Matt Yglesias

Iran and the End of History

Like a lot of Americans, I’ve sort of let myself get distracted away from the news out of Iran, which has taken a turn for the worse lately. But I did like this post from Peter Juul at the Wonk Room:

While I can’t read minds (I’m no Charles Xavier or Emma Frost), I think Roger Cohen hit the dynamic on the head in another recent column: “…the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails.”

These two Irans – the vibrant, diverse coalition that voted for change and then demonstrated in the streets versus the authoritarian, rule-by-force regime – will remain in conflict no matter if the government manages to disperse street protests in the short run. Khamenei and his successor(s) may be able to hold onto power by force for years, but they must do so now knowing large swaths of the population find their rule illegitimate and their system discredited. A

The End of History Comes to Iran

Like a lot of Americans, I’ve sort of let myself get distracted away from the news out of Iran, which has taken a turn for the worse lately. But I did like this post from Peter Juul at the Wonk Room:

While I can’t read minds (I’m no Charles Xavier or Emma Frost), I think Roger Cohen hit the dynamic on the head in another recent column: “…the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails.”

These two Irans – the vibrant, diverse coalition that voted for change and then demonstrated in the streets versus the authoritarian, rule-by-force regime – will remain in conflict no matter if the government manages to disperse street protests in the short run. Khamenei and his successor(s) may be able to hold onto power by force for years, but they must do so now knowing large swaths of the population find their rule illegitimate and their system discredited. As Cohen wrote earlier, “Whatever happens now, all is changed in Iran.” We can only hope that the change is positive for the Iranian people, and that it comes sooner rather than later.

One way to think about this is in terms of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. The geographical scope in which Shi’a Islamism and velayat-e faqih could possibly become the dominant form of government is obviously pretty limited because there aren’t that many Shia Muslims in the world. But despite that limit the Islamic Revolution represented the only real example I think you could come up with of a true ideological alternative to liberal democracy in the world. And part of what we’ve seen over the past several weeks is the collapse of that alternative.

The Mullahs haven’t been willing to contest the basic democratic idea that he who gets the most votes ought to win the election. Nor have they been willing to actually permit fair voting. They can, plausibly, get away with this just as lots of autocrats (most importantly, though hardly exclusively) get away with all kinds of things. But when that’s done, it’s just unmasked as rule by force and by fraud rather than some genuine alternative political model that people can embrace.

Pitneygate

History's greatest monster

I thought I might just quote Jason Zengerle on the folks hating on the White House’s semi-coordinated back-and-forth with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney:

Pitney solicited questions from Iranians that they wanted to ask Obama. The White House made sure Pitney got a chance to ask one of the questions–without knowing what the question would be. And, as I’ve pointed out, it was a very good and tough question–a question that Obama answered (or failed to answer) in a way that made him look bad. Yes, the whole arrangement was a violation of Washington protocol, but then the uprest in Iran–and the way news of that uprest is being spread over the Internet–is a violation of protocol as well, isn’t it? If Obama wanted to take a question about Iran from an actual Iranian, the only way he could do so was to call on a member of the media who has a direct line to Iranians–and that’s Pitney. It’s not like he asked Obama “Why are you so awesome?” (or “Have you really quit smoking?”). It seems like the focus should be whether the question was good and whether we learned anything useful from the response Obama gave to it. I’d say yes on both counts, so this really shouldn’t be a controversy.

This is, note, the second time a HuffPo reporter has asked a question at a White House press conference, asked a question that was a lot more substantive and interesting than many of the questions from the old-school media, and then prompted a freak-out. I think it would be worth asking who would be better off had that exchange not taken place and Obama instead called on someone else. I’m having trouble finding the answer.

The reality is that there’s a lot of status anxiety among the special class of reporters who do things like attend White House press conferences. In my experience, the kind of reporters who conduct in-depth investigations or write long features or correspond from war zones are facing a lot of economic anxiety about the continued stability of their careers. But the kind of reporters who basically sit around and in virtue of the fact that their employers are important get to ask not-very-interesting questions of powerful politicians and then dutifully write the answers down (or record the answers on tape and have an intern transcribe them) are facing a kind of crisis of prestige and authority. It turns out lots of people can do the job perfectly well, even people who haven’t “paid their dues” or gotten a job at an established media outlet.

Iran’s Dissident Soccer Players Banned for Life

Banned for Life

One of the more noteworthy twists in the Iranian political crisis was the moment when several players on Iran’s national soccer team showed up for a World Cup qualifying match wearing green armbands in solidarity with the opposition. Since state television couldn’t very well refuse to cover the game, it was a rare opportunity for dissidents to get national TV coverage. And now the players in question are done for:

According to the pro-government newspaper Iran, four players – Ali Karimi, 31, Mehdi Mahdavikia, 32, Hosein Ka’abi, 24 and Vahid Hashemian, 32 – have been “retired” from the sport after their gesture in last Wednesday’s match against South Korea in Seoul. [...] Karimi is one of Iranian football’s best-known stars, having played for the German club Bayern Munich. Ka’abi played for Leicester City for several months during the 2007/8 season. Hashemian and Mahdavikia play for the German teams Bochum and Eintracht Frankfurt. [...] Iran’s hardline media have since linked the protest to the arrest on Saturday of Mohsen Safayi Farahani, who headed the country’s football governing body under the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. He is one of several dozen opposition politicians, intellectuals and journalists to have been detained.

One of the things The Lives of Others does very well is illustrate how a dictatorial regime that prefers to stay in power through “soft” methods can use the threat of destroying people’s careers. Instead of being put on trial and executed, becoming a martyr for the cause, you can just be rendered unemployable in the field of your choice in a decision nobody has to publicly defend but everyone understands. You become, then, not an imprisoned hero, but perhaps just an apparently pathetic person—in the movie it’s a theater director who can’t direct—a cautionary tale rather than an inspirational example.

Analogies Department

Via Jim Henley, an analogy from Jim Lobe:

But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”

The analogy is not perfect, but I do think it’s illustrative.

Beyond pure partisanship, I think the characteristic error of conservative thinking on this sort of issue is overlearning from the distinctive experience of Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries. Precisely because the people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. perceived themselves as not only victimized by repressive government but specifically dominated and exploited by Russians dissidents were relatively well-disposed to collaboration with U.S. geopolitical strategies that were, at the time, primarily anti-Russian in orientation. By contrast, the primary strategic orientation of the United States in the Persian Gulf region is not merely hostile to theocracy or Ahmadenijad but to Iran. Iran would like to be the dominant power in the region, and we want it not to be. A similar situation exists in, say, China where patriotic Chinese people may deplore the human rights conduct of the People Republic, but are going to largely share the PRC’s geopolitical aspirations and be deeply skeptical of becoming (or being seen as) tools of American strategy in East Asia.

To this end, it’s instructive to note the difference between the post-Communist experience in Eastern Europe and the post-Communist experience in Russia. Poles and Lithuanians experience the fall of Communism the way Americans experience it—as a good thing, that unambiguously made the world a better place. For Russians, however, there’s a schizophrenia about the idea that while the end of Communism is in most respects a good thing, it also represented Russia “losing” a geopolitical contest with the United States, which is a bad thing. Consequently, Cold War nostalgia is a real political force in Russia, whereas nobody in Hungary is going to pine for the good old days.

Engagement With a Post-Crackdown Iran

Ali Khamenei doesn't seem very interested in what the outside world thinks of him.

With the possibility of brutal suppression of the current round of protests very real, the question naturally arises as to what such a turn of events would mean for Barack Obama’s proposed policy of engagement with Iran. Robert Farley comments:

If the regime survives, it will be because of the loyalty and brutality of its security forces. With that brutality on display on US televisions (if only rarely) it will be much more difficult for Obama to build any domestic support for talks. Moreover, it’s not clear that he should; knowing that the Iranian regime was repressive before these latest incidents, and acknowledging that many US allies in the region don’t even bother with the fiction of elections doesn’t change the fact that it’s an ugly bit of business. I’d rather, other things being equal, not have my President engage with Iran while the current group of thugs is in power. Finally, I do think that the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.

I would add to that the observation that a regime win would simply make me much less confident that engagement will work. The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

George Will Calls Right-Wing Iran Attacks on Obama “Foolish”

George Will may not know much about climate change or bicycle commuting but I think he’s mostly been a voice of reason on foreign policy issues relative to most conservative pundits. Today was no exception as he called out his colleagues for “foolish criticism” of the President’s approach to Iran:

The president is being roundly criticized for insufficient, rhetorical support for what’s going on over there. It seems to me foolish criticism. The people on the streets know full well what the American attitude toward the regime is. And they don’t need that reinforced.

Eric Cantor’s Selective Embrace of Human Rights

Torture for me, but not for thee.

Eric Cantor loves human rights:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip who has put out blistering statements about the White House’s response, spoke loudly and emotionally about “America’s moral responsibility to speak out on the protection of human rights wherever they are violated” — hint, hint. “I urge President Obama to follow the lead of this House,” Cantor said.

Adam Serwer wonders where this commitment was when “Cantor voted against the military appropriations bill that banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror detainees.”

Specifically, according to the State Department’s official human rights brief on Iran:

Common methods of torture and abuse in prisons included prolonged solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, beatings, long confinement in contorted positions, kicking detainees with military boots, hanging detainees by the arms and legs, threats of execution, burning with cigarettes, sleep deprivation, and severe and repeated beatings with cables or other instruments on the back and on the soles of the feet.

Now to be clear, neither the scale of abuses nor the intent of the abuses is equivalent in the United States and Iran. But when it comes to techniques, it’s hard not to notice the fact that several of the methods condemned here, most notably including sleep deprivation, stress positions (”long confinement in contorted positions”), and shackling (”hanging detainees by the arms and legs”) were specifically authorized by the Bush administration. Many of the others, though not specifically authorized, appear to have become widespread in several detention facilities in part as a result of the administration’s general habit of throwing out the human rights rulebook. These bad actions don’t justify bad actions on the part of the Iranian regime. But whenever you read about these kind of techniques being applied in Iran or North Korea, it’s immediately apparent to everyone that it’s torture, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s wrong. It’s also cruel, inhumane, and wrong when authorized by Dick Cheney.

Mike Pence’s Dangerous Game

Who will tell the Iranians that Mike Pence (R-IN) is a fool?

Tom Ricks watches a Mike Pence (R-IN) appearance on Fox News and comes away fearing for the lives of Iran’s brave protestors:

I just hope that Iranian protestors know not to take this clown seriously.

This problem goes to the essence of strategy: A “tough” stance that Fox’s anchors are pushing might feel good, but it likely would be unproductive. A sober stance of the sort that Obama has taken is more difficult but likely more effective in the long run.

For quite some time now I’ve been trying to emphasize the point that Pence is not an intelligent man. It’s good to see Ricks notice this as well. But I think it’s important for people in the journalism game to get a bit more interdisciplinary on this. Oftentimes people are inclined to grant the benefit of the doubt. A Ricks might say “well, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about on national security, but maybe his energy ideas make sense.” Ask around, though, and you’ll see it’s not the case. He’s just got dumb ideas on all sorts of topics. And it’s worth aggressively making that point. It’s all well and good to “hope” that Iranian protestors recognize that he’s a “clown” and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But the odds are actually pretty good that foreigners will take the situation at face value—he’s one of the highest-ranking and most prominent members of a major political party, so surely his pronouncements should be taken seriously. Right? Because if such a high-level party leader were, in fact, a “clown” then people would hear about that. Right?

How Regimes End

Protests in Iran

Douglas Muir has a very interesting post running down some of the political science on “protestor versus regime” scenarios. Unfortunately, it ends on a somewhat depressing note:

And finally, the government is both willing and able to use massive force: China, Burma, Armenia. In these cases, the government wins. There is, in recent history, not a single clear counterexample. If the government keeps its nerve, and the men with guns stay loyal, and the regime is willing to escalate without limit — the government wins.

Relevance to Iran: Looks pretty high right now. While there are some reports of unease among the security forces, it appears the police and the military are holding steady.

Until and unless this changes, Ahmadinejad looks quite secure — green paint and massive street protests notwithstanding.

One hopes this will prove wrong.

Iran’s Political Crisis and the Nuclear Issue

Hussein Moussavi (Wikimedia)

Back before the Iranian elections, when it suddenly began to appear that Ahmadenijad might lose, hawkish Israel groups started circulating oppo information on Hussein Moussavi and the right more generally was preparing to build an argument about how there’s really no difference between the two of them. Then came the apparent fraud, and the politics switched to criticizing the Obama administration for not intervening more forcefully on Moussavi’s behalf. But Eric Trager, working off the older talking points, published a brief article Tuesday titled “Who Is Mir Hossein Mousavil Really?” arguing that he’s no good.

I think he winds up badly overstating the case, but I do think it’s worth underscoring that on the key foreign policy issues between the United States and Iran it’s really not clear how relevant Iranian domestic politics are. As Joe Klein reports:

In truth, the reformers I spoke with seemed as unyielding as Ahmadinejad, if more politely so, when it came to discussing what Iran would be willing to concede in negotiations with the U.S. They were adamant on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted for peaceful purposes under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. None of them, except Mousavi, was willing to acknowledge that weaponization of uranium might be in the works and therefore be a subject for negotiation. (Mousavi told me that if such a program existed, it would be negotiable, but he didn’t say, and may not know, that it actually exists.) The reformers were unanimous in the belief that Barack Obama’s conciliatory words were not enough, that the U.S. had to take palpable actions before talks would be possible. I asked each of them what steps Iran was prepared to make for peace. The answer was always the same. “It’s natural that the first step should be taken by the Americans,” said Karroubi, the most progressive of the four presidential candidates. “We didn’t stage a coup against your elected government,” he said, referring to the CIA’s participation in the 1953 overthrow of the Mohammed Mossadegh government. “We have not frozen your assets. We don’t have sanctions against you.”

Recall that there are two issues here. One has to do with the construction of nuclear weapons. Iran is not permitted to do this under the NPT, Iran denies that they are working on this, Iranian opposition politicians mostly deny weaponization is a possibility, and Mousavi says that he would bargain about weaponization.

The other issue has to do with enrichment. The United States and Israel have been pushing the idea that Iran should eschew the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium. The Iranian position, which I believe is legally correct, is that they have the right to such enrichment under the NPT. Uranians will point out that Germany, Japan, and others have fully mastered the fuel cycle without having the United States bomb them or the international community sanction them.

I think the realistic hope for a diplomatic deal has been that the Iranians will be allowed to enrich, but that inspectors will be in place to provide confidence that weaponization is not happening. If you think about the possibility of political change in Iran, I think that makes a deal more likely in one sense and less likely in another sense. On the “more likely” side of the ledger, a more liberal Iran is less likely to just decide it doesn’t care what anyone thinks and wants to build a nuclear weapon, never mind the consequences. But on the “less likely” side of the ledger, I think that the more political change you see in Iran, the less likely it is that Iran will agree to onerous inspections to monitor their nuclear activities. If Iran becomes a democracy just like Germany and Japan and South Korea, it seems plausible to think that they’ll insist on being treated the same as those countries and basically just trusted not to break the rules.

Shirin Ebadi Supports Obama Approach on Iran

Objectively pro-Ahmadenijad? So says Bob Kagan. (Wikimedia)

As conservatives continue to criticize Barack Obama’s rhetoric on the Iranian political crisis, Iranian dissidents and human rights leaders continue to support Obama. Shirin Ebadi, for example, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts as a human rights lawyer and advocate in Iran. For her trouble she’s been persecuted in the press, threatened with physical violence, etc. And as Spencer Ackerman points out she thinks Obama’s doing the right thing:

Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, said she has no complaints about Obama’s rhetoric. “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard,” she said in a telephone interview from Geneva. “I respect his comments on all the events in Iran, but I think it is sufficient.”

There’s been an effort made to fit this into some grand tableau about “idealism” in foreign policy, but the simple fact of the matter is that the time for the United States to do something on behalf of the Iranian opposition would be when Iranian opposition leaders ask us to. Simply inserting ourselves more directly into the situation in order to feel more self-righteous about it would be horrible. The people protesting on the streets in Iran are running very real risks to their lives and their families. We owe them more than thoughtless rhetoric.

Strategic Nonviolence

Jon Chait observes that “For a revolution to succeed, it generally needs one of two things to happen: Either it needs its own weapons, or it needs mass defections by the state security forces.” He also sees some evidence that some elements of the security forces may be contemplating defection.

I think it’s worth emphasizing that in the modern world at least, the balance is tipped pretty overwhelmingly to security service defection rather than actual armed overthrow of the powers that be. The reality is that modern military technology makes it extraordinarily difficult to actually defeat a state on the battlefield. An dissident movement just isn’t going to be able to be able to blow up tanks and airplanes. Under the circumstances, strategic nonviolence is a vital tactic. If you were to try to fight the security forces—shoot some policemen, say—you’d encourage a more serious crackdown. It’s through nonviolent resistance that you heighten the psychological contradictions, and encourage the regime and its enforcers to blink. From the Velvet Revolution to Tiananmen Square to the Orange Revolution to what’s happening today in Iran, the brave dissidents are essentially daring the security forces to beat or kill them. The bet is that when push comes to shove, people in the Iranian security forces have some humane and patriotic instincts and will recoil from the idea of using mass violence against their fellow citizens. And it’s a terrifying bet. We’ve seen time and again that it’s a bet that often pays off, but as we learned in China 20 years ago there are no guarantees.

Actual Democracy Promoters Support Obama’s Approach

An excellent point from Spencer Ackerman:

Amazingly, someone who doesn’t think Obama’s statements about Iran have been detrimental to democratic impulses is Jack Duvall, the president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a non-governmental organization which provides tools and training for political reformers and democracy activists around the world. Duvall told me that Obama’s statement yesterday about Iran was “extraordinary,” in a way that I hadn’t considered. “He shifted the frame,” Duvall noted, “from [the question of] ‘were the elections fradulent’ to ‘what’s the responsibility of the Iranian government for peaceful dissent?’ That lays down a marker going forward: this is how we’re assessing you. He doesn’t have to send that in a giant shell shot out of a Howitzer, but it’s a matter of record.” In fact, Duvall said, Obama’s statement was “the first time you’ve heard a president articulate” that “how governments respond to the clamor of their people to be heard should be a measure of how we assess their legitimacy.” While the Bush administration surely wouldn’t have disagreed, he continued, Obama sharpened the point by “focusing it and giving it such visibility” during the largest protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

You actually see this time and again, where people who work full-time, all-the-time on the difficult issues of democracy, human rights, and humanitarianism are much less interested in tough talk and posturing than are political pundits who like to parachute into situations and start demanding maximalist rhetoric. The appropriate test of US policy toward the Iranian political crisis continues to be whether or not it actually improves the situation—helps save lives, helps promote political change—not whether or not it’s deemed adequately expressive.

Obama is Not Pundit-in-Chief

Robert Kagan, in an apparent effort to burn his reputation as the thinking man’s neocon, has a pretty silly column bashing Obama for not using his magical powers to cause the Iranian regime to topple. The Washington Post’s crack headline writing team decided to give the piece the absurd and offensive headline “Obama, Siding With the Regime.”

Meanwhile, my colleague Matt Duss was on MSNBC yesterday offering a much more reasonable take on Obama’s restrained response:

DUSS: I think the lesson to be learned is the United States’ ability to intervene and change these outcomes is rather limited. As Americans, we like to believe that our ability to move, to promote democracy and to move events in the world at our will is a lot bigger than it actually is. … Right now President Obama’s treatment of the demonstrations going on in Iran is pretty near perfect. He has taken the United States to the extent possible out of this equation, he, the United States, and our role in the Middle East is not — he’s not going to give that to the hard liners as an excuse for an even greater crackdown.

Something I think people don’t always get is that the President is not the columnist-in-chief or the National Blogger. One of the very nice things about being a professional political pundit, is that you can just sort of spout off what you think and use colorful language and strong, bold words. You need to be careful with what you say and do, paying scrupulous attention to consequences.

Max Bergmann did an excellent post on just this subject last summer, saying that John McCain had a tendency to act more like a pundit than a president. I think that’s exactly right. And today you’re seeing some rightwing pundits getting mad because Obama is acting like a president rather than like a pundit.

Goldfarb Thinks Invading Iraq Causes Reformist Election Victories in Iran

Mohammad Khatami won elections without any help from George W. Bush (Wikimedia)

As I understand the basic neoconservative approach to the eventual vindication of the Iraq War, their plan is to take advantage of the fact that over the course of the long-term, things tend to get better. So someday, the politics of the Persian Gulf region will almost certainly be less autocratic than they are now. This will all be credited to George W. Bush and his splendid little war. Of course by this same logic, Mao’s Five Year Plan was a smashing success, since today China is much richer than it was before the Revolution. Thus, Michael Goldfarb:

Is it possible that the Iraqi election experience had something to do with Iranian expectations of an election? If critics of the war can for just a moment move beyond their own deeply held opinions about the invasion of Iraq — that this was a war of choice fought on false premises to lower gas prices or whatever — and examine the effect of that war on the region as a whole, they might see a connection to the current turmoil in Iran. After all, one of the intellectual arguments in favor of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was, in the words of Dick Cheney, to place “a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

I think a case can be made that Barack Obama’s election as president has also raised expectations of the democratic process in countries around the world. It is certainly possible that we are seeing an Obama effect in Iran as young people there look to replicate the excitement and enthusiasm of young people here during last year’s election. But any honest assessment of events in Iran would also have to consider the effect of having a functioning democracy right next door — a democracy that millions of Iranians have seen for themselves as they make religious pilgrimages and conduct business in Iraq. Iran has had a tremendous influence on Iraq these last few years, usually to the detriment of peace and security there. Perhaps the current protests in Iran are evidence that influence doesn’t just cross the border in one direction.

Spencer Ackerman offers the sensible observation that if Iraq were a major source of inspiration for Iranian opposition leaders you might expect to hear something about that from the Iranian opposition leaders. But then again, the right-wing has gotten very invested in partisan criticism of Barack Obama for following the lead of actual Iranian dissidents and not injecting himself in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way into the crisis, and the general neocon view seems to be that Iranians are irrelevant to events in Iran.

So I think that the key point to make here is that the reformist candidate won the Iranian presidential election in 1997, and won re-election by a big margin in 2001. Then back in 2003 when a reformist president was actually in office and the Iranian government was looking to improve relations with the United States, the Bush administration chose to strengthen the hand of Iranian hardliners by (a) labeling Iran part of an “axis of evil” (b) refusing to engage in bilateral dialogue with Iran (c) cutting off cooperation on Afghanistan and (d) invading Iraq. We then got Ahmadenijad in the 2005 election, and now we’re watching the 2009 election unfold right before our eyes. The moral of the story is that there’s nothing unusual about a reformist candidate getting strong support from the Iranian voters.

Technology and Political Change

Henry Farrell is skeptical of the “twitter revolution” narrative:

As someone who has thought a reasonable amount over the past few years about the relationship between information technology and political action, I am somewhat skeptical of these claims (I also don’t know what the word ‘protagonal’ means, but that’s a whole different issue). First - while Twitter (like SMS) can be used to organize protests on the fly, I haven’t yet seen any evidence that it made a substantial difference to organizing efforts in Iran. This is not to say that it didn’t - but we need good evidence (which will require Persian language expertise, obviously) of correlation between specific bursts of Twitter communication and forms of social protest etc before we can really be sure that there was an effect. What we can say is that previous instances of ‘color revolution’ relied much less on technology than you would have thought from reading Western media. New technologies tend to be less reliable and more easily disrupted than traditional forms of organizing - while they are surely becoming more important over time, I think it is fair to discount some of the more breathlessly enthusiastic reporting until the actual evidence comes in.

Another issue is getting causal direction right. I frequently use my personal Twitter feed to coordinate plans with friends. Anyone interested in seeing such-and-such a movie? But it’s not as if the existence of Twitter caused me to start seeing movies with friends. Thanks to Twitter I now never use one-to-many SMS in order to organize movie going, and I use email for that purpose somewhat less than I once did. And thanks to email and Twitter and SMS, I never arrange movie plans over the phone, which is what I used to do. But, again, what’s going on here is the same old thing happening in a new medium, not the new medium actually allowing new things to happen. Insofar as Twitter becomes a more popular communications tool, popular protests will increasingly have a Twitter component. But that’s not the same as saying that Twitter is actually driving the political events.

The Other Side of the Story

There seems to be a pretty wide consensus among people knowledgeable about Iran that the elections was stolen, but I do think it’s important to point out that this isn’t a universal view. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, for example, write in the Washington Post that the result is similar to what their polls predicted. Ballen I don’t know, but Doherty’s a solid guy.

That said, Juan Cole raises a hugely important point of interpretation. Ballen and Doherty talk about how their mid-May poll showed Ahmadenijad with a 2-1 lead, about what the official results show. But they don’t mention the specific numbers. According to Professor Cole, “It found that the level of support for the incumbent was 34%, with Mousavi at 14%.” That seems like a 34-14 is very different from an official result in which Ahmadenijad’s support was in the sixties. In the domestic American context if you had an incumbent polling at 34 percent, you’d say he was in huge trouble no matter how badly his opponent was doing.

Haaretz: Dennis Ross to be Reassigned

Dennis Ross (Wikimedia)

An intriguing story from Barak David at Haaretz:

Dennis Ross, who most recently served as a special State Department envoy to Iran, will abruptly be relieved of his duties, sources in Washington told Haaretz. An official announcement is expected in the coming days. [...] A diplomatic source in Jerusalem speculated that perhaps Ross preferred to work for the National Security Agency, which answers directly to President Barack Obama, and would thus be considered a more enhanced role.

The second part of that doesn’t make much sense to me; it’s hard to imagine what job a life-long diplomat like Ross would take at the NSA. Nor is it clear why “a diplomatic source in Jerusalem” would be in the know on something like that. But leaving the Iran post for some kind of other job seems plausible. As Spencer Ackerman writes, the whole Ross situation has been fraught from the get-go and the nature of his policy brief as a State Department special advisor has been unclear.

Media at Its Worst

Coaxial Cable (Wikimedia)

Robert Farley:

So, I’m trying to find out something about what’s going on in Iran, and on CNN I can watch a rerun of Larry King interviewing several gentlemen without shirtsleeves who apparently assemble choppers. On Fox Mike Huckabee is trying to explain why Jesus hates credit card relief. MSNBC is rerunning something about a prison in New Mexico. CNBC is evaluating whether college students should be able to afford Chanel tote bags.

Whenever I find myself talking about new media to skeptics of an older generation who worry that the standards online are too debased, I try to remind people that the real debasing came with the rise of multi-channel cable news. In terms of the Iranian elections, the world’s top newspapers have the people on the ground reporting the main facts, and there’s lots of smart analysis from legitimate experts all over the web, but on television if it can’t be captured by two talking heads debating each other it’s like it never happened.

Whose Coup?

One of the puzzling things about the apparent electoral theft in Iran is that one of the major storylines of the Iranian election had been former president and current bigwig Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had earlier intervened in the campaign against Ahmedenijad. There had long been elements of tension between Ahmadenijad, a younger and more populist guy, and the old-line clerical establishment. Moussavi’s campaign, though reformist in its main thrust, also always clearly had one foot in the establishment and seemed to have some establishment support. Under the circumstances, the election theft looks like an about-face.

Brian Ulrich rounds up some different strands and speculates that what we may be looking at is a military coup that’s at least as much about consolidating the power of the Revolutionary Guards over the economy as it is about the establishment crushing the forces of reform.

New Study Highlights Deeply Problematic Nature of Israeli Strikes on Iran

With Barack Obama in the White House, misguided talk of bombing Iran has increasingly started to center on the idea that Israel might bomb Iran. But not only is this a bad idea, there continue to be many experts who see it as totally infeasible:

Their concerns, based on sober analyses of Israel’s known capacities and the scope of the challenge it would face, are crystallized in a recent 114-page paper by Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan, senior scholars at Washington’s Center for Strategic & International Studies. They have produced what is regarded as the most detailed public study thus far of the challenges Israel would face.

Their conclusion: Chances of a strong success — defined by how much of Iran’s uranium enrichment program is destroyed or the number of years the attack delays Iran’s acquisition of material sufficient to build a nuclear bomb — seem dubious, while the risks of the undertaking and its harsh military and destabilizing geopolitical consequences seem overwhelming.

And always recall that beyond the logistical challenges are the political issues. An Israeli strike on Iran is overwhelmingly likely to make the Iranian government more interested in forward-looking efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Kristol and Hume Call for Targeted Air Strikes on North Korea

As you probably know, a certain number of people are down-the-line pacifists. They believe that war is wrong, no matter what the cause. And as you’ve probably realized, none of them are major newspaper columnists or television pundits focusing on national security issues. Nobody takes the views of someone who’s a pacifist in general seriously on a specific question of war and peace. But if you’re Bill Kristol, and every time an issue comes up your idea is that we should launch a war, then you get to a Washington Post columnist and a constant TV presence. Here he is with Brit Hume calling for “targeted air strikes” against North Korean missiles:

Kristol doesn’t even attempt to say what he thinks this will accomplish. He just kind of tosses it out there for no reason because arguing that the United States should start wars is what he does. And ask yourself how Kristol would react if one of Iran’s leading political pundits went on television and said that maybe “targeting suicide bombings” against American targets would be a good idea.

Ahmadenijad Opponents Slam His Foreign Policy Stance

I would say that this counts as a more conciliatory posture from our side starting to bear fruit:

With campaigns for the June 12 presidential election in full swing, none of the three challengers have shied away from publicly criticizing Ahmadinejad on topics long considered off-limits for debate in Iran, such as his stance on the country’s nuclear program and his vitriol for Israel. Reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi accused the president of so sullying the nation that Iranian passports are now on par with those of Somalia, the African state that has become a hub of poverty, piracy and terrorism. [...]

Mehdi Karroubi, another liberal challenger, took on the president’s handling of the nuclear program, which Iran says is aimed at civilian energy production but the West believes is meant to eventually produce weapons. Karroubi said Tehran needed to be more transparent and rational in pursuing its goals abroad.

This is one of the virtues of expressing a clear desire for an improved relationship with Iran. Doing so lowers the temperature over there and opens up political space for disagreement about foreign policy objectives. It also clarifies that there’s a real upside to responsible behavior, and a real downside to pushing the envelope on nuclear issues.

Israel, Iran, and Nuclear Proliferation

Eli Lake observes that, in principle at least, the Obama administration’s non-proliferation efforts could wind up implicating Israel:

President Obama’s efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons threaten to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel’s nuclear weapons from international scrutiny, former and current U.S. and Israeli officials and nuclear specialists say.

The issue will likely come to a head when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Mr. Obama on May 18 in Washington. Mr. Netanyahu is expected to seek assurances from Mr. Obama that he will uphold the U.S. commitment and will not trade Israeli nuclear concessions for Iranian ones.

Let me make a few points about this. One is that obviously Israel’s nuclear program is not a direct security concern for the United States in the way Iran’s is. At the same time, insofar as nuclear proliferation in general is a direct security concern then we need to be working, over time, to build a stable rule-based order. That means working to get the United States and Russia into compliance with our NPT obligations by implementing sharp bilateral cuts. It means trying to inspire confidence in China that it shouldn’t expand its nuclear arsenal and should, instead, rely on US-Russian cuts to bring about parity. And, yes, it means trying to bring India, Pakistan, and Israel over time into the NPT framework. If you’re not trying to do that, then you’re reconciling yourself to an endless series of Bush-style ad hoc efforts that are likely to work about as well as Bush’s dual non-proliferation fiascos in Iraq and North Korea.

Specifically on the Israeli front, I think the idea that there should be no swapping of concessions whatsoever with the Iranians highlights a certain schizophrenia in the Israel view of these matters. The Iranian nuclear program, we’re supposed to believe, is an overwhelming existential threat to Israel’s existence and yet it’s not worth considering any form of Israeli concessions whatsoever in order to achieve any goals whatsoever on the Iranian front? Really? And at the same time, Israel’s nuclear deterrent is so overwhelmingly important that it can’t be bargained about for any purpose, and yet its existence gives the Israelis no confidence whatsoever that a nuclear Iran could be deterred. Again, really? If I were Israel, I wouldn’t want to swap my nukes for empty promises from Iran. But if I were Israel I also wouldn’t be ruling any sort of deal whatsoever off the table in advance.