President-Elect Hassan Rouhani May Be Iran's Hope For Moderation
By Ramin Mostaghim, Alexandra Sandels and Patrick J. McDonnell
August 3, 2013, 8:05 a.m.
TEHRAN — As a seminary student, he made a hazardous foray across the border into Iraq to meet his icon, the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Years later, he joined Khomeini in France, eventually returning home after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. On Sunday, Hassan Rouhani will be sworn in as Iran's president, succeeding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The styles of the incumbent and his successor couldn't be more different. But what everyone —in and outside Iran — wants to know is whether Iran's policies will change as well. That is far less clear. The biggest test will be trying to find common ground with the West on a subject Rouhani knows well — Iran's disputed nuclear program.
Rouhani, a white-turbaned legal scholar and theologian, has adopted "moderation" as his motto, a dramatic shift from his predecessor's bluster. Unlike Ahmadinejad, a blacksmith's son with little international exposure when he was elected, Rouhani is an intellectual who has represented Iran abroad. He holds an Iranian law degree and a doctorate from a British university.
At the heart of his candidacy in the June election was a paradox that he will have to confront as president. A consummate insider and conservative-leaning pragmatist, Rouhani played the insider-as-outsider card, securing a narrow majority in a fractured field.
MORE...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-rouhani-20130803,0,6695020.story