Live, From New York, It's Javad Zarif

I have seen Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif speak in person three times. To his credit, I guess, he waxed agnostic on the historicity of the Holocaust on only one of those occasions, nearly 12 years ago. Perhaps his thinking on the topic has evolved since then, in which case it would be maybe the only sign of moral or intellectual growth Zarif has ever betrayed. His appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations Monday evening was almost indistinguishable from his discussion at the Asia Society back in September, which was itself reminiscent of his New America Foundation-sponsored talk at NYU in April of 2015.  (I was unfortunately waitlisted for Zarif’s talk at CFR and had to watch a webcast of the event, but what’s just as well—others should get the chance to bask in the foreign minister’s presence.)

Zarif is still a dissembler and a double-speaker, and he still spent seemingly a third of his talk stewing over the particularities of the Iran-Iraq War, a conflict that concluded 30 years ago. This time around, the biggest howlers included: “In Iran, the judiciary is independent from the executive,” “We are in Syria to prevent a takeover of Syria by the extremists,” and “our economic indicators are good.” Orwellian is an overused descriptor these days, but what other adjective to use here? “Only in the Middle Ages could you have wars with winners and losers. In the war of the 20th and 21st century there are no winners,” said Zarif, whose government has behaved in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq as if wars are very much winnable or losable. He let a detectable anti-Arab chauvinism slip through: “We need to have a strong region, not to be the strongest in the region,” Zarif claimed, drawing a supposed contrast between Iran and its Gulf neighbors. “We are big enough, old enough, mature enough to appreciate this reality.”

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