page_title: Seyed Hossein Mousavian
section_title: Post at Princeton and controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Seyed Hossein Mousavian / Post at Princeton and controversy
caption_attribution_description: Dr Patricia Lewis, Sir Richard Dalton, Dr Seyed Hossein Mousavian (left to right) at the Chatham House event Nuclear Iran: Negotiating a Way Out, 4 February 2013
context_page_description: Seyed Hossein Mousavian is an Iranian policymaker and scholar who served on Iran's nuclear diplomacy team in negotiations with the EU and International Atomic Energy Agency. He currently resides in the United States, where he is a visiting research scholar at Princeton University.
context_section_description: Mousavian has been a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs since 2009.
  Writing in the Weekly Standard in September 2012, Reuel Marc Gerecht argued that Mousavian's Western admirers, who see him as “a guide to a possible resolution” of the Iran crisis, “have been as naïve as he has been deceitful.... To journalists and American officials, he has tried with conviction to make the case for Tehran’s 'peaceful' nuclear program. For him, the Iranian regime is 'misunderstood,' and the West, even under President Obama, has been too hostile and suspicious. Sufficient Western concessions and greater Western sensitivity are the keys to solving the nuclear contretemps.”  Mousavian's “assertions that Khamenei’s intent isn’t threatening,” noted Gerecht, “are followed by hints that a bomb might, nonetheless, be logical for the Islamic Republic to develop, especially given the threatening behavior of the United States and Israel.” Gerecht further pointed out that Mousavian, in his writings and talks, is consistently “respectful towards Supreme Leader Khamenei.”
  Gerecht noted that "Mousavian at times claims to know a lot about Iran’s nuclear program, and then, when accusations from the IAEA are too cutting, not much at all." For example, "Mousavian knew not a thing" about the uranium-enrichment facility at Fordow until President Obama's press conference about it. Citing Mousavian's expression of trust in "the supreme leader’s fatwa banning the use or production of nuclear weapons," Gerecht observes wryly that "Mousavian is putting his trust in the man who demolished his world, incarcerated him, and forced him and his family into exile. It would be easy to say that Mousavian is just lying—and he is. But what is more intriguing is how hard it is for him to reflect critically on the revolution. In his eyes still, Iran’s faults are mostly American in origin—or tactical mistakes made by his archenemy, Ahmadinejad. Like battered Communists of old who just couldn’t stop loving the Soviet Union, Mousavian remains a party apparatchik who still loves the cause....There isn’t a word, even from the safety of Princeton, about the dark side of Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards’ having the bomb. Little men like Mousavian—ideologues whose identities were created by the revolution—just can't flip."
caption: Dr Patricia Lewis, Sir Richard Dalton, Dr Seyed Hossein Mousavian (left to right) at the Chatham House event Nuclear Iran: Negotiating a Way Out.
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