Monthly Archives: June 2009

Iran Revolt Vindicates Neoconservative Ideals — and the Iraq War

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iran-green-peace

(Welcome, GayPatriot readers)

Since he turned against the Iraq War that he once championed, Andrew Sullivan has taken to using the term “neocon” as a curse word.  “The neocon hope that Ahmadinejad keeps himself in power – barely disguised any more – seems to me premature,” Sullivan said a few days ago — while linking to a blog post that is more accurately summarized by its own headline: “The Bright Side of Ahmadinejad’s ‘Win'”.

So when I saw Sullivan’s headline this morning — “The Good Neocons” — I was prepared for sarcasm.  But he was praising the work of two writers, Michael J. Totten (who years ago rejected the neocon label) and Daniel Finkelstein, whose London Times article Sullivan then quoted at length.  The whole thing is worth reading, but it was a different passage that jumped out at me:

Now, there is something you need to know. I am a neocon. Given all that has happened over the past ten years, I am sure my PR consultant would advise me to drop this label. But I don’t employ a PR consultant. [KP note: please contact me if you’d like to discuss your PR needs.] So, stubbornly, I cling on to the designation. It declares my belief in two things – that in every country in the world, wherever it may be and whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy (not necessarily through the barrel of a gun) is the only real way to bring peace to the world. I believe that what we are seeing on the streets of Iran now is a vindication of these neoconservative ideas.

Hear hear, and I’ll take it a step further:  It is a vindication of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.

I sniped at Sullivan in my first Iran post for saying that Obama inspired the Iranian revolt by sweeping away the Bush years.   To me it seems self-evident that exactly the opposite is true.  If the Bush Administration had not planted democracies (albeit still troubled democracies) in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s inconceivable to me that so many Iranians would risk their lives and their freedom for an idealistic vision that did not yet exist in their neighborhood.  Just as it was inconceivable that Libya would renounce its nuclear ambitions in the absence of a credible threat.

In the long run, the only hope for victory over Islamic fascism is a Reformation within Islam.  As Jews and Christians have evolved beyond the most repugnant parts of their own scriptures, so too can Islam.   If an Islamic Reformation occurs, the democracies that President Bush helped install in the heart of the ancient Caliphate will play an important role.

And yes, I’m a neocon too.

(Photo: Mousavi1388)

Should Obama Take Sides in Iran?

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Photo: Posterous.com

Photo: IranElection.Posterous.com

The question in the headline virtually answers itself. One side is a repressive, terror-sponsoring regime that has waged war against America, both directly and by proxy, since 1979.  The other side consists of hundreds of thousands of citizens whose democratic aspirations have been thwarted in a transparently stolen election, and whose peaceful assemblies have been attacked with governmental batons and guns. Decisions, decisions.

Set aside the fact that it was a sham election among clerically pre-approved candidates for a largely figurehead Presidency. Set aside the lack of resemblance between opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Thomas Jefferson. Mousavi might or might not have provided real change as President — but the Iranian people certainly thought they were voting for change.

Obama has said “it is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling — the US president, meddling in Iranian elections.”  You know, that whole Mosaddeq thing in ’53.  There’s a surface logic to that.

However.

The Iranian regime has been a self-declared enemy of America for three decades. There now appears to be considerable popular Iranian sentiment for regime change.  There might once have been a tactical justification for Obama’s efforts to make nice with the regime… but the facts on the ground have changed.

No, I’m not saying we should go to war in Iran.  I’m saying that the leader of the world’s beacon of democracy should be able to muster a few words in support of the Iranian people and their hopes for a democratic future.

Contrast Obama’s expression of “deep concerns” with the forthright declarations of Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of… um… France:

“The extent of the fraud is proportional to the violent reaction,” said the French leader.

“It is a tragedy, but it is not negative to have a real opinion movement that tries to break its chains,” Sarkozy said.

“If Ahmadinejad has really made progress since the last election and if he really represents two thirds of the electorate… why has this violence erupted?”

I continue to hope that Obama will evolve beyond his campaign rhetoric regarding Iran, as he already has evolved so decisively regarding Iraq.  But first he’s going to need to get past his sense of shame at a CIA operation that occurred before he was born.

Iran Looms Large in Bush’s Third Term

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Risking police violence in Tehran (Photo: mousavi1388)

I’ve said that regarding foreign affairs, Obama has been serving Bush’s third term.  It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek perhaps, but there’s plenty of substance behind the label.  So I find myself wondering how the Obama Administration’s response to the turmoil in Iran will compare with what Bush might have done in a third term.

Michael J. Totten calls out Obama:

Obama Administration officials still hope they can talk Khamenei out of developing nuclear weapons and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. This is delusion on stilts. Khamenei can’t even compromise with his own regime or his hand-picked presidential candidates. He placed them under house arrest, along with a Grand Ayatollah, and deployed thousands of violent enforcers into the streets. Not only does he confront the world, he is at war with his very own country. …

Military action against Iran should be the very last option and used only if everything short of it fails. Dialogue, though, is only the first option, one that has been failing for three decades. And there is a vast range of options between war and discussion.

I think Totten is right about the nature of the Khamenei regime, but I have two issues with his analysis.  I love the stilts metaphor, but I’m willing to give Obama some benefit of the doubt about whether he will change course in the face of changing reality.  He certainly changed course sharply in Iraq, which gives me hope that he’ll consider doing so in Iran.

And I by no means am advocating a hasty war in Iran, but I have an immediate strong reaction every time I hear words to the effect that war should be a last resort, only if all else fails.  There are always other options besides war.  There may be no good options, but passivity, appeasement and surrender, for example, are always options.  “Last resort” therefore becomes a euphemism for “never.”  Totten is on stronger ground when he says “there is a vast range of options between war and discussion,” and I hope to see Obama pursue some of those options for putting pressure on Iran.

The administration hasn’t taken a strong stand yet on the Iranian elections, although Vice President Biden has questioned the legitimacy of the results.  As Gordon Robison writes:

The Obama administration appears concerned mainly with not painting itself into any rhetorical corners. In a situation where events are fluid, and it is unclear even who all of the key players are, that seems, at least for now, like a good policy.

Bill Kristol issues a clarion call to Republicans who might be tempted to engage in Obama bashing:

Presuming ahead of time that Obama will fail to exercise leadership, and cataloguing this episode pre-emptively as another in a list of Obama failures, would be a mistake. The U.S. has a huge stake in the possible transformation, or at least reformation, of the Iranian regime. If there’s some chance of that happening, and some chance of U.S. policy contributing to that outcome, we should hope Obama does the right thing, and urge and pressure him to do so–because then the United States will be doing the right thing, and the United States, and the world, will benefit.

It’s still far too early to grade Obama’s performance on Iran.  I’m cautiously hopeful.  Hat tip for the Kristol and Robison quotes to Andrew Sullivan, who continues to be all over the developments in Iran.

Here’s Hoping Iran is the Next Domino for Democracy

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Pity the mullahs who cling to power in Iran.  With budding (albeit flawed) democracies to the east and west, with tens of thousands of angry people protesting the tainted election of a figurehead, with web-savvy dissidents informing the world via Twitter, YouTube and Flickr — what’s a frightened theocrat to do?

tehran-womanHere’s my favorite image thus far — evoking the lone man facing down the Tiananmen tanks, a woman shakes her fist and waves the green flag of revolution at the advancing riot troops.  You go, sister — next thing you know, she’ll be uncovering her head.

Andrew Sullivan is proclaiming that a coup has taken place, and he’s furnishing continuous updates.  Interestingly, the other day it looked like Sullivan was giving props to the man who set the first dominos in motion:

How is what is happening in Iran not exactly what the Bush administration wanted to happen in Arab regimes? New technology, massive over-reach by the Ahmadinejad forces, emerging women’s voices: these have already precipitated a fracturing of the regime.

Set aside the quibble that Iran is Persian rather than Arab — this is indeed exactly the kind of development that President Bush sought to precipitate with the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan.  And it’s great that Sullivan was finally able to set aside his hatred of all things GWB to recognize that.

Or… did he?  Sullivan continues:

And what achieved this? In a strange way, the messianic radicalism of Bush sustained the messianic radicalism of Ahmadinejad. Obama’s election, as many of us hoped, broke that cycle and allowed for Iran’s opposition to re-emerge without looking like a pawn of the US.

The mind reels.  Still, Sullivan has been one of the best sources for fresh updates on Iran.  Others are Michael J. Totten, NYT’s The Lede blog  and, for photographs, TehranLive.org.

Rush Limbaugh Has a Voice, But Doesn’t Speak for Me

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Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, a thoughtful and elegant writer, today takes on the notion — voiced mainly by wishful, self-deluding Democrats — that Rush Limbaugh is the voice of the Republican party.

The Democrats have a leader. He’s the president. When a party has a president, he’s the leader.

Parties out of power, almost by definition, are in search of one. When parties do not hold the White House and Congress they are, of necessity, retooling and reshaping themselves. Leaders of various party factions, being humans in politics and therefore bearing within themselves unsleeping little engines of ambition (that’s what Billy Herndon said lay inside his friend, unassuming prairie lawyer Abe Lincoln) will jostle each other for place.

Ultimately a leader will emerge for the Republican party, and it won’t be Rush Limbaugh or any other flame-thrower.  The flame-throwers are not going away, but their role is to provide a challenge to the party, not leadership.

Both conservative media and liberal media are alike in that they have to keep the ratings up, or the numbers up, or the hits. If they lose audience, they can lose everything from clout to ad revenue. Because they have to keep the numbers up, they have to keep it hot, which actually has some affect on the national conversation. The mainstream media is only too happy to headline it when a radio talker says Sonia Sotomayer is a dope. The radio talker may be doing it to play to his base, but the mainstream media does it to show that Republicans are mean, thick and angry.

Read the whole thing.

AOL to Acquire Maplewood. Sort Of.

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patch(Welcome, New York Times readers.)

Comes today the news that AOL is acquiring Patch.com, the owner of Maplewood Patch, a stalwart member of the Maplewood BlogolopolisTM. (I’ll have you know I taught myself how to hand-code that superscript in HTML.)  Maplewood Patch, by way of disclosure, has seen fit to publish some articles I have written, and they even slipped me a few bucks in exchange.

Because of my previous coverage of Patch on this blog, I got a personal email (it started, “Hi Kirk”) from a media relations guy at AOL, along with a copy of the release.  My immediate thought was, in the spirit of my previous Maplewood coverage, how can I have fun with this news?

I first considered conspiracy rumors.  I knew that Tim Armstrong, a senior Google executive, was a major investor in Patch.  In March, he left Google to become CEO of AOL.  So, let’s review:

  1. Patch gets launched with Google exec’s money
  2. Google exec bolts for AOL in March
  3. AOL announces acquisition of Patch in June

I quickly realized that there probably was some boring explanation for this suspicious sequence of events — but I would not be deterred that easily.

Maybe… um… maybe this is some kind of “reverse Trojan horse” scheme?  I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds cool.  Is Google planning to acquire AOL?  Or is AOL going to acquire Google?  I know! Patch is going to acquire AOL and Google!  I could make fun of all three organizations by speculating about which outcome is least likely.

My next thought was, I could call the PR guy and mess with his head.  As a long-time PR guy myself, I know what kind of pressure he would be under on an announcement day. I’d start out with some innocuous questions to gain his trust, then I’d go all weird on him.

I could read him the CEO quotation from the press release (“Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today…”), then ask, “Does Tim Armstrong really talk like that?” And then, “Does Mr. Armstrong use (AOL’s) MapQuest now, or does he still secretly use Google Maps?”  With a new CEO in the building and a story that involves him personally, the PR guy would just love dealing with flaky questions about the boss.

Hm… Gratuitous cruelty to a guy doing a high-pressure job — that’s not usually how I roll.   Well, let’s just see what the boring explanation is.

I introduced myself over the phone to Chris Savarese of AOL Corporate Communications, and he said “You’re with All That Is Necessary, right?” I’m apparently on his media list — how cool is that?  How could I even think about tormenting him?

It turns out Armstrong recused himself from the decision to buy Patch. OK, that makes sense.  Kara Swisher, who’s an actual journalist, was all over the story first thing this morning.

I had one last arrow in my quiver.  “Is there some sort of juicy Maplewood angle to this?” I asked Savarese.  Uh, not really.

I thanked him and hung up, thinking, how the heck am I going to make a blog post out of this?

A Religion of Peace? Only With Careful Editing

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I’m a fan of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — an organization I was predisposed to love as soon as I heard their name. Their weekly FDD Update newsletter provides an extremely comprehensive review of  each week’s developments in the defining struggle of our age — the war against Islamic fascism.

fdd-logoThere’s a large overlap in commentators between FDD and National Review Online, my favorite website, so I often have already seen some of the items that FDD President Clifford May highlights in the newsletter.  But when this week’s edition arrived today, I saw that I had missed a forceful critique of Obama’s Cairo speech by former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.  Some of McCarthy’s NRO colleagues had offered muted praise for the speech, as did I, but McCarthy was having none of it, and made some strong points.  For example:

The president, moreover, insisted on pulling from the Muslim apologists’ playbook the expurgation of Islamic scripture in order to render it congenial to Western sensibilities. We were treated to the hidebound claim that terrorist violence is anti-Islamic because what Obama takes pains to call “the Holy Koran” teaches that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” This conveniently decoupled Sura 5:32 from the next verse (5:33), which, though unmentioned by Obama, is well known by Muslims to read: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter.”

There are, of course, offensive passages in the Bible as well.  But while Christians and Jews have largely evolved beyond the barbarities of their early scriptures, too many Muslims show little sign of doing so.  It would not have been appropriate for Obama to launch a verbal crusade in a speech on Arab soil, but he also should not enable pathology by pretending it does not exist.  As McCarthy says:

[T]here is an enormous amount of reform to be done — work that can only be done by Muslims. We cannot rouse them to the task by telling them we think Islam, as it currently exists, is promoting peace.

Wanna Buy GM Stock? Better Hurry, the Price is Rising!

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As you may have heard, General Motors, once the world’s largest company by market capitalization,  is bankrupt. You and I, along with 300 million of our closest friends, are going to end up owning about 70% of a much-smaller General Motors.  Congratulations.

In this morning’s Washington Post, George Will has a good column worrying about all the different ways the government bailout could go badly, now that GM will be benefiting from the same ownership that has made Amtrak such a paragon of efficiency for nearly four decades.  The most obvious problem is that GM needs to close hundreds of dealerships — every one of which is in somebody’s Congressional district.

At the end of the column he mocks the idea that General Motors is “too big to fail”:

Big? GM’s market capitalization, $375.8 million on Wednesday, is about the size of California Pizza Kitchen’s ($340 million) — is it too big to fail? — and one-eleventh that of Harley-Davidson ($4.3 billion). Fail? If GM has not already failed, New Coke was a success.

California Pizza Kitchen is a nice parallel — they make mango tandoori chicken pizzas, GM makes the Chevy Cobalt.  But I was more interested in the fact he was quoting Wednesday’s market cap in Sunday’s paper.

I went looking for fresher stock prices, and found that GM had been delisted by the New York Stock Exchange, but was still trading over the counter, in the so-called “pink sheets.”  And looky there, the stock price was up almost 16% on Friday alone! More than 100 million shares traded hands Friday, with the day’s last trade at 86.5 cents, driving the market cap up to $528 million.

Now, investing can be a risky business, but some things are risk-free.  Here’s one: there is no risk that GM stock will not go to zero.  And yet on Friday, people collectively spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing GM stock at a price above zero.  This kind of trading happens in most major bankruptcies, and I’ve never understood it.  If you still have the 100 shares of GM that your grandparents gave you as a kid, I could see wanting to get whatever you can at this point.  But why the heck would anyone take the other side of that trade?  The rules of bankruptcy are well defined, and stockholders get nothing unless bondholders, creditors, employees and everyone else with a stake has been paid first.

Except… about those “well-defined” bankruptcy rules…

No, “Work-at-Home” Pimps, I Won’t Write Blog Posts for $5

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This post is dedicated to my friend (and competitor, I suppose, but whatever) Lori Widmer at Words on the Page, who is the force of nature behind Writers Worth Day.  The video features science fiction novelist and screenwriter Harlan Ellison ranting about being asked to contribute his work for free. (Warning: includes undeleted expletives.)

For those of you who won’t watch the 3:24 video (you know who you are), here’s an excerpt:  “They always want the writer to work for nothing.  And the problem is, there’s so [expletive] many writers who have no idea that they’re supposed to be paid — every time they do something, they do it for nothing!”

Hat tip: Max Boot.