Let’s stick it to the gas-frugal

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another case where the conscientious lose out: people who have old gas-guzzlers get to trade them in for government incentives of $3,500 to $4,500 when they get more energy efficient cars.

That’s not chump change, even if you figure into the calculations the fact that the sum is instead of (rather than in addition to) any trade-in value the car might have.

For example, I drive a rather old car: a 1998 (or is it 1997? I never can remember) Toyota Corolla. When I look up my car (assuming it’s a ’98 in good condition) at the Kelley Blue Book site, I find that its trade-in value is a whopping $2,175. If I could qualify for the new program, that would mean I’d get somewhere between $1325 and $2325 extra to go towards my new purchase.

But alas and alack, my little Toyota already gets good mileage, well over the 18 miles per gallon necessary to qualify. I never forgot the gas shortages of the Carter years, and it seemed silly not to get a vehicle that conserved fuel.

And so I’ll have to do without my government largesse. This is a familiar experience for me—I keep waiting and waiting for my piece of the Obama pie. I didn’t get a sub-prime mortgage, nor did I max out on my credit cards, so I’m stuck supporting those who did.

Dummy me.

Is Mousavi a “changer?”

The New Neo Posted on by

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the candidate for President of Iran who is at the center of the current Iranian storm, is an enigma.

Mousavi’s Wiki entry sheds little light on the subject; it deals with the bare bones of his history, which indicate that he was an early mover and shaker in Iranian government—its last Prime Minister before the office was abolished, for example. But Mousavi has been laying low, in the public office sense, for well-nigh twenty years. He has not held any major state office since 1989, and although one could conclude that this indicates his disapproval of the course Iran has taken since then one cannot be sure, or know how deep or how far such disagreement might go.

A late-April 2009 interview in Spiegel isn’t much more informative. The picture Mousavi paints of himself is that of a man who plays his cards very close to the vest (as one might imagine; it probably aids survival in Iran). However, from whatever evidence the interview does provide, he seems mostly interested in economic and cultural reform rather than any change in international policy.

Michael Ledeen thinks otherwise, at least now that events have unfolded that raise the stakes:

…at this point, Mousavi either brings down the Islamic Republic or he hangs. If he wins, and the Islamic Republic comes down, we may well see the whole world change, from an end of the theocratic fascist system, to a cutoff of money, arms, technology, training camps and intelligence to the world’s leading terrorist organizations, and yes, even to a termination of the nuclear weapons program.

I think that, whatever or whoever Mir Hossein Mousavi was five days ago, he is now the leader of a mass movement that demands the creation of a free Iran that will rejoin the Western world…

That seems tremendously optimistic to me. However, I’m always especially interested in the topic of political change, and I know for a fact that such a transformation is possible. This particular one just seems too large a leap for me to imagine, and doesn’t fit in very well with the Spiegel interview. But it’s also not outside the realm of possibility that Mousavi has had some sort of epiphany—or whatever the equivalent is in Moslem terms—that has outraged him and caused him to be more of a reformer than he was before.

There is no question, however, that Mousavi’s earlier public incarnation was in the mold of the mullahs he now appears to be opposing. As Prime Minister, he called for the annihilation of Israel and the death of Salman Rushdie. But the reasons for Mousavi’s retirement from the public scene in 1989 are mysterious (at least, I haven’t found anything yet that sheds light on them), and twenty years is a long time. Was he undergoing a metamorphosis and biding his time? Or was he just biding his time?

We may or may not get a chance to find out, depending on how events go in Iran. As Ledeen says, if Mousavi doesn’t succeed he’s probably in a huge heap of trouble. And at the moment there’s no reason to suppose he will succeed.

But if Mousavi has really reformed (as opposed to just being a “reformist candidate”), he is not alone. Many revolutionaries who are gung-ho in the first flush of a movement’s victory later become disgusted with the wretched excesses that ensue. If Mousavi goes that way, he wouldn’t be the first Iranian to do so—read about Azar Nafisi, as well as the sad and cautionary tale of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh.

[ADDENDUM: Commenter Tim P. alerts me to the fact that Michael Totten is speculating on much the same question.]

More on the Walpin case—and more about Sacramento Mayor Johnson

The New Neo Posted on by

There are two interesting developments in the Walpin case.

The first is that a possible obstruction of justice charge is being investigated by the FBI—against Johnson, the Sacramento mayor whom IG Walpin implicated in misuse of AmeriCorps funds. There’s a lot more on the story in the local paper, the Sacramento Bee.

It’s always instructive to read what those who are closer to the characters involved have to say. Here are some excerpts from a column in the Bee by Marcos Breton:

There is seemingly always a skeleton poised to fly out of Johnson’s closet. Johnson ”“ or his posse ”“ have been accused of a range of misdeeds, from inappropriate behavior with girls to misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants.

Now the FBI is looking into obstruction of justice allegations stemming from the earlier investigation into misuse of grant money by St. HOPE Academy. Former bank executive Rick Maya, who replaced Johnson as executive director of St. HOPE Public Schools, made the allegations that triggered the FBI probe.

In a damning eight-page letter he submitted when resigning from the St. HOPE board of directors, Maya alleged that while the organization was under federal subpoena in that earlier investigation, a St. HOPE board member deleted some of Johnson’s e-mails.

Maya claimed in the letter that he alerted the St. HOPE board, and that members did nothing except notify St. HOPE legal counsel Kevin Hiestand. Hiestand is also Johnson’s longtime friend, business partner and personal attorney. And he was the lawyer embroiled in a scalding controversy from last year’s mud-splattered mayoral election:

When Johnson was accused of inappropriately touching a student at Sacramento High, Hiestand questioned the girl before anyone at the school contacted police. The girl recanted, and police ”“ contacted a week later ”“ found no merit to the allegation. But Hiestand’s behavior was disturbing.

That’s the story of St. HOPE: great intentions, some progress, inner turmoil.

There’s more; keep reading at the link.

I have no idea whether anything will come of this—there are certainly innocuous explanations for the deletions. But it is interesting that things like this keep popping up with Johnson.

The comments to Breton’s piece make fascinating reading as well. From perusing them, I get the not-surprising impression of a fight between those who think Johnson’s a crook (including those who claim to have personal knowledge of such) and those who think it’s all smoke and no fire. It also emerged, as I read the comments, that writer Breton was originally a Johnson supporter. I’m always interested in people who change their opinions—and it seems as though a lot of this smoke has convinced Breton that there might be a fire around Johnson after all.

But back to Walpin. I mentioned two interesting developments. The second is outlined in the Village Voice, of all papers, which discusses another controversy, this time involving Walpin’s investigation of CUNY’s (the City University of New York) AmeriCorps funding. There is an even more in-depth discussion of the CUNY case here, as well.

From reading both articles (and I strongly suggest that you do) a picture begins to emerge: Walpin took very seriously “Barack Obama’s admonition to ‘scour’ federal budgets to determine if ‘taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.'” Unfortunately for Walpin, he wasn’t listening to Obama on the second channel. He was listening to Obama’s words instead, and he ruffled an awful lot of feathers.

[ADDENDUM: In another development, Senator Grassley wonders whether there is a pattern of suspicious IG firings emerging.]

[ADDENDUM II: Someone asked who replaced Walpin. There’s been no official appointment yet, and in the meantime his place is being taken at least temporarily by this man. He seems to be a criminal investigator rather than a lawyer, and a specialist in tech problems.]

[ADDENDUM III: White House lawyer Eisen—the person who actually gave Walpin the news that he had an hour to quit or be fired—claims the Walpin firing was “an act of political courage.” On the White House’s part.

Well, I guess it was ballsy, all right.]

Watch Walpin for yourself: does this man seem confused?

The New Neo Posted on by

On Monday, Gerald Walpin was a guest on the Glenn Beck show (his segment begins at around 3:30). As you watch the clip, see whether you think Walpin seems “confused, disoriented, and unable to answer questions.” For extra credit, compare his abilities on that score to those exhibited by Vice President Joe Biden and President Obama minus teleprompter.

Ah, the evidence is there after all! At the end of the clip, see how Walpin takes a moment to remember the last word in the quote from FDR. Surely a sign of dementia.

[NOTE: And speaking of seeming unable to answer questions, take a look at this.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s Walpin’s description of the meeting where he was supposedly “confused and disoriented”:

“There was no confusion in my opening remarks at the meeting, in which I chastised the board for what appeared to be the board’s refusal to perform its duty, independent of management, in overseeing what management was doing, particularly as it regards determining the merits of the two reports I had issued,” Walpin says.

“I started out by chastising the board and telling them their duty was not just to accept what management says, but to make their independent analysis of those reports,” Walpin continues. He says board members were “clearly angry at my temerity in telling them they should not be acting in the manner of many for-profit boards, which have been recently criticized.” Walpin says there was “no confusion whatsoever about our two reports, and our clear findings, which were a major part of the meeting.”

So where did the White House allegation of confusion come from? Walpin says that he was not feeling well that day, and that he was repeatedly interrupted as he gave a prepared presentation. “Then at one point, they broke in and said I had to leave the room while they handled something else,” he recalls. “I left my papers there. When I came back, they were in disorder. I attempted to reorganize them and be certain that I was not repeating what I had already discussed. But I was quickly denied time to review my notes and told that I had to leave because the board was too busy.”

Walpin says no one at the Corporation ever said anything to him about allegedly being confused or disoriented, at the time or any time later. The first he heard the charge was Tuesday night, in Eisen’s letter. “The only confusion exhibited was the board members’ confusion as to their responsibilities,” he says.

Read the whole thing.]

[ADDENDUM II: Another witness backs up Walpin’s claim.]

The Walpin firing

The New Neo Posted on by

The Walpin firing should be a big big story: heavy-handed executive overreach by the President in order to protect a political supporter from charges against him.

Right now it’s not. The NY Times? So far it’s offering the sound of crickets chirping. Don’t trust me; try doing a search yourself on the Times’s website for “Gerald Walpin.” All you’ll find is this from early April, on Walpin’s investigation of Kevin Johnson. But now that Walpin has been fired, and has alleged that the White House did so to protect supporter Johnson—employing some of the niceties Obama’s learned along the way in Chicago—nary a word is heard from the Times (remember, in contrast, how very eager the paper was to air this all-important piece of flim-flam?).

Do the same for Newsweek. Nada. And here’s a piece on how slow the WaPo has been on the uptake, with the usual empty excuses by editors.

In contrast, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent story on the Johnson case and the related Walpin firing (please read the whole thing). I especially like the Orwellian irony of the fact that the hatchet guy for the termination, Norman Eisen, is the “Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform.”

This White House isn’t just lying here, it’s lying badly and stupidly. Perhaps Obama has never been under such scrutiny before and therefore is sloppy, or perhaps he knows that even now he is effectively immunized from scandal by the protection the mainstream press will give him. But in any event, here’s the trail of deception and coverup as reported by the WSJ:

[Eisen has stated] that it was “pure coincidence” [that Walpin] was asked to leave during the St. HOPE [Johnson] controversy. Yet the Administration has already had to walk back that claim.

That’s because last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which requires the President to give Congress 30 days notice, plus a reason, before firing an inspector general. A co-sponsor of that bill was [watch for another point of irony here] none other than Senator Obama. Having failed to pressure Mr. Walpin into resigning (which in itself might violate the law), the Administration was forced to say he’d be terminated in 30 days, and to tell Congress its reasons.

White House Counsel Gregory Craig cited a complaint that had been lodged against Mr. Walpin by Mr. Brown, the U.S. Attorney, accusing Mr. Walpin of misconduct, and of not really having the goods on Mr. Johnson. But this is curious given that Mr. Brown himself settled with St. HOPE, Mr. Johnson and his assistant, an agreement that required St. HOPE (with a financial assist from Mr. Johnson) to repay approximately half of the grant, and also required Mr. Johnson to take an online course about bookkeeping.

No doubt some will defend President Obama by saying this is politics as usual. I’m not so sure (if you have examples of the Bush Administration doing something similar, please point it out). But I am sure that it’s irrelevant whether it’s typical or not. Obama ran—and won—on the idea that his politics would be more transparent and more honest than the usual. One thing that is unusual about Obama, though, is the depth of his hypocrisy, and the audacity of his reach.

[NOTE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has much more on the White House excuses and Walpin’s reaction. It seems to be a bit like the old Soviet-style accusations of dissidents’ mental instability. Is internment in a mental hospital the next step for Mr. Walpin?

And if Walpin really does have some sort of mental or cognitive problem—which his recent statements don’t seem to suggest at all—would threatening to fire him and giving him an hour to resign instead really be the proper way to handle it?

And here’s a lot of background material from Byron York.]

[ADDENDUM: Don’t sit on a hot stove till these questions get answered.]

Right on schedule: Iran accuses US of meddling

The New Neo Posted on by

Despite Obama’s heroic efforts to remain uninvolved in the Iranian post-election protests, the Iranian government has accused him of doing so anyway.

Fancy that. As I wrote yesterday [emphasis mine]:

Obama has positioned himself as the un-Bush. This means that making a strong statement of solidarity and support to the Iranian demonstrators is not possible for him either strategically or temperamentally. Commenters at the blogs on the Left defend this course of action by saying that any such statements would only afford the mullahs an opportunity to say that the demonstrators are mere US puppets. But since they’ll say that anyway if they wish at any time they wish no matter what Obama does or doesn’t do…that sort of argument rings hollow and seems mere apologia for the weak response of our current President.

Lawyer-blogger William A. Jacobson adds:

Obama’s statement yesterday that he did not want “to be seen as meddling” all but invited an accusation of meddling.

These accusations appear to be a precurser to, and excuse for, a violent crackdown by the regime, which could start as early as Thursday…

Obama is a novice at this game. At the end of his essay, Jacobson also points out something I’ve been thinking recently: is this Obama’s 3 A.M. test? If so, he’s failing, just as Hillary said he would. Only problem is, Hillary has become his willing henchwoman.

This isn’t just about Obama, either. It’s about an entire point of view widely held by those on the liberal side of things, a misunderstanding of what the Iranian leadership is all about and what they are prepared to say and do. The far Left, on the other hand, may know full well and applaud them. Remember that in the original Iranian Revolution, the Left were major players and originally supported the Ayatollahs.

[NOTE: This may be a good time to republish Part II of my series on the Iranian Revolution. I republished Part I yesterday. You may notice towards the end of the piece there is a discussion that is very pertinent today, about how much ruthlessness should be used against a ruthless regime.

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.

The Shah’s secret police—SAVAK, usually referred to with an adjective such as “dreaded” or “hated” before the acronym—was active in Iran to stifle those who would oppose him. There is a great deal of controversy over just how dreadful SAVAK actually was in the larger scheme of things. Was it a wide-ranging and indiscriminate effort to track down, torture, imprison, exile and/or murder all those who dissented, or who even were thought to dissent, much like the operations of the Soviet KGB? Or was it far more benign, only dealing with those who would violently overthrow the government (such as Khomeini and his henchmen), and using torture only sparingly? If history is written by the victors—and, in this case, the victors so far in Iran have been the Khomeinists—then how can we know the truth about SAVAK?

What we do know, however, is this: there were many protests against the Shah’s modernizing changes, which especially threatened the religious establishment in Iran. For example, religious students demonstrated against land reforms that the Shah had instituted to try to offer the populace of Iran some economic benefits, with the goal (among other things) of increasing his popularity with them.

If that was the Shah’s intent, it backfired, because the land reforms imposed hardships on the Shiite clerical establishment (which had owned some of the land). Khomeini, who was still in Iran at the time, issued a fatwa. Protests were organized, the Shah’s government began to ridicule the clerics as old-fashioned, and more clerics took offense and joined the opposition. In addition, crackdowns on protesters became very brutal—for example, a group of theological students protesting against the opening of liquor stores were killed, and these deaths ultimately reached into the hundreds.

It appears that the Shah was already fighting the same extreme fanatics who were to take over the country in 1979. As often happens, his efforts to stop them had the paradoxical effect of making them martyrs, agitating their sympathizers, and ultimately making the movement against him grow stronger. Had his policies against his enemies—the enemies of modernization—been less heavy-handed, might the movement have died down? Or would it only have grown larger and more powerful more quickly? Unanswerable questions, I’m afraid.

History gave its own answer. I’ve written before about how the Shah had hesitated to have Khomeini executed in 1964 when the latter was imprisoned, because the Shah feared making the already popular and powerful cleric into a martyr. Perhaps if he’d done so others would have filled Khomeini’s shoes and carried on in his name, and history would have taken more or less the same course as it ultimately did.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there was something especially charismatic about Khomeini that would have been lost to the clerics’ cause without his particular presence. Once again, we’ll never know; what we do know is that Khomeini’s life was spared, he was ultimately exiled, and he lived to return to Iran in triumph and take over the government. As unrest and discontent with the Shah was brewing in the late 1970s, Khomeini became the de facto head of the opposition, which was a strange amalgam of restrictive clerics, liberals who supported human rights, and socialists–each with an agenda, each jockeying for position:

Anti-Shah intellectuals, secular and Islamic, moderate and leftist misread developments. They believed that they were using the popular Khomeini and that he could be shunted aside as democracy was established. It was believed that with the success of the revolution the ulama (official community of scholars of Islam) and Khomeini would return to their mosques and schools and perhaps advise the government on Islamic matters.

Such hubris is misplaced. The moral of the story is to never underestimate the power of a demagogue fully bent on acquiring it (the same mistake was made, by the way, by Franz von Papen and Hindenberg. In the waning days of the Weimar Republic, they thought they could “control” that silly-looking upstart, Hitler.)

Which brings us to Bakhtiar. 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.]

Montazeri speaks: trouble in Iranian Ayatollah paradise?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an indication that those such as Michael Ledeen, who predicted dissent in the upper reaches of the Iranian clergy, were correct.

Yesterday Ledeen wrote:

The other great threat to the regime comes from the upper reaches of the clergy. Do not be surprised to see some senior ayatollahs denounce the regime; many have done so in the past (Ayatollah Montazeri has been under house arrest for years, and Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been subjected to horrible torture for criticizing the lack of freedom in Iran).

And now Montazeri has weighed in just as expected:

“No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.”

“A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ‘sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God.”

As Ledeen wrote (but the McClatchy article neglects to mention) Montazeri is already persona non grata and under house arrest. So it’s unclear how much this means, how large a following he has, or how many allies there are among those ayatollahs who haven’t yet spoken up (perhaps none, perhaps some).

Hot Air has some more background on Montazeri; he’s hardly a newcomer to the scene. The man is courageous; that much I can say. It’s also interesting that he remains alive, even though he had the cojones to criticize Khomeini when the latter was still around. This resulted in Montazeri’s removal and replacement by Khamenei; prior to that, Montazeri was a front-runner for appointment as Khomeini’s successor.

I can’t help but think that, if Montazeri had kept his mouth firmly shut until Khomeini died, Iran would be a much better place today.

Listening in on the second channel

The New Neo Posted on by

I like the concept of the second channel, which Richard Fernandez describes with his usual insight here [emphasis mine]:

And in the particular case of Iran, my own emotional curiosity is drawn toward one question alone. Does the current President in his most private moments truly and sincerely wish for the downfall of the regime in Teheran? Because even if he were only to wish it, without acting on it; without initiating a single program to overthrow the Ayatollahs, I believe the message would shine through.

Over at Ann Althouse’s there’s a poll on who is the bigger partisan hack: Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. Last I looked Sullivan was winning the hack race by 94 % to 6%. And the reason apparently, is largely Sullivan’s credulity of Obama’s position on gay marriage and his contorted attempts to reconcile his belief in President Obama in despite of the plain facts. Sullivan’s problem was that he was listening to Obama’s words. Other people were clever enough to listen in on the second channel ”” the one that sends signals about who [Obama] is. Clever enough to deduce the truth from coded signals because in certain circles, engagement always means being able to say all things to all men. People learn to read the tea leaves eventually. I think that some Iranians actually know how to listen in on the second channel and they are. They want to know if the current administration is “on their side”. Maybe that’s all the help they want; all the help they need. But are they going to get it?

And it’s one of the reasons that Obama’s tepid words on Iran fall so flat. Listening in on the second channel, we sense absolutely no conviction behind them and no commitment to anything other than keeping the options open for negotiating with Ahmadinejad.

And, looking at the domestic picture, it is at least part of the explanation of why some of us have distrusted Obama from the start, while others are (and remain) starry-eyed.

The Iranian election: Obama speaks (kinda, sorta)

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some of the remarks President Obama made yesterday on Iran. I don’t need to analyze them too closely; many others have already done so. But I will say that they highlight Obama’s already-marked tendency towards narcissistic referencing that emphasizes his own personal reaction and/or personal story, as well as his remarkably passive and mealymouthed “evenhandedness” in the international sphere.

Obama has positioned himself as the un-Bush. This means that making a strong statement of solidarity and support to the Iranian demonstrators is not possible for him either strategically or temperamentally. Commenters at the blogs on the Left defend this course of action by saying that any such statements would only afford the mullahs an opportunity to say that the demonstrators are mere US puppets. But since they’ll say that anyway if they wish at any time they wish no matter what Obama does or doesn’t do, and since such statements of strong support in the past have given protesters around the world heart in many countries and at many times (see this for just one example), that sort of argument rings hollow and seems mere apologia for the weak response of our current President.

I wrote “weak response;” some would say “cowardly response.” I don’t think it’s the latter; to be a coward implies that Obama knows that he should be denouncing the regime and supporting the demonstrators in stronger terms, and that he rejects that move because he is afraid. There may be a bit of that involved, but I don’t really think so; if I read Obama correctly, I believe that he is unmoved by the protests and has tunnel vision for his task, which he sees as negotiating with Ahmadinejad and convincing him (whether by the sheer force of Obamalove or the power of logic) to give up his nuclear program.

That this is a delusion on Obama’s part and a misreading of Iran’s intent and ability to deceive is not the point; Obama seems to believe that it will happen, and has staked quite a bit on this belief. And it’s not just about Iran itself. It’s about an entire philosophical approach to international conflict that is as different as night and day from that of Bush and Cheney (Manichaeans who believe in the division of good and evil in the world, and the need for the former to press hard against the latter). Obama is committed to proving that cultural relativism (read “respect for all other countries and their governments”), the talking cure, apologies, meekness, and American non-interventionism pave the way for productive dialogue with the likes of even Ahmadinejad.

Compared to this, a few demonstrators in Iran must seem paltry and unimportant to Obama. The big picture is the power of negotiation. In the meantime, Obama—who once would have been considered, as President of the United States, the “leader of the free world”—doesn’t see himself that way. He sees his role as subtly guiding, through his own measured and nuanced response, this country to a new position as facilitator rather than leader, as the great mediator rather than the great liberator.

I used the word “Manichaean” earlier in this essay. It’s of interest to note that Manichaeism originated in Persia. That country is now known as Iran, and you can bet that, although the mullahs are Shiite Moslems, they have an approach to the world that is profoundly Manichaean in the more general sense, and that whoever heads the US it is the embodiment of evil to them (the “big Satan”). They are most likely to see Obama’s evenhanded refusal to say much of anything to condemn them as evidence of the weakness of the current leader of the Western axis of evil, rather than of the fact that he isn’t evil.

Did I say “leader?” Yes, I did; the world still views the POTUS in this way, whether the current occupant of the office acknowledges it or not. And it’s not a good thing to be considered a weak leader or a weak horse by enemies; Bin Laden was certainly correct on that score.

I mentioned the Persian origins of Manichaeism. Persia was also the birthplace of chess, that game of complex strategic moves and planning. The mullahs are no doubt familiar with that discipline as well, and although in his autobiography Obama claimed to be a chess player, I think he’s a rank amateur compared to them.

That doesn’t mean that I (or anyone else, for that matter) have a clue what will ultimately happen in Iran. With or without Obama’s support, the opposition will either gather enough strength to actually put a dent in the mullahs’ power or it will be crushed. Michael Ledeen, somewhat of an expert on Iran, seems think it at least possible that the regime is currently in trouble. He bases this partly on the fact that there is evidence of defection in both the Revolutionary Guards and the clergy itself. As a commenter on the Ledeen article writes (see #43, “Uzi”):

Two things to look for in a revolution are the moment when the leader or leaders of the ancien regime suffer a sudden loss of nerve, often due to the sudden realization that their position is less secure than they had peviously thought. (Think of James II when Marlborough crossed the field to join the forces of William and Mary or of Nicolas Ceausescu when he suddenly realized that the hundreds of thousands of rent a crowd people he had gathered up for a pro- government demo in front of his palace were chanting anti-government slogans, or of Ferdinand Marcos when part of the leadership of the Phillipenes army came out in support of Corizon Acquino). At moments like that, the old regime leadership start suffering vicarious flashbacks of previously overthrown leaders: Charles I on the scaffold, Moussolini hanging upside-down from a lamp-post, etc. and start looking for the nearest exit. When that happens the game is over and the revolution quickly replaces the disintegtrating ancien regime.

The second possibly determinative development would be for key members of the current leadership to somehow fall into the hands of the revolutionaries (as happened with Louis XVI , Tzar Nicholas, Moussolini, and Ceausescu). This almost always changes the dynamic of the revolution, generally by reason of execution of the outgoing leadership. Obviously Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will be taking precautions, but if they can’t trust their own Revolutionary Guards Corps officers, anything could happen.

Why did the mullahs bother to steal the election?

The New Neo Posted on by

The consensus is that there’s no way the Iranian election figures are correct, and that things were rigged to allow Ahmadinejad to win. And for a long time it’s also been clear that the mullahs—Khameni in particular—are the ones who are really in charge, anyway.

So why did they bother? Why not just rubber stamp whoever might happen to win, if either candidate would essentially have been under Khameni’s thumb? Why would Khameni want to pull the mask from his own face, and reveal the truth of how corrupt and tyrannical the system is?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know the question. I’m not completely convinced by Time, either, when it suggests theories such as the following:

Some analysts believe Khamenei is motivated by a desire to prevent Iran from normalizing its relationship with the West, fearing that removing the external “threat” against which it was constructed will fatally undermine the Iranian political system. Ahmadinejad’s critics charged during the campaign that his provocative antics had undermined Iran’s standing in the world, but he certainly functions to restrain any movement toward rapprochement, keeping in place the fear of the “Great Satan” that has been an organizing principle of Iran’s authoritarian clerical regime.

Not that Iran won’t seek agreements with U.S. on areas of conflict that could lead to confrontation. Khamenei may believe that his regime’s best hope of survival is keeping his country on a war-footing against an external enemy, but an actual war would be disastrous for the regime.

Perhaps. But if the tenure of Ahmadinejad predecessor Khatami is any guide, a “reformist” President would be nice window-dressing for Iran, but wouldn’t necessarily give him any sort of real power to change things in a fundamental way—or especially to stop Iran’s nuclear program. So why risk inflaming the huge number of people who voted for Mousavi by so flagrantly and openly cooking the books for Ahmadinejad?

As I said, I don’t know. But I don’t think Obama helped the situation any by playing his own hand even before he became president, leaving himself no wriggle room with Iran. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad must feel they have Obama just where they want him, committed already to negotiating directly with them. Is this at least part of the reason why they felt so emboldened—because they knew they would stand to lose none of the ground and none of the validation they’d already gained from the Obama administration?

Bahukutumbi Raman agrees:

The U.S. has had the Israeli card against Iran. Tehran was always nervous about the possibility of the U.S. encouraging Israel to put Iran in its place if the worst comes to the worst. Obama has thrown away that card much to the relief of Iran.

If Iran spurns Obama’s overtures to it and follows on its nuclear and anti-Israel path, Obama has not kept for himself a fall-back option. In his anxiety to project a “good guy” image of himself right across the Islamic world, including Iran, Obama has unwittingly encouraged hard-line elements such as Ahmadinejad, who have no genuine love for the U.S. and who will lose no opportunity to make the interests of the Islamic world prevail over those of the international community. The U.S. may have to pay a heavy price for Obama’s policy U-turns in the Arab world and towards Iran.

[ADDENDUM: John Bolton weighs in. And I find it darkly humorous that so many people offering mindless ad hominem attacks on Bolton in the comments section there call him the nastiest name they can think of: neocon! Funny way to refer to a guy who was head of his school’s Students for Goldwater group back in high school. But the word “neocon” has become a simple pejorative devoid of all meaning save “evil warmongering relic of the Bush years”—except, of course, for when it’s revised to be a code word for “evil Jewish warmongering relic of the Bush years.”]