Hassan Rouhani needs more than just warm words and a cheery Twitter feed

Like the wider world it reflects, Twitter is a nasty place these days, full of people brimming with bile of all kinds. So amidst the hatred, one man stands out these days as a lone voice of reason - the turbaned, funky cleric who Tweets under the name of @HassanRouhani.

Indeed, judging by his Tweets since he became Iran's president last year, one could be forgiven for thinking that Hassan Rouhani's account had been hacked by the Dalai Lama or the ghost of John Lennon. It's a constant stream of earnest messages about compassion, peace and world understanding: even before he delivered his speech today at the World Economic Forum at Davos, he was lavishing praise on his Swiss hosts for their "admirable democracy".

The oratory he gave on Thursday morning carried on in similar fashion, as full of sweetness as a bar of Swiss chocolate. Iran's new priority was "constructive engagement with the outside world", he said. Relations with Europe - broken off after Iran's brutal crackdown on dissent after the 2009 elections - would soon be normalised, he pledged. And nuclear bombs? Perish the thought. "We never sought and will never seek nuclear weapons," declared Mr Rouhani. "I declare that a nuclear weapon has no place in our security strategy."

True, most diplomats would no doubt say that that Mr Rouhani makes a pleasant change from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who used such occasions to rant about the Great Satan (America) and its smaller, but wilier partner, the Little Satan (Britain). But as with most speeches made by statesmen from countries with little history of free speech, there was not so much an elephant in the room as much as a herd, some of whom are currently on the rampage.

Mr Rouhani's comments on Syria, for example, where he said "free and fair elections" were now the way forward, somehow failed to mention that for the last three years, Tehran has been quartermaster-in-chief to President Assad's murderous regime, providing both weapons and "public order" advice courtesy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

These days, Iran tries to present that as part of an honourable fight against the lunatic al-Qaeda fringe in the rebel ranks. But the fact is that Iran's support began long before al-Qaeda was a player in the Syrian civil war, when most of the rebels were just ordinary people who wanted a change from the Assad family's rule. Likewise, it is rather rich of Mr Rouhani to recommend free and fair elections, when the polls that brought him to power last June did not allow any candidate who was not a loyal acolyte of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Of course, this being Davos, with its audience made up mainly of wealthy businessmen and diplomats, nobody heckled his speech. No oil executive shouted out "Why haven't you released all your political prisoners?". No ambassador asked him whether Iran might one day move to become a multi-party democracy. And nobody raised the question of why Iran does not want to dismantle the various atomic facilities it has in bomb-proof mountain bunkers, if it really has no interest in making nukes.

Instead, the only person who tried to spoil the fun was an old man who wasn't even in the audience. In a hotel on the other side of Davos, Israel's 91-year-old president, Shimon Peres, gave a rapid-reaction news conference that rebutted nearly everything Mr Rouhani said. Or, rather, what he didn't say.

“He didn’t say clearly the time has come to make peace between Israeli and the Arabs," said Mr Peres. "He didn’t announce he is going to stop sending arms to Hezbollah. He could have announced, since he said he didn’t want a nuclear bomb, that he would stop building long-range missile with nuclear warheads."

Mr Peres went on in that fashion, composing what could have been an entirely alternative speech for Mr Rouhani, one which might have given rather more credence - in Israeli eyes, at least - to his aspirations to become a Persian answer to President Barack Obama. There are already 170,000 followers of @HassanRouhani, but it seems Mr Peres is yet to become one of them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/10592753/Analysis-Hassan-Rouhani-needs-more-than-just-warm-words-and-a-cheery-Twitter-feed.html