New Republic(!): Iran is not our friend
Hassan Rouhani is an improvement over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since he is not a lunatic. He does not deny that the Holocaust happened, which for the Islamic Republic counts as a breakthrough in enlightenment. But it is important to remember, during this explosion of good feelings, that Iran is still the Islamic Republic, a theocratic tyranny ruled by a single man, a haughty cleric who subsumes the state beneath religion and his interpretation of it, and maintains his power by means of a fascistic military organization that brutalizes the population and plunders the economy—liberticide and prey, as a poet once wrote about another dictator. This same mullah-king supports the murderer in Damascus and the murderers in Lebanon and Gaza, and remorselessly pursues a foreign policy animated by anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and intra-Muslim hatred. We may have extended our hand, but the Supreme Leader—the title itself is repugnant to decent modern ears—has not unclenched his fist. The smiles of his president and his foreign minister must not blind us to the scowl that is the true face of this cruel and criminal regime.
This does not mean that we must not negotiate with it. I appreciate the need for a diplomatic exploration of the Iranian nuclear challenge, though I prefer a deal that represents a strategic decision by Iran to renounce nuclear weaponry, not a strategic decision by Iran to find a cunning way out of the sanctions, and I resent the suggestion by the White House that anybody who is skeptical of its interim agreement is for war. Strenuous negotiations demand strenuous sanctions: the stronger our diplomatic position, the greater the likelihood that we will not resort to force. The thrill of diplomacy must not be allowed to obscure or to soften its purpose. Nor should it shrink our understanding of America’s role in the world. The abandonment of human rights as a primary and ardently pursued goal of American foreign policy—the Obama administration has returned American statecraft to its pre-Bosnia, pre-Rwanda days: we will have to be educated again by history, and by France—has been justified, in the case of Iran, by the urgency of the nuclear question. American support of democratization in Iran, it is said, would jeopardize the American effort to strike a deal on nuclearization. And so we must choose between a nuclear-free Iran and a tyranny-free Iran. But it is a false choice, designed to ratify the administration’s prior lack of appetite (and lack of nerve) for the promotion of freedom. We discovered the phoniness of the choice in our experience with the Soviet Union. You may still recall the twentieth century. Soviet missiles threatened the United States then infinitely more than Iranian centrifuges threaten us now, but arms control was not permitted to eclipse human rights in our policy toward the nuclear dictatorship. And even though we were prepared to offend, with our “moralism,” the interlocutors with the ICBMs, we did not fail—not at arms control nor, eventually, at human rights; and we learned that human rights, too, had vast strategic implications. A people is always more important than a government.Where were all these Obama critics last November?
Labels: Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Barack Hussein Obama, Hassan Rohani, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, P 5+1
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:22 AM
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