Leaving aside the hilarity over nude statues being hidden from his gaze, there is nothing particularly amusing about the five-day visit of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to Italy and France. The degree to which both Rome and Paris have been fawning over the Iranian president is disturbing. Both countries, grappling with recession, have been eager to sign lucrative deals with Tehran now that sanctions have been lifted. Given that it is only days since economic restrictions were removed, it would seem evident that the deals now being inked have been under discussion for some time - in contravention of the ban on commercial and economic ties. The scramble for business is quite startling. Tehran hotels have filled up with foreign businessmen, the lobbies crowded with sharp-suited Iranian fixers. This is bonanza time for the deeply corrupt movers and shakers in the regime. Once they benefitted from smuggled goods brought in to the country in defiance of international sanctions. Now they have the chance to play middlemen to contracts for the essential upgrading of huge areas of Iranian infrastructure, from oil fields to airliners, from communications to power stations. Deals worth billions of dollars are going to be made in coming months and significant quantities of this money are going to stick to the middlemen. A new generation of international businessmen seem willfully to be forgetting the experience of their predecessors. Iran was always an extremely difficult place in which to do business. There is an almost complete lack of transparency. Iran is still not a member of the World Trade Organization. It applied to join in 1996. It is now keen to press ahead with its application. It is not hard to see why. WTO membership would make it very hard for international sanctions to be reimposed. There is a National Security Exemption. Russia, which joined in 2012 is subject to that exemption because of its invasion of Ukraine, occupying the Crimea and a swathe of the east of that country. However, it is less clear how that exemption could be invoked if Iran resumes those parts of its nuclear fuel enrichment program which it has promised to abandon. It seems clear that the deal-hungry West is seized with a crowd mentality. In their rush to secure advantage, governments are throwing aside political caution. The pity is, that when it comes to making sensible decisions, more often than not, the crowd is wrong. Just because Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister Javad Zarif have presented themselves as amiable moderates with whom the international community can do business, should not be good reason to conceal the hardline core of the regime and its henchmen gathered around the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. There is a belief that the end of sanctions and the return of economic stability is likely to benefit Rouhani and the moderates. But surely this is a nonsense. Iran is currently sponsoring Hezbollah terrorism in the Middle East, funding and arming a rebellion in Yemen, supporting the vicious Assad regime in Syria, fomenting discord here in the Kingdom and in Bahrain and testing ballistic missiles in defiance of an international ban. What is moderate in any of that? Yet the selfsame Rouhani who has been feted in Rome and Paris is supposed to be in charge of the government that is behaving with such aggression. The international community should wake up and smell the coffee.
