Escape the Okie Zone

June 18, 2009 Like Rasputin, the unhinged "Mad Monk" whom they sometimes seem to have adopted as an intellectual role model, the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq war refuse to die. Although they have been figuratively stabbed, poisoned, shot, garroted and drowned, they somehow keep standing, still insisting that history will vindicate George W. Bush's glorious crusade. In a world governed by the Victorian moral code conservatives claim to uphold, they would be shunned, shamed and forbidden to appear on television or write Op-Ed columns. But because Beltway decorum apparently requires that disgraced pundits be given a permanent platform to bray their discredited theories, the rest of us are condemned to listen to their ravings.

What caused the neocons and their fellow travelers on the right to sit up in their coffins this time is the almost certainly rigged Iran election and the massive unrest that has roiled the country in its aftermath. Outraged that Obama has not behaved like their hero Bush and begun loudly rattling his saber, the neocons have denounced him as -- you guessed it -- an appeaser. In a piece titled "Obama's Iran Abdication," the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, that bastion of unreconstructed neocon lunacy, attacked Obama for not supporting the Iranian protesters more vigorously and derided his "now-familiar moral equivalence" in citing the 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh. In an Op-Ed two days earlier, the paper's Visigothic editors, who have been calling for the U.S. to bomb Iran for years, took the opportunity to climb into the Wayback Machine to pay homage to one of George W. Bush's greatest hits. "It turns out that the 'axis of evil' really is evil -- and not, as liberal sages would have it, merely misunderstood," sneered the editors, suggesting that the crackdown should make Obama rethink trying to strike a grand nuclear bargain with Iran.

In his own attack on Obama, Sen. John McCain also rushed to resurrect Bush's Axis of Evil line, saying, "Look, these people are bad people and I know that it was unpopular to call them part of an axis of evil or whatever it was, but we just showed again that an oppressive regime will not allow democratic elections, free and democratic elections."

Neocon stalwart Danielle Pletka also made a not-so-subtle attempt to use the turmoil in Iran to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq. In a piece in the New York Times, she and fellow American Enterprise Institute pundit Ali Alfoneh wrote, "Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him." Earth to Pletka: George W. Bush is not president anymore, and even if he still was, the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to attack Iran. It would be more accurate to say that the soon-to-depart U.S. troops in Iraq are encircled by Iranian forces than the other way around.

The nadir of neocon idiocy, however, may be a piece by Robert Kagan that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post. Titled "Obama, Siding With the Regime," it argues that because Obama wants to begin negotiations with Iran as soon as possible and does not want to appear "hostile to the regime," his "goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it." In other words, Kagan is saying that Obama would prefer to rush into a deal with a repressive, anti-Western Iranian regime than do what he is in fact doing, which is to recognize that U.S. meddling is counterproductive and wait and see what government emerges from Iran's current turmoil. That Kagan adduces no evidence for his bizarre assertion is hardly surprising, because there is none. Kagan's real purpose is to smear Obama as a craven appeaser, and the only way he can do that is to paint a ludicrously crude caricature of Obama and the foreign-policy realism he has embraced.

That these neoconservative pundits have the gall to talk about Iran at all, let alone pose as defenders of the Iranian people, would be stunning if it were not so familiar. For it was their own policies that were largely responsible for the rise of the hard-liners in Iran. As Islam expert Malise Ruthven notes in an essay on Iran in the current New York Review of Books, "external factors, driven by U.S. policies, were decisive" in thwarting Iran's nascent democratic movement. And of those U.S. actions, none was more consequential than the very "axis of evil" statement that the neocons are now tumbling over each other to glorify.

"George W. Bush's notorious 'axis of evil' speech in January 2002, linking Iran to its enemy Iraq and the maverick Communist republic of North Korea, undermined many of Khatami's achievements in improving Iran's international profile, and convinced the hard-liners that the Islamic Republic would become the next target in Bush's 'war on terror,'" Ruthven writes. "The build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 -- one month before the invasion -- conservatives regained nearly all the seats they had lost in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement. This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for 'Islamic suitability.' The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad's election as president."

In short, the very rhetoric the neocons are now demanding that Obama use backfired disastrously when Bush used it -- which is precisely why Obama has avoided repeating it. And, of course, the entire Iraq war greatly empowered Iran by removing its greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and shifting power to Iran's coreligionist Shiites.

posted by Garvald  # 6/18/2009 11:21:00 PM