Hassan Rouhani charmed his way around Europe, but Iran is still fuelling the war in Syria; Guardian editorial

With his charm offensive, the clerical regime’s president who visited Europe last week was probably looking for a public relations bonus in the west especially after releasing a number of journalists, but the statistics in Iran tell another story.
The Guardian says in 2015 Iran executed at least 830 people, including juveniles, many for non-violent crimes. The security services continue to harass and detain activists, writers and journalists. The methods used by the regime to crush the pro-democracy movement in 2009 are still very much in use today.
Nor has Iran become in any way more “moderate” in its behaviour in the Middle East. In Syria, Iran’s militias and Republican Guards are direct participants in the war crimes that the Assad regime inflicts on its own population. Iran’s close ally Hezbollah played a key role in the siege of Madaya, where children died of hunger as a result, and it is part of similar operations elsewhere.
Anti-Rouhani protest in Paris, 28 January 2016
It is to be hoped that a sustained implementation of the nuclear agreement will improve international security. But to draw from that the notion that Iran must now be spared any reproach would be foolish. Iran’s hardliners sought economic relief through the nuclear deal because they desperately want to keep their hold on power, not because they want to pursue a more democratic path at home or more rational policies abroad. Diplomacy is important, but it must not come at the expense of clear sightedness, nor should it be accompanied by the kind of simplistic analysis that puts the sole onus on Saudi Arabia rather than
on Iran.
In the reporting of President Rouhani’s visit, the covering up of nude statues in Rome, supposedly to spare the Iranian delegation a sight they would find objectionable, was treated as a sort of comic interlude. But it is hardly a laughing matter that, while its president was on a charm offensive in Europe, Iran’s military forces were carrying on their brutal operations in Syria as usual. It is Iran’s responsibility for the crimes that have generated the refugee crisis that is the true obscenity, not a few nude statues in the Capitoline museum.