Posted on 06/15/2009 5:17:09 AM PDT by Tolik
Thoughts Tonight on Iran
1) Why did we reject the Bush policy of non-engagement with a monster like Ahmadinejad, who oppressed his own and threatened nuclear destruction to Israel? Is it all that moral, or all that wise, or all that much in US realpolitik interests to apologize to a thug? Does it show solidarity with the Iranian people to court a nut? What is so smart in making Iran the center of our attention rather than the Maliki democratic government in Iraq? Hamas rather than democratic Israel? Is what we are now seeing in the streets of Iran proof of all the praise once heaped on theocratic “democratic” Iran by the likes of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and the NY Times?
2) Will someone please tell President Obama that when you send videos to Ahmadinejad, apologize for something that happened over a half-century ago, and ignore serial Iranian killing of Iraqi and American democrats in Iraq, you, well, send a message that implicitly you either approve of him-or are afraid of him? One of two things is happening in Iran: either a boasting, cocky Ahmadinejad rigged the election, without worry that anyone-much less the present US-would care. Or, if the election result is semi-accurate (I doubt it), he energized his base, by showing the rural believers that even much worshipped Barack Hussein Obama was courting their all-wise leader and de facto agreeing to the new Persian Islamic nuclear hegemony.
3) So what constitutes Obama’s morality? Courting the Islamic street by distorting history? Being more critical of one’s own democratic open society than the autocratic Arab governments you seek to placate? Using your middle name abroad to court favor and separate yourself from America’s past, while insisting that those who invoke it at home are as illiberal as you are liberal in broadcasting it?
4) Much of Iran wants what they see going on in Iraq. How odd that the ‘experts’ assured us that Bush had empowered Iran by removing his rival Saddam. Perhaps in the short term-but in the long term TV, radio, and osmosis from free Iraq is proving more destabilizing to the theocracy in Iran than are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and shaped charged IEDs to Iraq.
5) As Aristotle saw, amorality is as much an absence of moral judgment as it is a commission of sin. When Obama lavishes more attention on Chavez, Castro, Ortega, Ahmadinejad, or a Saudi royal than he does on our struggling democratic friends in Iraq, Israel, Columbia and eastern Europe, he sends a message: ‘I wish to be loved, adored, to be seen as absolutely even-handed, even more than I do to take risks for those of you who bravely risk even more by championing freedom and consensual government.’
6) In Obama’s morally equivalent universe, when all leaders are alike, when there is no moral difference between nations, when a handful of classical texts that survived only in Arabic written by Muslims are equivalent to the entire transmission of classical learning through thousands of manuscripts in Europe, then there is no A or B, just AB, then there is no bad or good, no nothing really. Yes, he certainly is not a “Manichean” like Bush, who saw the world in moral absolutes. Yes, but he is certainly also a moral relativist, who cannot distinguish an Ahmadinejad from a Maliki, a Netanyahu from Abbas, a Chavez from an Uribe.
Everything is contingent on being liked, or rather worshipped. I was proud of Bush when Chavez trashed him, when Ahmadinejad blasted Bush, when Putin slurred Bush-and very worried when they began to court Obama whom they either saw as a patsy to be used or a friend–to be used. Years from now do we really think there will be some great revisionism and the world will come to love the ‘peacemaker’ Chamberlain or Baldwin, and despise the troublemaker Churchill?
I think not.
Obama has applause for the moment, it is true, but for all our sakes, he better start thinking of respect from the ages.
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The World Turned Upside Down [Victor Davis Hanson]
They’re rioting in Iran over a probably fraudulent election and the use of violence to suppress dissent — part of the “robust” debate that President Obama just welcomed. Meanwhile, the “optional” and orphaned war in Iraq, which led to real democracy, is now, after January 20, mysteriously once again a sign of the “winds of change.”
It used to be that a South Korean leader, worried about a cowboy America, would visit Washington to lecture an American president about grating U.S. bases while talking grandly about a “Korean solution” and the growing “sunshine policy.” Now it is more likely that a worried Korean president will have to persuade his skeptical American counterpart to keep imperialist U.S. troops on the DMZ to order to deter a nuclear Armageddon.
There is some value to the present irony. Erstwhile U.S. allies can begin to fathom the wages of their much-desired “post-American world.” It appears that it wasn’t George W. Bush’s Manicheanism that “played into the hands” of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who now has a fresh lease on power, despite the U.S. charm offensive of the last six months.
The truth is that the United States now gives more attention and concern to former enemies than it does to present allies. We now believe that provocative acts arise from misunderstanding, not planned aggression. Possible military action against aggressors hinges on U.N. approval and global consensus. We have leapfrogged Europe and are now quite to left of it on matters of foreign policy. It is assumed that disputes involve 50/50 culpability and do not arise from the greater bad-faith efforts of one party. This is the world our allies largely wanted, and it is fascinating to see it play out about them.
Just a partial list. More at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
“Much of Iran wants what they see going on in Iraq. How odd that the ‘experts’ assured us that Bush had empowered Iran by removing his rival Saddam. Perhaps in the short term-but in the long term TV, radio, and osmosis from free Iraq is proving more destabilizing to the theocracy in Iran than are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and shaped charged IEDs to Iraq.”
This should be on a billboard in Berkley, California.
This one was very nearly another home run for Hanson, but unfortunately it hit the foul pole and bounced out of play.
The foul here is that Hanson assumes something that many of Obama’s critics assume: that Obama is weak in the way Carter was weak.
Obama is not weak. He’s doing exactly what he wants to do.
He wants to strengthen dictatorships around the world with the long-term goal of transforming his own presidency into one.
He’s not letting American foreign power slip away. He’s subverting that power. He is working for our enemies against the American people.
Until critics like Hanson get this essential fact about Obama, their criticisms will seem like home runs but will actually bounce uselessly out of play.
Hanson presents evidence and makes all the arguments supporting your statement, yet he can't seem to bring himself to plainly state the obvious.
I don't think he can avoid this much longer.
The Big Secret: Obama can be managed with a shrewd strategy. If anyone can appeal to his ego, they can move a political initiative. This is because Obama is simply not very bright. But, he has learned this crucial lesson: It’s not how smart you. It’s how smart people THINK you are.
It is what it is. Unfortunately, if people of Iran actually do bring down Dinnerjacket, then Obama and the press will take all the credit for the stark contrast of bloodless peace that Obama has brough to the midddle east.
This will (falsely) advance their appeasement course for years.
Bush and Reagan will not get any credit. Tough moral decisions will not get any credit. The military will not get any credit.
I think your point forgets something: Carter still had people in his government that believed in America
Obama has no such problems...
Obama doesn’t care what the man in the streets of Iran thinks of America. He only cares what the power-players think of America, because he’s an ambitious, glory-seeking suck-up with a woefully dysfunctional moral compass.
I think both observers on both the left and right in this country greatly overestimate the the extent to which anything the rest the world does affects the internal political dynamics of Iran.
IMO, the increasingly corrupt and repressive nature of the Islamic regime in Tehran is going to be one of the chief forces destabilizing and subverting dreams of Islamic theocracy worldwide: for a while it looked as though Iran might be able to establish some sort of reasonably successful combination of representative government under theocratic dictat that might have endured for generations and become a model for much of the rest of the Islamic world, instead the forces which inevitably decay theocracy have operated rapidly and dramatically to the reduce legitimacy of the model.
Theocracys are are inherently even more unstable than other types of dictatorships - all forms of highly centralized political power rapidly breed corruption and economic inefficiency, however if you are claiming to be ruling in God’s name your failures can have only one of two causes: either you are the representative of a false god, or or you are the illegitimate representative of the true god, in either case you are clearly unfit to rule. The Christian West spent 400 bloody years establishing this paradox as practical fact, today our failures are in our own, their sources are seen as human failings, and government by directed by divine revelation is seen for what it is - the theocratic pretensions of power-hungry human beings - and we look to religion for set of governing principles, not a detailed political program.
Political Islam is going through this process on a crash basis, because an alternative roles for religion do not have to be imagined and invented, they can be observed by looking beyond their borders to modern Western states where religion coexists with representative government.
If Tehran have presented some viable alternative, it would’ve greatly slowed this process. Instead it presents the image of a corrupt Clerical class claiming the right to rule as God’s direct representatives on earth, aligned with an authoritarian and politicized military, incapable of rational or effective economic governance, intolerant of its own people’s will, and increasingly driven to thwart it through subversion of representative government.
In short, it looks like the various kinds of secular religions (communism, fascism, “Arab socialism” and the like) and the like which blighted the lives of the peoples of much of the world throughout the 20th century.
Under these conditions not only to the people below the ruling elites lose confidence in the system, eventually the elites loose it themselves - this only took about 40 years in the case of communism (roughly, from around 1950, as it became clear that progress toward both social justice and economic growth was much higher in Western capitalist and “mixed economies”) and I don’t see any reason to suppose that will happen much faster - or more slowly - in Islamic theocracys.
What can we do to speed the process up?
IMO, there are two things that matter: 1) continued improvement or at least reasonable stability of conditions in Western economies and 2) not unnecessarily aiding repressive governments in claiming that other systems are responsible for their problems.
We have to see our legitimate national security interests, but there’s little point in engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or inefficient confrontational policies to “make a point” or “take a moral stand” - the moral goal in such cases should to engage in behavior which destabilizes such regimes, rather than to allow them to whip up public sentiment and blame outsiders for the failures of their system. For example history suggests that most boycotts and sanctions fall into the category of “things which make us feel good, rather than things to do good” unless, as for example the case of South Africa, they’re pretty much universally observed by the international community and pretty much universally supported by public opinion.
And this is where I think Hanson has got it wrong: theocratic Islam in its regimes don’t pose “existential threats” to either the West or other non-Islamic societiess: they are neither serious economic, social or political challenges to those already living in such societies, and the “challenges” they present are the purely practical challenges of ordinary political confrontation and “containment”; the rest of the world is not going to be challenged by in a by technological innovation and economic dynamism from Islamic societies, Islam is not attractive religion to the religious or secular in Western cultures and its authoritarian, anti-iintellectual and patriarchal nature makes it completely unsuitable as a social alternative, and as the clear trend in Western culture (for better or worse) is toward increasing secularization, the political threat of establishing Islamic theocracy is nil.
(Even in the Western European countries with the highest proportions of Islamic them are immigrants the immigrants remain minorities, and the rapidly changing demographics of Islamic immigrant communities makes it apparent that they will retain minority status).
So I don’t see much point in making a point of the obvious superiority of our system or the obviously bleak future of Islamic theocracy, the superiority is obvious to unbiased observers, and to biased observers Western condemnation of Islamic regimes reinforces their bias, allows their leaders to blame us for their problems, and forestalls rather than advances the decay of their systems.
So while we wait for the decay of their systems, which may or may not precede the decay of the American system, what do we do about their desire to nuke Israel?
Well, first I’m a lot more optimistic than many posters here about the stability of our own system - I’m really quite surprised at the extent of the panic in conservative circles in this country and on the part of many posters on FR,
As for “waiting for the the decay” of Islamic theocracy in Iran... well, what are the practical alternatives?
As far as I can see our options are pretty limited, and it appears to me the confrontational rhetoric buttresses the current regime to much greater extent than it subverts it.
As for the Iranian desire to “nuke Israel”, doing so is tantamount to suicide, and the current regime in Iran does not look suicidal to me - quite the opposite, it appears to be a corrupt authoritarian theocracy very much interested in self-preservation.
Myself, I’m not nearly so much worried about the regime in Tehran as I am about the possibility of Pakistani weapons falling into terrorist hands - in this case there is no question of the suicidal nature of many of the people involved.
Let us hope that your vision is better than mine. I see the corrosion of our own society as our biggest threat.
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