He has appointed Hossein Dehghan, a senior Revolutionary Guard official and one of the masterminds of the bombing of the US marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut in 1983, to the post of defence minister. A man who can count the lives of 241 US soldiers and 58 French paratroopers on his conscience will help to steer Rouhani's "moderate" new course. 

He will be joined by another "moderate", Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, the new justice minister, who spent 12 years (1987-99) as deputy minister of intelligence in charge of foreign operations. He is accused of overseeing the murder of thousands of prisoners in the summer of 1988 and the assassination of Iranian opponents both at home and abroad during his time in office. 

"Moderates" of the same type populate Rouhani's cabinet, most of them people with links to powerful clans in the Iranian nomenklatura, such as the Larijanis and Rafsanjanis, or to the security establishment — or both.

With such a pedigree, it is hard not to dismiss early enthusiasm for Rouhani. Although anyone is clearly better than Ahmadinejad — which is a bit like saying that death by hanging is better than burning at the stake.