Matt Yglesias

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.

Not a Parody

To be clear, when I say that the conservative movement has a lot to offer people who are convinced that poor Puerto Rican women growing up in Bronx housing projects get a lot of unfair advantages in life, I’m not kidding.

Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Stuart Taylor of National Journal are genuinely engaged in an Ahab-like quest to smoke out examples of the “preferential treatment” of which Sotomayor has been such a beneficiary.

Beyond the simple observation that conservatives really and truly are fanatical in their defense of the prerogatives of white people, the obvious observation to make is that everyone in life has been treated preferentially by someone at some point. Sometimes if you face a lot of disadvantages in life, people recognize that and extend you an extra helping hand. Or maybe, like John Roberts, you were educated at a private boarding school before attending Harvard. Or maybe you’re Irving Kristol’s son. Or maybe because your ideology pleases Rupert Murdoch, he agrees to cover the losses of the magazine you work at. The only reasonable question to ask about someone like Sotomayor is whether or not you think it’s reasonable to conclude that, on balance, poor minority women benefit from more special advantages in life than do middle class white men. I think that would be a difficult case to make. It’s hard to look at the composition of the United States Senate, or the Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages, or the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs and reach the conclusion that the system has been working overtime to promote underqualified Latinos into positions of prominence. Unless, that is, you want to argue that we’re so intrinsically deficient in our ability that we’re structurally underrepresented despite the massive advantages we receive in life. Maybe that’s what Goldfarb really thinks.

My guess, though, is that they haven’t thought this through at all. And that one reason they haven’t thought this through at all is that to the best of my knowledge there are no Hispanics working in high levels at The Weekly Standard and thus nobody around to point out what an ass he’s being.

In The Interests of Charity

As I wrote this morning “If you’re a white guy looking to vent about how Puerto Rican women growing up poor in the Bronx get unfair advantages in life, the conservative movement has a lot to offer you.” Just in time, here’s Michael Goldfarb to prove my point “Does anyone dispute that Sotomayor has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life?”

Jason Zengerle comments:

Honestly. Is there anything in Sotomayor’s background–other than the fact that she’s a Latina–that would lead Goldfarb to such a sweeping conclusion? I’m always reluctant to say someone’s a racist, but I’m really struggling to come up with another explanation here.

Personally, I’m of the view that American pundits are too hesitant to call other people’s statements racist, but in the case of Goldfarb I’m willing to lean toward charity. If you look at the man’s body of work in full, there’s tons of evidence that he’s extremely dim-witted and not that much in the way of racially charged rhetoric.

Conservative Radio Host Has Himself Waterboard to Prove It’s Not Torture, Realizes He Was Wrong

Via John Chait, it seems that conservative talk radio host Eric “Mancow” Muller decided it would be a fun stunt to have himself waterboarded in order to prove that it’s not really torture. Didn’t work so well:

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’”

I’m not sure I understand why Mancow wasn’t willing to take Christopher Hitchens’ word for it when he undertook an identical experiment for the same reason and concluded “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” But as Chait says “I think the torture debate would be mighty different if more of the conservatives who scoff at waterboarding would try the same thing.”

The one guy who I want to see at the front of the line for this is Michael Goldfarb from the Weekly Standard who, I think, has really gone above and beyond the call of duty in terms of minimizing torture by referring to it as “dunking”.

Michael Goldfarb’s Strange Complacency About Nazis

I think he may want to think harder about this:

Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work.

The difference between al-Qaeda and the Nazis is that Nazis didn’t kill civilians? Really?

This is via Conor Friedersdorf.

Meanwhile, the underlying assumption that the United States of America is incapable of building a secure prison physically located on the North American continent is really strange. If there’s anything we know how to do in the USA it’s lock people up. Everybody knows that.