Month: February 2011

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 14th, 2011:

The Washington Post: On her “Right Turn” blog, Jennifer Rubin asks “Will Obama now reverse course on Iran?” “We should re-evaluate the ongoing, useless talks with the Iranian regime on its nuclear weapons program, which have the effect of legitimizing the regime and depressing the opposition,” says Rubin. “Instead, in international bodies and with allies we should pursue a full court press to isolate the Iranian regime and highlight its dismal human rights record.” The neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative’s Jamie Fly tells Rubin “If the administration is serious about regime change, it is going to have to give up its hopes of a negotiated solution to Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

Commentary: Abe Greenwald writes about the reports on protests in Tehran and the house arrest of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. “Given the regional political temperature, the Iranian regime’s historical inclination to absolute security, and the new suspicion that Washington is content to be a witness to atrocity, there could be a perfect paranoid storm brewing in the minds of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Amadinejad.”

The Wall Street Journal: Melik Kaylan opines on Iranian official’s decision to “outlaw Valentines Day” and observes, “The state, for its part, continues to respond with a Whack-a-Mole approach to any social ripple not dreamt of in its philosophy.” He goes on, “[W]ith mosque and state firmly conjoined, there’s no stray detail of daily life so arcane that the scriptures can’t be mobilized to rein it in.”

The Wall Street Journal: The Journal’s editorial board writes, “The hard men of Tehran are now seeking to tap into Egypt’s revolutionary fervor, hailing Hosni Mubarak’s downfall as “a great victory,” but acknowledge that the Iranian government is concerned about the upsurge of pro-Democracy movements in the region… Clearly the mullahs are nervous about contagion,” they conclude.

Ron Paul supporters appear to be dominating this conservative event. Yesterday, Cheney and Rumsfeld were booed with calls of “Where’s Bin Laden” “murdering scum,” and “draft dodger.”

Here’s Ron Paul’s speech:

Immediately after the speech, Ron was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer:

Rather than admit how wrong he was about Egypt — he was sure the despot was firmly entrenched — Daniel Larison, The American Conservative‘s resident foreign policy maven, is berating me for mentioning his prediction that the Egyptian despot would survive:

“It’s true that I doubted that Mubarak was going to leave. When I wrote that, three days after the protests had begun, that seemed reasonable. So, yes, I got that wrong along with maybe 90-95% of observers. The larger point that the regime behind Mubarak wasn’t going anywhere seems to have been basically correct.”

The conventional wisdom always seems “reasonable,” even when it’s totally wrong. What separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to see through to the emerging reality. Surely having been wrong about this would cause an honest observer to question a pundit’s other prognostications — especially given how many words (thousands!) Larison has committed to “proving” that Mubarak would a) remain in power, and b) ought to remain there.  It might even provoke some self-reflection on the pundit’s part.

Instead of being such a crybaby, Larison should look in the mirror and question some of his own assumptions. It is one thing to inveigh against what he calls “democracy promotion” by the US government, and an indigenous upsurge of democratic forces. Larison is so locked into his obsessive opposition to what he calls “democratism,” that he can sit there and watch the young people of Egypt stand up to tanks and the truncheons of the secret police and remain unmoved.

This is ironic, given his alleged “hyper-realism,” which supposedly eschews all ideology. Looks like “anti-Democratism” as an ideology can be just as disabling as “democratism” itself — and the evidence is the long trail of blog posts he has written over the entire course of Egypt’s 18-day revolution, disdaining the prospect of the tyrant’s overthrow and shamefully joining with the more extreme neocons in scare-mongering the Muslim Brotherhood issue.

It’s amazing how many “expert” know-it-alls, the kind who populate cable tv-land, were not only dead wrong about the outcome of the Egyptian events, but had an ideological axe to grind in objectively supporting a loathesome dictator. Take, for example, Marc Ginsberg, former US ambassador to Morocco – one of the most repressive regimes in the Arab world — and a devoted AIPAC activist who never fails to uphold whatever political line the Israeli government is pushing, albeit gently chiding the radical Likudniks for pushing too hard.  He regularly holds forth on the Huffington Post, naturally enough, where, in the wake of the Tunisian revolution, he had this to say:

“It is woefully premature to pop the champagne corks extolling the eventual certitude of democratic revolution in the Arab world as if Tunisia were a Hungary, a Poland or a Romania and setting the Arab world dominoes in motion. What happened in Tunisia most likely will stay in Tunisia; it was not a revolution as much as a palace coup.”

So much for Ginsberg, the alleged “expert” who has been appearing regularly on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC program to “interpret” the Egyptian events. Aside from being wrong about the big question, however, he is weirdly wrong-headed in other ways. For example, in the Huffington piece he jumps on Al Jazeera as some sinister force:

“ Using events in Tunisia to fuel its favorite political pastime of disgorging its anti-authoritarian editorial bias across all of its media platforms — much to the anger and hostility of most Arab rulers, particularly those Al Jazeera views as too pro-western.”

“Anti-authoritarian editorial bias”? As former ambassador to the corrupt and craven “King” of Morrocco, Ginsberg, perhaps, has a pro-authoritarian bias. Certainly we’ve never heard a word out of his mouth about the repression and brazen corruption in Morocco, as revealed by Wikileaks — which, as ambassador, he must have known about.

We all have our biases, but there is some slimey about Ginsberg’s. Al Jazeera proved its mettle from the beginning, and soon became the main source of information about what was happening on the ground in Egypt. While the rest of us look at Al Jazeera’s continuous coverage of the Egyptian uprising — undertaken at great risk to their reporters — with open-mouthed admiration, Ginsberg sourly averred:

“Stoking anger and hostility has become Al Jazeera’s mantra, and its producers have taken to heart the axiom ‘if it bleeds it leads’ to such a degree that baton-swinging policeman [sic] clubbing Tunisian demonstrators literally took up the entire first ten minutes of one news broadcast as the emotional reporter cried into his microphone about the unjustness of Arab autocrats.”

In Ginsberg’s world, one is supposed to politely avert one’s eyes if the scene  involves the shedding of Arab blood, especially Arab blood spilled by “pro-Western” despots (and, of course, Israelis).

What I want to know is this: how does Ginsberg get to blog on the supposedly oh-so-“progressive” Huffington Post and pontificate on MSNBC, with Chris Matthews deferring to his “expertise”? Aside from having been another one of those “experts’ who got it wrong, he’s a hater and a creep.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 11th, 2011:

The Weekly Standard: Stephen Schwartz writes on “Iran’s Conspiracy Industry” and observes that “conspiracy theories have long flourished in the lands of Islam.” Schwartz offers a rundown of recent anti-Semitic television programming in Iran, warning, “all of this might seem like nothing more than typical, daily insanity in Iran.”

The Washington Post: Charles Krauthammer writes, “Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers who dared challenge the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism – the notion that Arabs, as opposed to East Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans and Africans, were uniquely allergic to democracy.” Krauthammer goes on to identify the new totalitarianism as “Islamism” and argues, “as in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external. Iran, a mini-version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites – Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states.” He concludes, “We are, unwillingly again, parties to a long twilight struggle, this time with Islamism – most notably Iran, its proxies and its potential allies, Sunni and Shiite.”

The Washington Post: Michael Gerson asks, “Do Egypt’s protests mean American decline?” He warns, “The emergence of a Sunni version of Iran in Egypt would be a major blow,” and “There’s a reason shahs are sometimes followed by mullahs – because religious extremism is the opiate of a humiliated people.”

National Review Online: The Foundation For Defense of Democracies’s Benjamin Weinthal blogs, “The failure of the West to energetically confront Iran’s bellicose policies might very well be revealed in the post-Mubarak era.” He argues, “Iran’s understanding of a new Egyptian political system mirrors the fiercely anti-democratic goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.” Weinthal segues the jubilation over Hosni Mubarak’s resignation into a call for tighter sanctions on Iran, writing, “If the West, particularly the Obama administration, is serious about the business of democracy-promotion in Egypt and in the Muslim world, then an accelerated round of hard-hitting sanctions ought to be implemented against Iran’s energy sector… Crude-oil sanctions targeting Iran serve the twin goals of advancing democracy in Egypt and perhaps contributing to the demise of the Iranian regime.” He concludes, “In short, democratic change in Egypt is arguably contingent on blocking the spread of revolutionary Iranian Islam in the Middle East.”

The fall of Hosni Mubarak isn’t just an occasion to cheer the demise of a dictatorship, it’s also a golden opportunity to celebrate the downfall of all-too-many “experts” whose complacency, deference to power, and complete ignorance of the situation on the ground led them to predict the dictator would survive.  Below, a list of the fallen:

“Experts predict that Mubarak will survive the crisis” — that was the headline at USA Today on Jan. 28. The article quotes only one of these alleged “experts”: ”

“Jon Alterman, director and senior fellow of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the regime of Tunisian autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali quickly crumbled after his military withdrew its support. In Egypt, the security services are solidly behind the Mubarak government, he said.

“‘If I were a betting man, what I’d bet on is that the government gets through the current crisis,’ Alterman said.”

Here‘s another “expert,” cited in Le Figaro:

“Opposition to Hosni Mubarak has always existed, explains Jean-Noel Ferrie of France’s national scientific research center (CNRS). And though the criticism and public demonstrations have reached a new level, Ferrie cautions against quick comparisons to what happened in Tunisia. ‘It would be wrong to compare his unpopularity with Ben Ali’s.’  Mubarak came to power after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.  With his military background, and stature as a hero during the 1973 war, he won the army’s support, which has been a key element in the regime’s survival, right up to the present moment. ‘It is unlikely that protesters can oust him without facing the military first,’ says Ferrie.

 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

The Israelis –  “The Egyptian demonstrations, now in their third day, have been inspired by those who overthrew Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali this month, but the official said Israel saw limited parallels between the countries. ‘Mubarak is not Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. There is a huge difference. The Egyptian regime is well rooted, including the defence establishment. Their regime is strong enough to overcome the situation,’ he said.

“A second government Israeli official echoed that view. ‘The regime may be shaken by the troubles, and anything is possible, but it doesn’t have a serious air to it,’ he said …”

Daniel Larison, over at The American Conservative — “The disagreement centers on the expectation of Mubarak’s fall. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is likely at all, which makes this one of the few times that I agree with the Netanyahu government about something.”

Larsison wasn’t just wrong, he was willfully and stubbornly wrong, conducting a weeks-long campaign against Egypt’s democracy movement. Echoing the neocons and the Israel lobby, he cited fears of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover and the demise of Egypt as a reliable ally. Mubarak’s overthrow, Larison claims, would not be in “American interests.”