As events in Iran continue to unfold, the usual suspects are griping that Barack Obama is not spending enough time going on the teevee and proclaiming loudly that we’re on the side of the Iranian protesters, and that we want the Iranian government to topple.
That would be, of course, absolute insanity. Mousavi is not a liberal reformist who wants warm ties with America. And for obvious historical reasons, Iranians are deeply distrustful of American interference in their internal political affairs. If Obama came out strongly on Mousavi’s side, it would give the forces supporting Ahmadinejad a great card to play — the ability to paint Mousavi and his supporters as American puppets. It could sap support for the budding movement, stop it in its tracks. It would be the single worst thing Obama could do to the protesters.
And I think the right knows it.
Hilzoy is more charitable here than I would be in laying out the situation:
[C]omparisons to Reagan and Eastern Europe are ludicrous. We can debate how important Reagan’s various pronouncements about Eastern Europe were, but I do not recall anyone suggesting that they would not be welcomed by Eastern European dissidents, or would harm their cause. In this case, they could do real harm, which is why no Iranian human rights activists and opposition leaders that I’m aware of have called on Obama to speak out.
Question: do the people who make these arguments not know this? If they don’t — if they really believe that the question how Obama should respond is in any way like the question how Reagan should have responded to Eastern Europe — then they are completely ignorant of Iran’s history, and have no business commenting at all.
If they do know this, then either they genuinely believe that Obama ought to come out in favor of the protesters or they don’t. In the first case, I think they are deeply unwise. (Matt Yglesias on McCain: “a dangerous madman whose ideas would risk incredibly suffering and destruction around the world.”) In the second, they are advocating a policy that they know would harm the demonstrators they claim to support, demonstrators who are risking their lives. That would be deeply cynical, and vile beyond belief.
Deeply cynical? Vile beyond belief? That pretty much describes the right these days.
You see, the right is hammering Obama here because they assume that he cares enough about American interests in the region not to take the bait. They figure they can hammer Obama for not showing overt support because they know damn well that he can’t, not without harming the very movement that Obama’s words are supposed to back. Moreover, they get to paint Obama as “soft” on Ahmadinejad, and they get to play their favorite game, which involves our nation being Team America: World Police, but for real.
Of course, they know in their hearts that Obama is doing the right thing here, that jumping too hard right now could destroy a fragile movement for justice in Iran. But they don’t care. They don’t care about the people fighting for their freedom, and they don’t care about the people of Iran, and really, they don’t even care about the people of America.
They care about regaining power, and maybe starting a war. That’s it. And the only thing decent human beings should do is shun them utterly.
This is good stuff! Nothing carries your point forward more than demonizing your opponents – or is the proper term “othering”? It’s worked so well for the extremist opponents of things like gay rights, after all.
Please, keep it up. This kind of thing should really help the left in the 2010 elections. After all, the last election certainly prepared most of the rest of the country to be open to the idea that John McCain – a man who got approximately 48% of the vote in it- is in fact “a dangerous madman whose ideas would risk incredibly suffering and destruction around the world” and will certainly find people who propound such a viewpoint as persuasive.
Using the word “insanity” in this sense is insensitive to people with mental health issues. Otherwise, this post is pretty spot on.
Mousavi is not a liberal reformist who wants warm ties with America.
This is a legitimate and important observation, though. It’s my undestanding that he has plenty of blood on his hands from people of various nations. This reminds me of an observation that a senior State Department spokesman was reputed to have made after the first Gulf War. When he or she was asked why they didn’t push to have Saddam overthrown then the reply was “It’s not like Thomas Jefferson is waiting to take over.” Mousavi is no more our friend than the incumbent, and in any case neither can do anything against the will of the Supreme Council, who hold the real power in the country. He probably is less inflammatory, but my guess is that’s about it.
I don’t think we should make any big call or push to support any particular candidate in this election. For one thing, we have no real way of telling whether or not any fraud that occurred was the decisive point of the election. For another thing, I actually accept the viewpoint that favoring any particular person’s cause will probably be used by cynical despots to whip up the true believers into a frenzy with extremist rhetoric. Probably using terms like “dangerous madman” and “vile beyond belief”.
You do leave out the possibility that they are true believers, as at least some of the people who claimed the Iraqis would be spreading flowers at the feet of our military were, and that they think an McCain-ish-America-leads approach, or something even more forceful, is just what the Iranians really need. I don’t think it’s any less cynical, but it’s a different kind of cynicism, one that is, to me, in many ways more scary than what you describe.
The first part of this is certainly true, if you measure “liberal” by our standards. There are small signs, though, that by Iranian standards he is quite liberal. Admittedly, these are small, but I think they are not insignificant, and I think it is not insignificant that they have to do with women:
1. His wife has been campaigning with and for him, perhaps not quite US-style, but nonetheless this is something unheard of in Iranian politics since the revolution (as far as I know).
2. He and his wife have been seen holding hands in public. For married couples to hold hands in public in Iran is not illegal, but it is a sign of a kind of liberal attitude towards sexual relations/politics that others have noticed and that I think should not be ignored.
Again, these are two small things that I would not want to blow out of proportion, especially in the context of what is going on in Iran now, nor do they point to any indication that Moussavi would repeal the most repressive aspects of Iran’s social policies, but they are not insignificant when you start thinking about what liberal means in the context of Iranian society and culture.
As to the second part of your statement, whether Moussavi wants warm ties with the US: Again, I think it depends on what you mean by “warm.” If “warm” means that we get what we want at the expense of Iran’s sense of its own sovereignty–no matter how many carrots we dangle in front of them–then of course he not only wouldn’t want that, but he would never be able make it happen in a million years. If, on the other hand, “warm” means that each side can get something of what it wants–including some kind of recognition from the US of Iran’s legitimate aspirations towards nuclear capability as a way of providing energy for its people–and the kinds of relations that could follow from that, then I think he probably does want them.
No sane politician in Iran, from what I have heard and seen, wants to continue the standoff with the US, for all kinds of reasons, most of them economic and technological–not to mention their desperate need of spare parts for their airplanes. I am not naive; I do not think the Islamic Republic’s word on anything should be taken at face value. So I do not mean that we should trust them to “do the right thing” simply because they say they are interested in doing it. But I think it’s important to recognize that they have very good reasons not to trust us, or the British. I don’t think it is a good thing for Iran to possess nuclear weapons, but I do understand the psychology, given their history and relations with the West, that might have led them to feel like they ought to have them. It is a mistake, a stupid and sometimes I think all too typically American mistake, to paint the Islamic Republic as a group of crazy people whose desire for nuclear weapons is motivated by a desire for the power they bring. If I were Iran, I would have a hard time not seeing the deterrence that possessing nuclear weapons would create as something desirable.
And while we could get into a chicken and egg question about who should blink first, us or them–since many people believe they are now the ones who need to demonstrate “good will” and a serious desire to join “the community of nations”–I think it’s crucial to remember that we (The West) interfered in their country, exploited their resources, shut down their budding democracy, etc. long before the Islamic Revolution took place.
And just to be clear: I am not saying that, therefore, we need to take any particular step regarding the nuclear or any other issue first, or that we are “in the wrong” about any given issue in any sort of absolutist way; I am simply saying that we need to understand the stance of Iran towards the US–whether it’s Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, or Moussavi and a different supreme leader (which I doubt will happen, but for example)–from their point of view and in the context of their experience of Iran’s history in relation to the West, which has hardly been an overwhelmingly positive one.
Mousavi was the Prime Minister of Iran between 1981 and 1989.
If we want to know what sort of President he would be, I think the best thing would be to examine his actual record in a position of executive responsibility, not whether or not he holds hands with his wife in public.
In 1986, TIME summarized Mousavi thus:
1987:
Toward the end of his tenure as PM, Mousavi supported the fatwa against Rushdie and broke off relations with Britain in part because of their sheltering Rushdie.
Of course, all this only tells you how Mousavi behaved 20+ years ago: in the wake of the 1979 revolution, and during a brutal war with Iraq in which the U.S. provided assistance to Iraq and withheld Iranian assets that had been frozen during the hostage crisis. Many people change with time and circumstances.
This from the AP via Yahoo:
That’s it, though – there’s no citation as to whether or not the Iranians were specific about what such interference has been composed of.
Maybe it’s the failure of Twitter to close down their services to Iran?
Yes, and most of the lower class voted for Ahimdenjad for his work with the poor whereas the middle class went with Mousavi. He also claimed he wanted to return to the values of Khomeni,but wouldn’t that happened with either president since they have no actual power?
Jenny, I think Ahmadinejad’s lower class support has less to do with him actually doing anything that benefits the poor and more from the fact that he comes from an unprivileged background himself. The Iranian Revolution did little to break down the class structure in Iran, it simply transferred it from one group of the educated professional class to another.
Simply by occupying the office he does, Ahmadinejad attracts aspirational support from the un-privileged. This, ironically, means he has little incentive to try to close the class divide.
I also think it’s an over-simplification to say the President has ‘no power’. It’s true, his power is sharply circumscribed by unelected officials such as the Supreme Leader and the Council of Experts, not to mention the need to contend with elected but potentially hostile bodies such as the Majlis. But he’s still probably the second most powerful person in the country.
That could be, though there is this: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-iran-erupts-as-voters-back-the-democrator-1704810.html
This graphic from the BBC gives a good understanding of how Iran’s government is structured and how it works.
This is a much better graphic for understanding the Iranian government.
A short CNN piece about Moussavi’s wife that is worth paying attention to, just for what it says about her as a woman and about what it implies about him. In a place like Iran, if her husband did not support and encourage her independence, it would be almost impossible for her to do what she has done. This does not mean everything will be fine and right with the world for women in Iran if Moussavi were to become president, and the comment someone left wondering where she was and what she was doing while Moussavi was helping to oversee the Islamic Revolution’s killing of an awful lot of people is worth paying attention to, but so is what she is doing now.
ETA: Another article about women in Iran that highlights Zahra Rahnavard
Louis Proyect’s double standard: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/the-double-standard/#comments
I agree with Obama’s strategy, but i think this arguemnt against the arguemtn agaist it, is overstated. After all, if the WSJ is deeply cynical and vile beyond belief, what would that make Biden and Clinton?
What if Ahmid had won: http://www.maxajl.com/?p=1410
no prob