide Saudi Arabia with a blank check to conduct its war in Yemen. This could well shape the outcome of the Trump administrations review of the U.S. approach to Iran, including how aggressively to confront Tehran and whether to maintain the nuclear deal.

There are good and important reasons to push back against Irans activities in the region, a policy approach that has remained consistent for several administrations. Irans support for destabilizing proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen or Bahrain is beyond dispute, and Trump will surely get an earful about these concerns in his meetings this week. The important question is how the United States and our partners can push back effectively without further inflaming the regions conflicts or playing into Irans hands. We can expect Saudi Arabia and the UAE to seek a freer hand and more U.S. assistance, including through weapons sales and perhaps even the commitment of U.S. military forces in their war in Yemen, which Riyadh and Abu Dhabi see as the primary front in a regional conflict with Tehran.

In this, the details matter. It would be one thing to increase support for securing the Saudi border and preventing illegal Iranian weapons shipments; it would be another entirely to offer Riyadhs coalition more leeway or deeper U.S. military involvement inside Yemen. This paradoxically would give Iran the opportunity to exact a heavy price on our allies through its Houthi partners while making a minimal commitment of its own, further embroil the kingdom and its partners in a quagmire, and provoke even more devastating suffering for the Yemeni people. And as long as the conflict continues, our most pressing national interest in Yemenpreventing Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists from taking advantage of the chaos to solidify their safe havenwill remain unaddressed.

The better way to help Saudi Arabia, Yemen and U.S. interests would be for the administration to launch an intensified diplomatic effort to end this conflict, which has lasted far too long and has left the impoverished country on the brink of a devastating famine.

Finally, Congress may step into this debate. Next week, the Senate is expected to begin marking up its latest sanctions bill on Irans ballistic missile program, which could fuel the administrations inclination to escalate and poses a direct threat to the nuclear deal.

Increasing sanctions pressure on Iranian activities outside the scope of the nuclear dealsuch as the routine new designations the administration announced on Wednesdaymake sense. An extensive web of legal authorities and executive orders provide the administration with a robust tool kit to disrupt Irans support for terrorism, its ballistic missile program and human rights violations. But, here too, the details matter. The benefit of new sanctions legislation that adds to this arsenal must be weighed against the risk of failing to uphold our obligations under the nuclear deal, especially as new legal language is interpreted and implemented. Experts reviewing the Senate legislation suggest it is likely to have modest, if any, benefit. Under such circumstances, why take the risk? At a minimum, as we have previously written, the legislation must be revised to minimize any risks to the deal.

But, of course, there is a larger question: Members of Congress considering legislating toughness on Iran should carefully consider the tools they are putting at the disposal of a president whose intentions remain unclear, some of whose advisers appear eager for a confrontation, and whose domestic politics may lead him to favor a diversionary foreign crisis. Indeed, President Trump, who already has lived up to the wildestand darkestpredictions, and is enmeshed in a serious domestic political crisis of his own making, might well have learned from last months missile strike in Syria that nothing helps change the conversation so much as military escalation overseas. Bolstering this administrations instinct to confront Iranencouraged by leaders Trump meets on this first foreign triprisks isolating the United States, not Iran, and replaces a stable equilibrium on Irans nuclear program with the renewed prospect of escalation. Congress should not play with matches.

It is important to keep our priorities straight. Under the nuclear deal, Iran has dismantled its centrifuges and heavy-water reactor and has committed never to build or acquire a nuclear weaponwith international inspectors deployed throughout Iran to ensure that remains the case. In the meantime, we face the urgent task of addressing Russias ongoing attempts to undermine democratic institutions here and in Europe. We also face a genuine nuclear crisis in North Korea, where sustained diplomacy and increased sanctions pressure could help address a direct threat to U.S. security. And we need to finish the fight against ISIS. With all these uncertaintiesin Iranian politics, in the region and here at homeone thing that is certain is that the JCPOA is working to constrain Irans nuclear program. We should not jeopardize that source of stabilityor risk an unnecessary military confrontation with Iran.

Authors: Antony J. Blinken, Jon Finer, Avril Haines, Philip Gordon, Colin Kahl, Robert Malley, Jeff Prescott, Ben Rhodes, Wendy Sherman.

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A Momentous Week for the Iran Nuclear Deal - POLITICO Magazine