We'd be foolish to not let the battle between technocrats and theocrats play out.
By Moisés Naím
The Atlantic - Dec 3 2013
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, has more cabinet members with Ph.D.
degrees from U.S. universities than Barack Obama does. In fact, Iran
has more holders of American Ph.D.s in its presidential cabinet than
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, or Spain—combined.
Take, for example, Rouhani’s chief of staff, Mohammad Nahavandian. He
spent many years in the United States and has a Ph.D. in economics from
George Washington University. Or Javad Zarif, the foreign affairs
minister and chief negotiator in the recent nuclear deal between Iran
and six global powers. He studied at the University of San Francisco and
completed his doctorate at the University of Denver. For five years, he
lived in New York and was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. Ali
Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, has a Ph.D. in
nuclear engineering from MIT. Mahmoud Vaezi, the communication minister,
studied electrical engineering at Sacramento and San Jose State
Universities and was enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Louisiana State
University (he ultimately earned a doctorate in international relations
at Warsaw University). Other cabinet members have advanced degrees from
universities in Europe and Iran. Abbas Ahmad Akhoundi, the
transportation minister, has a Ph.D. from the University of London,
while President Rouhani got his from Glasgow Caledonian University in
Scotland. The new government in Tehran, in other words, might well be
one of the most technocratic in the world.
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