Leaving the Reagan criticism aside, though, I think Koppel's overall point is largely correct. Thirty years after the hostages came home, we still haven't figured out how to deal with Iran.One core issue is, I believe, that Iran was playing against us, and Carter was playing against the Republican Party.
Long-time Winds of Change readers will remember colleague/contributor Hossein Derakshan, the father of the Iranian blogosphere, who is noted in the column to your right.
It occurs to me that while I was away, you may not have been updated about this:
"Mr. Derakhshan, 35, is widely known by his online name "Hoder." He was born in Iran, but moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen in early adulthood. He is a staunch advocate of free expression in Iran, and became known as the "blogfather" of Iran's on-line community for training pro-democracy advocates to blog and podcast in the late nineties. Later, he apologized for his dissenting views, and emerged as an unlikely supporter of the regime, at one point comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a modern-day Che Guevara.
So when the Iranian government invited him to travel to Iran in 2008, he accepted, thinking he would help his country reach out to the world, according to friends and family. Upon his arrival, however, another branch of the government arrested him.
On Tuesday, he was convicted of insulting Islamic thought and religious figures, managing obscene websites and co-operating with "enemy states" because he visited Israel five years ago...."
He has been sentenced to 19.5 years in prison.
Hoder's attempt to find a locus of collaboration with the Islamic regime dilutes his status as a prisoner of conscience, but does not erase it. Or touch the legacy he leaves. He remains in my thoughts - and I hope, in yours.
Jonathan Spyer is not your typical Israeli journalist and political analyst. He has a PhD in International Relations, he fought in Lebanon during the summer war of 2006, then went back to Lebanon as a civilian on a second passport.
I can't say I felt particularly brave venturing into Hezbollah's territory along the Lebanese-Israeli border, but it takes guts for Israelis to go there. If Hezbollah caught him and figured out who he was, he would have been in serious trouble.
No one he met in Lebanon knew where he was from. Everyone thought he was British. And no one in Israel but his friends and colleagues knew he went back to Lebanon on his own. He decided, though, that he may as well "out" himself on my blog. His secret journey will soon be revealed anyway when his book comes out in November called The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict
We met in Jerusalem this month and discussed his two trips to Lebanon--with and without a passport--and the perfect Iranian storm brewing on the horizon.
MJT: So why did you go back to Lebanon?
Jonathan Spyer: Lebanon is a fascinating place, and I wanted to visit for all sorts of reasons. I especially wanted to get back to where we were during the war. There is a green valley, which I imagine you know very well, between the towns of Khiam and Marjayoun.
MJT: Yes, I know where you're talking about.
Jonathan Spyer: We were down there in that valley during the war, and our tanks got shot up. I wanted to get back there and look at it from Khiam. I hired some guides in Beirut and asked them to take me. We took the coast road down, then drove all the way across southern Lebanon to the eastern sector. And I stood in Khiam and looked down into that valley.
We got stuck there because of a cock-up. The infantry in our division were supposed to capture Khiam. There were 300 Hezbollah men there. We were operating at night. After a series of screw-ups, our column of tanks ended up heading through that valley toward Israel with 300 Hezbollah men looking down on us in the morning. So you can imagine what happened.
And to make it even more ludicrous, we weren't even moving at the right speed. The steering mechanism on one of our tanks was broken, so we had to drag it with reinforced cables. We were going about five kilometers an hour. We were hardly moving at all. And we got blown to bits by Hezbollah's missiles. Our armor is pretty good, though, so only one of our guys was killed.
An Associated Press photographer was also in Khiam at the same time, so the AP has a photograph of our tanks in flames. [Laughs.] I'm laughing because I found that photograph on a pro-Hezbollah Web site, and this tough revolutionary guy was on there boasting and saying "the people in those tanks died horrible deaths!"
I wrote back and said, "Listen. With the exception of one person who was killed, the people in those tanks all got out, hid in the fields for over an hour, and got back across the Israeli border. All of them were operational again within 48 hours."
Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens visited my hometown of Portland, Oregon last week, and I interviewed him at Jake's Grill downtown over glasses of Johnny Walker Black Label. My old friend and sometimes traveling companion Sean LaFreniere joined us and contributed a few questions of his own. You can read Part I here.
MJT: The big story in 2010 will be Iran. We have this revolution there--I'm not afraid to call it that.
Hitchens: You're right, I think it is one.
MJT: We have Iran's terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon. And we have the regime's nuclear weapons program.
Hitchens: Also, in each case, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard--the Pasdaran--is the controlling force.
MJT: Hezbollah is the Mediterranean branch of the Revolutionary Guards.
Hitchens: We have the same bunch overseas where they're not wanted, in Lebanon and even among the Palestinians, conducting assassination missions abroad, shooting down young Iranians in the streets of a major city, and controlling an illegal thermonuclear weapons program. We do have a target. All this has been accumulated under one heading.
MJT: Yes.
Hitchens: I thought that was worth pointing out. It's not "the regime" or "the theocracy." It's now very clear that the Revolutionary Guards have committed a coup in all but name--well, I name it, but it hasn't yet been named generally. They didn't rig an election. They didn't even hold one.
MJT: They never counted the votes. There's no "recount" to be done.
Hitchens: The seizure of power by a paramilitary gang that just so happens to be the guardian and the guarantor and the incubator of the internationally illegal weapons program. If that doesn't concentrate one's mind, I don't know what will.
MJT: If the Obama Administration calls you up and says, "Christopher, we need you to come in here, we need your advice." What would you tell them?
Hitchens: I would say, as I did with Saddam Hussein--albeit belatedly, I tried to avoid this conclusion--that any fight you're going to have eventually, have now. Don't wait until they're more equally matched. It doesn't make any sense at all.
The existence of theocratic regimes that have illegally acquired weapons of mass destruction, that are war with their own people, that are exporting their violence to neighboring countries, sending death squads as far away as Argentina to kill other people as well as dissident members of their own nationality--the existence of such regimes is incompatible with us. If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them.
We're saying, "Let's give them time to get ready. Then we'll be more justified in hitting them." That's honestly what they're saying. When we have total proof, when we can see them coming for us, we'll feel okay about resisting.
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com
In the October 12 issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria makes a case for containing rather than confronting Iran, partly because he expects "a massive outpouring of support for the Iranian regime" if its nuclear-weapons facilities are attacked by the U.S. or Israel. "This happens routinely when a country is attacked by foreign forces, no matter how unpopular the government," he writes.
As a precedent, he cites how Russians rallied to Stalin when Germany invaded in 1941. But of course Russians rallied to Stalin. No viable political opposition existed as it does today in Iran, and besides: they were attacked by the Nazis. The Germans weren't liberators. Russia was not going to be treated better by foreign totalitarians than by its own. Even the U.S. and Britain backed Stalinist Russia under those circumstances.
The people of Afghanistan, on the other hand, were euphoric when NATO demolished the Taliban regime in 2001. The Taliban has since reconstituted itself as a terrorist and insurgent militia, but its approval rating among Afghan civilians is by some reports as miserable as 6 percent. Support for the U.S. and NATO has slipped recently, but it's still telling that, according to an ABC News poll of public opinion, 58 percent still say the Taliban is the greatest threat to security, while only 8 percent say the same of the United States.
Very few Iraqis outside the relatively small Sunni community threw their support behind Saddam Hussein when President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction facilities in 1998 or when President George W. Bush finished off his Baath party regime once and for all in 2003. Meanwhile, the various terrorist and insurgent militias that later rose up were almost exclusively sectarian and Islamist, not Baathist.
Even the Shia of south Lebanon -- today's Hezbollah supporters -- initially hailed the Israelis as liberators in 1982 when they invaded to oust Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization from its state-within-a-state along the border and in West Beirut. Only later, when the Israelis did not leave as expected, did the prototype of Hezbollah begin to take shape.
Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.
Al Giordano's analysis of goings-on in Iran is worth reading. For a different view, there's George Friedman of STRATFOR:
"Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime's orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.
Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces - who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators - and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China...."
Friedman makes some good points, while others strike me as less well grounded. Read him and decide what you think.
As things head for a lull - and possibly an outright defeat - in Iran, WSJ online has a good piece about a gentleman named Mohsen Kadivar:
"Mr. Kadivar's chief claim to fame rests on a three-part work of political philosophy titled "The Theories of the State in Shiite Jurisprudence." At heart, it is a devastating theological critique of the Ayatollah Khomeini's notion of "the rule of the jurist" (Velayat e Faqih), which serves as the rationale for the near-dictatorial powers enjoyed by the Supreme Leader."
That kind of argument on the regime's own terms is useful and valuable. Ultimately, the defeat of Khomeinism is going to require an ideological shattering, as well as a physical shattering. Religious critique from within is a vital part of that, though certainly not exclusive. The decision that ordinary Iranians have taken are also part of it - and on Jack Wheeler's site, he carries a piece by an Iranian philosophy professor in Tehran:
...We agreed that our discussion would be off the record, so I'm not going to quote anybody by name. But what I can give you is my own roadmap or x-ray of what the situation in Iran is today, informed by this consultation with: 1. a prominent Iranian human rights defender, 2. an award-winning filmmaker who has spent months at a time on end reporting inside the regions of Iran, 3. a veteran strategist from the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa that successfully ended apartheid, 4. a Polish student of social movements, 5. a Mexican journalist and civil resistance trainer, and 6 and 7. two individuals much like me: authors with intensive experience and study of civil resistance movements and community organizing.
[TEHRAN BUREAU] The rigged presidential election in Iran - a coup d'etat, according to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a spokesman for the main reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi and other analysts - has prompted protests both inside and outside Iran. There is, however, little understanding about the ideology and motivation behind the operation.Along with Twitterfall (looking at #iranelections, #g88, #iran9), Tehran Bureau is a site that I've been reading compulsively for the last three days...
