A couple of days back, Phillip rightly chastised me for my giddy optimism regarding the election of Hassan Rouhani to be the new president of Iran. Hey, I was just eager for some good news.
Now, I’ve been far more sharply checked from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Opposite from Phillip, I mean.
Bret Stephens of the WSJ has this to say about Americans hailing Rouhani/Rowhani/Rohani (and seriously, haven’t we learned not to trust these foreign chaps who can’t decide how to spell their names?) as a breath of fresh air: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Stephens paints him as quite the baddie. Excerpt:
All this for a man who, as my colleague Sohrab Ahmari noted in these pages Monday, called on the regime’s basij militia to suppress the student protests of July 1999 “mercilessly and monumentally.” More than a dozen students were killed in those protests, more than 1,000 were arrested, hundreds were tortured, and 70 simply “disappeared.” In 2004 Mr. Rohani defended Iran’s human-rights record, insisting there was “not one person in prison in Iran except when there is a judgment by a judge following a trial.”
Mr. Rohani is also the man who chaired Iran’s National Security Council between 1989 and 2005, meaning he was at the top table when Iran masterminded the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people, and of the Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 U.S. airmen. He would also have been intimately familiar with the secret construction of Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities in Arak, Natanz and Isfahan, which weren’t publicly exposed until 2002….
Stephens warns that the mullahs have pulled this “good cop” routine on us before, suggesting that this time our willingness to give the new guy room to operate will give them more room than they need to finish building the Bomb.
This scenario also fits the available facts. If that’s what the mullahs were pulling, this is just the way they’d do it.
The thing that hasn’t added up, for the “good news” scenario, is that the powers behind the presidency have so meekly gone along with the results of this election.
Remember, when we had a peaceful turnover of power after the 1800 election, it was a revolution in human affairs. And it’s still not as common as it should be, outside of the liberal West.
The liberal West which is a perfect patsy for the “We’re trying to change things; just give us some concessions so we can have some room to maneuver in our internal politics” ploy. It it’s a ploy. The terrible thing is, if Rouhani is a serious reformer who really wants a better relationship with the rest of the world, then he’d be asking for the same thing.
A touchy situation…
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By the way, the thing about foreigners who can’t figure out how to spell their names is a joke. I feel I have to say that since Kathryn seems to have taken me seriously when I made the same joke on a previous thread.
It’s editor humor. It’s funny to me.
I didn’t take you seriously. I called you on a tasteless exercise in “humor.”
Well, I think it’s a funny situation. I mean really — how hard should it be to come up with a standard way of spelling the name of someone so much in the news?
One thing’s for sure — no one could look at all those spellings and suspect that the media conspire together on anything.
Most media observe whatever the AP style is on a spelling. But there are certain outlets whose independence in spelling is a measure of their arrogance. THEIR way is the right way, by damn, and everyone else can go to the devil. I suspect them of having special meetings to decide on spellings that are entirely unlike anyone else’s…
OK, this is interesting…
The AP has decided, based on I know not what, to spell it “Rowhani.”
And yet his own English-language Twitter account spells it “Rouhani.”
I’m going to go with the latter. If that’s how HE spells it, what business do we have spelling it some other way?
On the other hand, I’m perfectly serious when I ask why “Peking” became “Beijing.” I don’t think I ever got a satisfactory explanation of that.
I mean, it was supposed to be a phonetic transliteration before, right? Or is that wrong? And that’s what it is supposed to be now, right? So… who screwed up the phonetics the first time? Because those are nothing alike.
I don’t find this explanation or this one or this one satisfactory. Anyone have a better one for this dramatic difference?
I mean, if it’s right now, it was a monumental screwup before.
I had thought that maybe, on account of the revolution, one dialect of Chinese had triumphed over another, and that accounted for the change. But I haven’t found that explanation anywhere, and even if that were the case, then the two dialects were as different as Spanish and Portuguese….
Sorry about the digression. I had really wanted to talk about Rouhani.
My guess is that Iran wanted to put a better face on their policies than the last guy. I doubt there will be much daylight between Rouhani and the regime. It’s actually a smart play if you’re Iran. He’s not going to have the real power. The mullahs had the power before, and they still do.
Remember student council elections in high school? The student candidates run on whatever kind of platforms they want (vending machines in the cafeteria, new lockers, etc.) and get elected by the students, but the Student Body President can’t do anything in reality unless the School Principal allows it in fact.
That’s Iran.
I’ve sort of wondered for years how Ahmadinejad was a good idea for the mullahs.
If you want to have the space to develop your nuclear program — or back Hezbollah, or save Assad, or whatever mischief you’re up to — then you sort of want a significant portion of the world to believe that your nuclear program, or whatever, is not a threat.
But when your front man is a guy known for crazy talk about Israel ceasing to exist, etc., that can’t help your cause.
It appears that I’m thinking along the same lines as Ha’aretz:
Maybe, once Ahmadinejad is in prison, Israel could send him a cake with a file in it.
It’s worth remembering that although Ahmedinijad’s re-election in 2009 was almost certainly a fraud, and his original election in 2005 at least of somewhat questionable validity, he did (at least initially) enjoy broad popular support from certain segments of Iranian society. He was seen as a “common man,” and a lot of his demagogic comments about Israel were primarily meant to stoke up populist support. In the early stages of his first term, support for the nuclear program was seen inside Iran as a patriotic position, which Ahmedinijad used to his advantage. Eventually, with the toll on the economy due to the sanctions as well as the regime’s own mismanagement, his support waned and first there was the Green Movement (though worth remembering that Mousavi also supported continuance of the nuclear enrichment program) and now the election of Rouhani. I also think that perhaps late in his term, Ahmedinijad may have even hoped for a pre-emptive strike upon his country by Israel and/or the US to unite the country behind the regime more thoroughly. Thank goodness we had Obama in office during these last few years and also a tip of the cap to those strategists in Israel who persuaded Netanyahu to hold off.
From that link: “Most Americans don’t just remember where they were on September 11, 2001 — they remember feeling frightened. Along with anger, that’s one emotion I felt, despite watching the attacks from a different continent.”
Really? Because I truly do not remember any such emotion.
Most Americans do, though. I cannot recall any other time when I was so frightened for our nation! Heck, I bought a flag and figured out how to hoist it!
If Iran is high school, then Ahmadinejad was that weird guy with the bizarre, never-ending questions who made everyone in the class groan every time he raised his hand.
I’ve got that much. But who would be the head cheerleader?
The one in the most form fitting burka….
For ignorant people like me, please explain what the worst case scenario is in the whole Iran situation? They get a nuclear weapon? and then what? in which scenario does Iran NOT get wiped off the face of the Earth?
Personally, I don’t consider a scenario in which Iran gets wiped off the face of the Earth to be a GOOD one. So, for starters, let’s call any scenario that ends with that something that we want to avoid.
I didn’t say it was a good one. Tell me what the alternatives are long term — the ones that are achievable.
My point was that Iran is not a threat to the U.S. So if it’s about Israel, let’s say it’s about Israel. And if that’s the case, let Israel drive the policy.
Israel can’t drive the policy. About all Israel can do is hit Iran to stop it from getting the Bomb — from assassinations to sabotage to air strikes.
And then, Israel has to hunker down and suffer the censure of the world.
The U.S. has way more geopolitical capital to seek solutions other than military (or paramilitary). So we have a lot more options than Israel does, more leverage.
And, this isn’t just about Israel. Other friends and semi-friends in the region (and in the West) are very, very worried about a nuclear Iran. Steering away from that happening is in everyone’s interests.
C’mon, the New Yorker spells “vendor” “vender” among other idiosyncrasies….and there are no copy editors to enforce style books.
I just wish The State would ensure (or insure, if we are the New Yorker), that its writers use “formally” and “precedence” correctly, and not as substitutes for “formerly” and “precedents”…,and don’t get me started on “hone in”!