filed under Daily Dose
Huh… He doesn’t speak for everybody in the country?
12:12PM ON
08/27/2008
BY
Dave Segal
Iran’s not a monolith, but we are supposed to think that the man who barely made the run-off in the 2005 election (19% of the vote in the first round, beating out the pro-reform Mehdi Karoubi by 2 points) represents every last Iranian.
(He won that run-off not because of his anti-west rhetoric, but because he was decent to the poor, while he was mayor of Tehran.)
Today there’s this, treated as a surprise by the mainstream media:
An Iranian cleric accused President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of betraying the people and called on reformers to unite to defeat him in next year’s elections, according to an interview in a German newspaper quoted by Reuters, Wednesday.
“Ahmadinejad is not complying with the will of the people,” The Financial Times Deutschland quoted Grand Ayatollah Bajat Sanjani as saying. “This is a major threat, a big danger,” the cleric added in an unusually direct personal attack.
The newspaper also said Sanjani accused Ahmadinejad’s government of breaking the law, seriously violating personal freedom and illegally empowering the Revolutionary Guard.
Also important, and never mentioned: Ahmadinejad has no control over the Iranian military, or foreign policy at all, for that matter.
Yet just a year from new elections, our sabre-rattling is doing what it always does: Entrenching the powers that be (rally-around-the-flag mentality) and making it more likely that Ahmadinejad will be re-elected.
August 27th, 2008 at 3:12PM
Marc Says:
I fear that this country keeps deciding that it’s picked ‘the wrong enemy’ (the Taliban, the Ba’ath party, and now the Iranian government), when in fact, we have ‘the wrong approach’.
We could have done a lot more with a lot less if we had reached-out to these governments and dangled big fat carrots for them, instead of hitting them with our stick. I even believe that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein would have been more than reasonable about policing ‘terrorists’ if we, you know, -talked- to them, and maybe offered up something in return (there’s precedents for both). Iran would -certainly- be a reasonable partner for negotiation, ask any Iranian.
I worry that the USA will pick this fight with Iran, get involved in a way we can’t back-out from, and then decide a few years later that ‘it was all a big mistake, the -real- enemy all along was China (or Russia, or North Korea, etc.)!’
We already have a huge backlog of do-gooding to get to to atone for Iraq, the last thing we need is to dig this hole any deeper.
[Reply]
August 27th, 2008 at 7:33PM
joe bernstein Says:
We shouldn’t go to war with Iran.That would entail a lot of civilian casualties in a country where the populace isn’t necessarily our enemy.We could drop a bunker buster on the Majlis when Ahmedinajad is addressing them with the ruling Mullahs present.Without this crew to run things,the people would manage to install a new government and deal with the Revolutionary Guard who are terrorizing the ordinary citizens.It happened in Romania.
[Reply]
August 28th, 2008 at 8:01AM
Marc Says:
I have to disagree with Joe, I don’t think taking out the leadership of a country is the best way to get what you want from them. I think if we normalized relations with them and bought some natural gas from them, they’d be less likely to be a ‘threat’ to our ‘allies’.
Also, Ahmadinejad is not the guy who gets to ‘pull the trigger’, he’s a politician. I wouldn’t worry about what he says about Israel, he’s just trying to stay in office, the same way some of our candidates feel that they should be ‘tough’ on Iran.
[Reply]
August 28th, 2008 at 9:45AM
joe bernstein Says:
I don’t carry water for Israel,despite my last name.They can sink or swim on their own-I don’t doubt thaty have enough nukes and delivery systems to seriously depopulate a large segment of the countries posing a threat to them,but who would want to see that?
I was thinking more along the lines of Libya.Qaddafi choked his motor significantly after we bombed his house.We didn’t have to invade his country to get results.Nowadays he is just another third world autocrat and of little interest to anyone.
I have known quite a few Iranians and they are not al-Qaida “hate America” types-Iran has large minorities of Bahais,Zoroastrians,and Christians(even some Jews) and the people are in bondage to the Revolutionary Guard,so the point is that we deal with the problem without killing innocent Iranians or sacrificing more American troops.
My idea is not that extreme if you view it in the context of doing the least overall damage.
[Reply]
August 28th, 2008 at 1:00PM
Marc Says:
Also see:
Executive Order 11905: (Gerald Ford)
“5(g) Prohibition on Assassination. No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
Executive Order 12333: (Ronald Reagan)
“2.11 No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
The issue is that when you ‘topple’ a regime by taking out the leadership, you can’t control which way the rest of the structure falls. All too often, the most rabid, bloodthirsty underlings of those toppled take control. Also, the population, even if they weren’t behind the assassinated leader, tend to ‘go nationalist’ and take a more hard-lined approach.
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August 28th, 2008 at 3:27PM
joe bernstein Says:
I can’t say you’re entirely wrong-treating humans like gaming pieces with predetermined options is always a major mistake.Romanians really purged themselves of the Ceausescu regime and the securitat,or so it seemed.Later,some former apparatchicks moved back towards power-the end result being somewhat indeterminate.
I just think the option I mentioned is a lot better than indiscriminate bombing.Taking out their nuclear facilities may not be doable from the air.
Negotiating with the megalomanic little cab driver isn’t too promising either-well,nobody has hired me as a policy wonk so my opinion is meaningless.
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