The age-old question: fools or knaves?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my previous post for today, I called those who discount the jihadist intent of the Muslim Brotherhood fools and useful idiots.

But it occurs to me that they might instead be knaves. Or both.

It’s the age-old question—although what would be in it for them in supporting jihadists who are out to destroy all the advances of the Enlightment is a puzzlement to me. That’s why I go with the “fools” hypothesis.

Your mileage may differ.

[ADDENDUM: And is this any real surprise?

he Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.

The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said…

Monday’s statement was a “pretty clear sign that the U.S. isn’t going to advocate a narrow form of pluralism, but a broad one,” said Robert Malley, a Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. U.S. officials have previously pressed for broader participation in Egypt’s government.

The George W. Bush administration pushed Mubarak for democratic reforms, but a statement in 2005 by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not specifically address a role for Islamists.

“This is different,” said Malley, now with the International Crisis Group. “It has a real political edge and political meaning.”…

[The Brotherhood] is not listed on U.S. terrorism lists, as the militant Hamas and Hezbollah organizations are…Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has become the leading symbol of the effort to oust Mubarak, has said the group poses no threat. The Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday announced its support for ElBaradei as a transitional president if Mubarak was toppled.]

[ADDENDUM: Caroline Glick weighs in. Her conclusion, “The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.”]

What does the Muslim Brotherhood want? And why do some discount it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since the turmoil in Egypt began, I’ve been saying that no one knows what will happen there. That is still my position.

But amidst all the speculation, I think we discount the possibility of an Islamist state at our peril—and, to speak bluntly, those who discount it are fools, no matter how learned they may be.

The Muslim Brotherhood—the Islamist fundamentalist group based in Egypt—is such a fine name. Who could be against brotherhood (well, a few feminists; but you know what I mean)? The history of the group is a chilling one, however. And it is no accident that 9/11’s Mohammed Atta and Ayman al Zawahiri were highly educated Egyptians (note that al Zawahiri joined the Brotherhood at the ripe old age of fourteen).

Sayyid Qutb was another Egyptian. He became a leading voice of the “spiritual” wing of the Brotherhood in the 50s and 60s. This was his advice to the Muslim world:

Qutb…taught that Muslims and Muslim rulers who fail to implement God’s laws are takfir [apostate], they live in a state of jahiliyya [ignorance] and must be opposed…This idea has influenced the rise of contemporary takfiri militants who use this doctrine to legitimize the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy. In contrast to Abul Ala Mawdudi [1903-1979], who advocated the establishment of “Allah’s law in Allah’s land” by a gradualist methodology of infiltration into both secular and nominal Muslim lands, Qutb declared direct, immediate action against jahili and takfiri states…and gave such jihadis legitimization for the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy.

The Brotherhood wasn’t all talk and no action. Here’s some of the group’s influence on Egyptian political affairs:

The Society of Muslim Brothers, the oldest and most influential fundamentalist group in Egypt, instigated an uprising against the British, whose lingering occupation of the Suez Canal zone enraged the nationalists. In January, 1952, in response to the British massacre of fifty Egyptian policemen, mobs organized by the Muslim Brothers in Cairo set fire to movie theatres, casinos, department stores, night clubs, and automobile showrooms, which, in their view, represented an Egypt that had tied its future to the West. At least thirty people were killed, seven hundred and fifty buildings were destroyed, and twelve thousand people were made homeless…In July of that year, a military junta, dominated by an Army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, packed King Farouk onto his yacht and seized control of the government, without firing a shot. According to several fellow-conspirators who later wrote about the event, Nasser secretly promised the Brothers that he would impose Sharia””the rule of Islamic law””on the country…

It quickly became obvious to Nasser that Qutb and his corps of young Islamists had a different agenda for Egyptian society from his, and he shut down [the Brotherhood’s] magazine after only a few issues had been published. But the religious faction was not so easily controlled. The ideological war over Egypt’s future reached a climax on the night of October 26, 1954, when a member of the Brothers attempted to assassinate Nasser as he spoke before an immense crowd in Alexandria. Eight shots missed their mark. Nasser responded by having six conspirators executed immediately and arresting more than a thousand others, including Qutb. He had crushed the Brothers, once and for all, he thought….

I have quoted at length because I would imagine most of us are unfamiliar with the finer points of Egyptian history, and it’s important to get some historical perspective on what’s happening now.

What’s more, these events from the 50s and 60s have had a direct affect on us before, notably in regard to 9/11:

One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11th was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri [later to become al Qaeda’s second in command]. The main target of their wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.

But let’s go back a bit, and see what transpired between Nasser and Qutb:

In 1964, President Abd al-Salaam Arif of Iraq prevailed upon Nasser to grant Qutb parole, but the following year he was arrested again and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government…Qutb received a death sentence. “Thank God,” he said. “I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.” Qutb was hanged on August 29, 1966, and the Islamist threat in Egypt seemed to have been extinguished. “The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,” Zawahiri wrote in his memoir. “But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.” The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. He was fifteen years old.

While we’re looking at history, let’s not ignore the events surrounding the assassination of Anwar Sadat:

In January 1977, a series of ‘Bread Riots’ protested Sadat’s economic liberalization and specifically a government decree lifting price controls on basic necessities like bread. Dozens of nightclubs on the famous Pyramids Street were sacked by Islamists. Following the riots the government reversed its position and re-established the price controls.

Islamists were enraged by Sadat’s Sinai treaty with Israel, particularly the radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad. According to interviews and information gathered by journalist Lawrence Wright, the group was recruiting military officers and accumulating weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch “a complete overthrow of the existing order” in Egypt. Chief strategist of El-Jihad was Aboud el-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose “plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing – he expected – a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country.”

In February 1981, Egyptian authorities were alerted to El-Jihad’s plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information. In September, Sadat ordered a highly unpopular roundup of more than 1500 people, including many Jihad members, the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Bishop, and highly ranked clergy members, but also intellectuals and activists of all ideological stripes.

The round up missed a Jihad cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Anwar Sadat that October.

And now please take a look at the following remarks made yesterday by Fareed Zacharia in an interview with Elliot Spitzer, and then some commentary on them by Andrew McCarthy which occurred on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. First, Zacharia and Spitzer:

FZ: The Brotherhood, even the Muslim Brotherhood, does not have the aspirations of the Iranians to create a kind of Islamic state…

ES: You said the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have the aspirations to create a theocracy. Do they not have the aspirations? Or do they not have the power to do it at this point?

FZ: For the last thirty years or so, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have moved in the direction of wanting to be a conservative, socially religious organization that wants to institute some greater element of Sharia. Now to understand what that means, a lot of that is social welfare stuff. Some of it is things like the veil. Some of it is court procedures in which unfortunately, women would have fewer voices. But it’s not some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. They seem to have accommodated themselves to the idea of democracy, and they have done so for decades now.

Do you think this is likely, after having read the earlier history right up to the early part of the present century? Or do you think we have a fine old bridge in Brooklyn to sell Mr. Zacharia?

I don’t know whether the Brotherhood will succeed in finally taking over after all these long decades of trying. But those who don’t think they still want desperately to do so, and have instead become social workers, are what might be called useful idiots.

And that’s the best thing we can call them. I’m with Andrew McCarthy on this one:

I just think that is willfully closing your eyes and your ears to what they say and what they write. I mean, look, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, just a few months ago, gave a raging speech calling for jihad. I think Mr. Zacharia is paying attention to what the Brotherhood says to their rapt, English audience, and not a whole lot of attention to what they say, either when they think no one’s listening to them, or in the Arabic press, which tends to be virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli, and does aspire to the creation of a theocracy. What more do you need to know than that their slogan, their motto remains to this day the same. The Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.

This willful, hopeful closing of the eyes and ears of a large part of the intelligentsia is inexplicable to me, and yet it happens time and again. It happened with Hitler. It happened with Castro. It happened in Iran with Khomeini, whom the left thought it could control and co-opt. It happened with the West and Yassir Arafat, their revolutionary darling turned pussycat. I don’t know how many people agree with Zacharia about the Brotherhood (here’s an influential one), but I fervently hope their numbers are small, and that they do not include our own president and State Department—although I fear they might.

[NOTE: This post is already very long, but I must add a link to Andrew McCarthy’s excellent article covering some of this same territory. I just noticed it, after having written my post; if I’d seen it earlier I might have saved myself the trouble of writing this and just linked to McCarthy!

If you don’t feel like plowing through the McCarthy piece, however, I’ll just quote the end, which bears on the ending of my post as well:

The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. ”” CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists ”” even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.

There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown. We ought to be very afraid.]

Obamacare ruled unconstitutional–for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Every time these rulings come down, I refuse to get too excited one way or another, because the only ruling that will end up mattering is the one that will one day almost inevitably be issued by SCOTUS—in other words, what will Justice Kennedy think?

But it is still big news that US District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida has struck down the individual mandate as being unconstitutional, and because there is no severability clause he has extended that ruling to the entire HCR act itself.

As Ezra Klein and several others take pains to inform us, Vinson is a Republican-appointed judge. Rhetorical question: do you think that when liberal rulings come down, those same people are equally eager to lead with the fact that the judges in question are Democrat-appointed?

And then there’s noted constitutional scholar Nancy Pelosi, back in October of 2009:

Teen pregnancy and education: slip-sliding away

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Gerry Garibaldi in City Journal—about the enormous number of teen pregnancies, our attitude towards them, and the state of education in our country today—is a must-read.

Garibaldi is a teacher in an urban school in Connecticut. The tale he tells is a heartbreaking one, of teenagers who have given up all hope of marriage as unworthy of contemplation or expectation, and who are having children in a system that, in its attempt to be humane, rewards them and supports them for doing so.

They are mostly the product of unwed teen mothers themselves. Although not unintelligent, they are uninvested in school and much of anything else except the frantic search for love, be it from a missing father, a swaggering teenage boy, or the babies they have with alarming frequency.

As Garibaldi points out, tons of taxpayer money is being flung at the problem. But the end result, unfortunately, is only to encourage the behavior.

I have no solution; these things begin in the home, and this system is broken down. It’s not just urban schools, either—the problem is worse there, but it is everywhere.

The contrast between the world I remember from my high school days could not be greater, in which the few girls who got pregnant usually became more quiet and withdrawn, and then were sent away for months to continue their pregnancies in homes for unwed mothers. Later they would return, empty-handed, a sad and newly-adult look in their eyes.

Not so today. The pregnancies of these girls are often the happiest events in their lives, and the babies are almost always kept to be raised by the teens and their thirty-something moms. The single female parent is the norm:

My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”

“Two,” I say.

The next question is always heartbreaking.

“Do they live with you?”

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? It hardly matters at this late point, unless the answer would lead to solutions. Do we withdraw the supports from pregnant teenagers and possibly doom them (and their babies) to a worse situation? But if we don’t, aren’t we just perpetuating the problem? Does the phenomenon lie more in the realm of the emotional? But can’t the emotional be influenced by practicalities? If the consequences of teen pregnancy are made more dire, will it matter at all to these children and their children, who know so little of marriage that it is a foreign territory, almost never visited by anyone in their acquaintance?

The revolutionary young

The New Neo Posted on by

The situation in Egypt keeps conjuring up memories of Iran for me. This seems as though it might become relevant again. I hope not; I hope that as events unfold it will turn out there was no analogy after all.

But here’s an excerpt that might send a chill down your spine:

[Iranian exile and author-to-be] Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:

I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.

So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”

For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:

[I] insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving “counterrevolutionary” writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.

Once in Tehran, Nafisi…soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.

Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.

Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.

And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.

“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.

In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.

An expert weighs in on the Egyptian crisis: Jimmy Carter

The New Neo Posted on by

If I were Jimmy Carter, I think I’d keep my mouth shut on the subject of the current Egyptian unrest. But being Carter being Carter, that’s not happening:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will likely be forced to step down because “the people have decided,” according to a news report.

“This is the most profound situation in the Middle East since I left office,” Carter said…

I’m not sure what “most profound” means, but I would think he’s leaving out a few subsequent events, such as the Iraq War.

But that’s just Carter’s narcissism, which is so familiar as to be unremarkable. What’s more interesting to me is that, although both Carter and the article mention his role in the “historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978,” the entire article proceeds without mentioning the enormous part Carter had in the downfall of the Shah and his replacement with the Iranian theocracy that has been hugely influential in unrest and terrorism in the region and the world ever since.

Carter calls Mubarak “corrupt,” and very few people would quarrel with that; I’m certainly not one of them. He also says Mubarak “will have to leave.” But here’s what happened between Carter and the “corrupt” Shah, who also “had to leave”—and we all know how well that one turned out:

The Shah lived in what’s known as a “rough neighborhood.” This meant that, in order to implement the modernization of Iran, he felt he needed to be harsh in dealing with the opposition. Jimmy Carter was dedicated to the cause of spreading human rights throughout the world, and he decided to put pressure to bear on the Shah to expand civil liberties and relax his policies towards those in his country who were against him.

Carter threatened the Shah with cutting arms shipments, and in response:

The Shah…released 357 political prisoners in February, 1977. But lifting the lid of repression even slightly encouraged the Shah’s opponents. An organization of writers and publishers called for freedom of thought, and 64 lawyers called for the abolition of military tribunals. Merchants wrote letters requesting more freedom from government controls. Some people took to the streets, perhaps less fearful of being shot to death, and they clashed with police. A group of 120 lawyers joined together to publicize SAVAK torture and to monitor prison conditions. Dissident academics formed a group called the National Organization of University Teachers, and they joined students in demanding academic freedom. Political dissidents started disseminating more openly their semi-clandestine publications.

As events spiraled out of control, there were demonstrations throughout Iran. Police reacted harshly, and many protestors were killed, which led to more demonstrations and more deaths, which led to–well, you get the idea.

A genie of dissent had been unleashed–a valid one, because there was much to protest. But as things escalated, and the Shah eventually lost the support of the army and the police (a turning point), few seemed to be prescient enough to predict what forces would replace his regime–not what was hoped for, but what was likely to do so. There were only three choices, and two of them–the mullahs and the Marxists–could reasonably be expected to be far more repressive than the Shah.

Jimmy Carter was probably sincere in wishing that his pressure on the Shah would lead to greater civil liberties, not fewer. But if so, it was one of the gravest miscalculations in history. Be careful what you wish for.

On New Years Eve of 1977:

President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him “an island of stability’ in the troubled Middle East….Did the Carter administration “lose” Iran, as some have suggested? Gaddis Smith might have put it best: “President Carter inherited an impossible situation — and he and his advisers made the worst of it.” Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences.

Even after it became known that the Shah was suffering from cancer, President Carter was reluctant to allow him entry to the United States, for fear of reprisal against Americans still in Iran. But in October, when the severity of the Shah’s illness became known, Carter relented on humanitarian grounds. “He went around the room, and most of us said, ‘Let him in.'” recalls Vice President Walter Mondale. “And he said, ‘And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?’ And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did.”…

The rest, as they say, is history.

The fate of Egypt is unknown, but our own fate is tied in with what happens there, just as it was in Iran back in the late 70s, when Carter was our president and the Shah “had to go.”

Egypt: will it be democracy, or will it be…

The New Neo Posted on by

Are Obama and Hillary Clinton becoming neo-neocons? Well, sort of:

Asked if Washington supports Mubarak as Egypt’s leader, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton avoided a direct answer, telling Fox News in an interview, “We have been very clear that we want to see a transition to democracy, and we want to see the kind of steps taken that will bring that about.”

I don’t think much of El Baradei. And, although the Muslim Brotherhood is “willing to let ElBaradei act as pointman for the movement,” I feel fairly safe in saying that he probably won’t be a very permanent pointman.

Will El Baradei be the Brotherhood’s Bakhtiar? For those who don’t get the reference, I’ll refresh your memories:

Shapour Bakhtiar took office as Prime Minister of Iran on Jan 6, 1979. He was appointed by the Shah in one of the latter’s final acts in Iran, a country from which the Shah departed on Jan 16.

But Bakhtiar was not the Shah’s man. He was a well-known dissident who was appointed in an effort to show that the Shah was ready to reform in ways that would satisfy those who were proponents of greater freedom and civil liberties in Iran.

The Shah is one of those figures in history who, like Ataturk in Turkey, was faced with the dilemmas common to those who would modernize and Westernize a third-world country, and especially one with a strong traditional Islamic clerical tradition. It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss why Ataturk was able to successfully buck the fairly substantial opposition of religious leaders and the populace in Turkey, and why the Shah’s effort ultimately failed in Iran. Some day I may attempt to tackle that one–but suffice to say for now that the Iranian Shah had the same goal of modernization as Ataturk, but the opposition to his rule was stronger, and his efforts to crush it far more Draconian…

On Bakhtiar’s appointment as the new Prime Minister, Khomeini condemned him, of course, from his exile in France. But Khomeini continued to live his charmed life; Bakhtiar allowed him to return to Iran shortly thereafter. The reason? A combination of Bakhtiar’s own devotion to freedom of speech, and the Shah’s old conundrum: Khomeini was so popular that to try to ban him would cause such public unrest in Iran that it seemed counterproductive. In essence, Bakhtiar, although a far different ruler than the Shah, faced the same dilemma; he resolved it in favor of not suppressing the opposition.

So who was Bakhtiar? Like many Iranians, he’d spent many formative years in France, acquiring graduate degrees in political science, law, and philosophy. But he was also a man of action; residing in France during the Nazi occupation, he fought for the Resistance. Returning to Iran after WWII, he continued his resistance, becoming an opponent of the Shah, who imprisoned him for many years.

Thus Bakhtiar had his bona fides–no patsy of the Shah, he had been one of the leaders of those who were against the Shah’s regime because of its human rights abuses, and he himself had suffered greatly for his bravery. But by the time Bakhtiar came to power it was most decidedly too late, both for him and for the Shah’s modernization program, as well as for the civil rights that Bakhtiar championed. Perhaps the only beneficiary of that campaign for civil rights was Khomeini himself, ironically enough.

Bakhtiar’s regime lasted about two weeks before Khomeini and the clerics took over, establishing the primacy of Sharia law, abolishing most of the rights women had enjoyed, banning alcohol and gambling and a host of other un-Islamic pursuits as well as newspapers, and instituting his own murderous crackdown to stifle all opposition. Khomeini didn’t have to worry about making martyrs of his enemies, nor about whether to allow them to remain in Iran and exercise freedom of speech. Tyranny doesn’t struggle with the same sort of philosophical questions about how much toughness is too much, questions with which its opponents wrestle mightily:

It was announced that any spreading of corruption would be punished by death. A variety of the Shah’s former friends, colleagues and generals were seized, and after trials of a few minutes they were executed immediately – to prevent news spreading to the others who were detained – the executions lasting without stop for several weeks. The bodies of the prisoners were loaded into meat containers and dumped into mass graves. Khomeini dismissing international protests, saying that criminals did not need to be tried, just killed.

Bakhtiar, however, was not one of them–at least, not right away. He left Iran and settled in Paris again. From that venue he organized another resistance–a movement to fight the Islamic Republic of the mullahs. For his pains, he was almost assassinated in 1980; a policeman and a neighbor died, but Bakhtiar lived to fight another day.

In 1991, however, the number of this brave man was finally up. The assassins got their man; Bakhtiar and his secretary were murdered in his home. The assailant later was captured and tried in France. At his trial he admitted to having been sent by the Iranian government.

What lessons can we draw from the life of Bakhtiar? The first is that one can be both committed to freedom and personally courageous, and yet lose the battle against repression and tyranny. The second is more of a question: is it sometimes acceptable (or perhaps even necessary) to use greater ruthlessness, to be willing to use oppressive tools against an enemy that–if successful–would not hesitate to abolish all the civil liberties and the advances for which you are fighting?

This is the dilemma faced not just by Bakhtiar, but by all those who would oppose the likes of Khomeini. How much of a crackdown is too much? How little is too little? At what point do you compromise your own principles so much that you become too much like the enemy you are fighting?

There are no easy answers. Only the questions–and Khomeini’s regime, in its present-day manifestation, Ahmadinejad– remain.

Come to think of it, Bakhtiar was 100 times the man El Baradei is. And yet ultimately he was defeated by the forces of tyranny.

Egypt: breaking some eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

“Rumors are circulating everywhere. You don’t know what’s true and what’s not true.”

That statement by Sharif Abdul Bakhi (my phonetic spelling), a man living on the outskirts of Cairo who was just interviewed on CNN, seems to say it all. And he doesn’t know what’s going on even though he’s in Cairo; most of us are not (fortunately).

So far reports vary, but it seems that scores of people have died in the riots. Is this only the beginning of the violence, or will it be contained? Lenin famously said that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. What sort of omelet is being cooked up right now?

And Israel wonders most particularly, although most of the speculation is that whatever the result, it won’t be good for that beleaguered country.

I have an extremely apprehensive view of what’s going on. It feels potentially like a runaway train. Whatever the protesters have in mind (other than doing away with Mubarek) is unclear. And whatever they have in mind may become irrelevant, because other more pernicious forces can easily co-opt the movement and take over.

And the US, and Obama? I have to say that this is one of the moments I have a small amount of sympathy for him. Yes, he may be in over his head, but wouldn’t almost anyone be? No one foresaw this; no one. That said, I would deeply prefer that more realistic and informed heads were involved. Exactly whom these people might be, and what they would actually say or do, I don’t know. I just know they’re not at the helm right now, and that makes me especially uneasy.

[ADDENDUM: John Bolton chimes in.]

Netflix thinks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that because I enjoyed “The Great Escape” I will also enjoy “Fiddler On the Roof.”

Netflix is nuts.

Netflix thinks that because I enjoyed “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” I will also enjoy “The Madness of King George.” In this case, Netflix is probably not nuts, although King George most likely was.

Netlix thinks that because I enjoyed “In Treatment, Season 1” I will also enjoy “In Treatment, Season 2.” This seems eminently sensible. And yet I did not. Go figure.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Politely philosophical bot with an odd idea of what seems comforting:

good post, I enjoy reading it. I hope 1 time I may acquire identical. have a nice day time. – Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought.