I haven't written anything about the protests in Iran. I don't feel like it's my place to comment, really. Popular revolts are powerful and mysterious and thrilling. But I don't know the politics of the country, and, like Matt, feel that symbolic support for the protesters feels hollow somehow. But, like you, I've been riveted by the videos and tweets and blog posts coming out of Tehran. Me, I've been following the protests on Andrew Sullivan's site.
Part of me is wary of the enthusiasm - especially from conservatives - about the protests. Even if they do succeed and manage to topple Ahmadinejad, I suspect Iranian representative democracy won't gibe with neocon fantasy. After all, Ahmadinejad was at his most popular when stoking anti-Western and -Semitic passions.
Still, the protests are hopeful and thrilling. A reminder that government lives at the consent of the governed.
As a journalist, I cannot say that what I have read and seen today is the whole story: everything is too piecemeal, too unconfirmable, too one-sided. But experiencing the raw feed of history has been chilling. As we try to carve out the truth from the speculation and relentlessly repeated reports of outrage, the overall impression is one of immense sadness and tragedy, of a country seeking to preserve itself by destroying itself....
In the weekend cacophony of messages and videos, one note lingers. A video postedK the night before the crackdown is of a woman reading a poem about Iranians standing up to change their country, afraid but determined to move into the morning, even if it is to face forces that would destroy them. The voice is sad and at one point almost breaks into a sob, and in the backdrop of the Tehran night can be faintly heard protest chants: Allahu-Akbar, Allahu-Akbar. God is Great,God is Great. A Palestinian friend of mine remarked that those words would once have struck fear into the hearts of Americans. Now they inspire. That is a revolution all by itself.
I haven't mentioned this much, if ever, here or elsewhere, but I lived in Germany during the 1989 revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall and reunified the country. I even managed to spend a semester at an East German University during the "in-between time," the period after the Communist Party was ousted from power and before the reunification with West Germany.
During the early stages of the revolt, I hitchhiked to Berlin with a friend. Somehow - the memory is fuzzy - I ended meeting a friend of a friend, an East German student, in East Berlin. She took me to a small protest of students, maybe 500 students, at the Opernplatz, a short distance from Humboldt university and the site of a notorious book-burning by German students and Nazi followers in 1933. It was terrifying. There was no violence, no East German equivalent of the Basiji beating protesters with sticks, no tear gas. And there wouldn't be. But no one knew that at the time. At any moment, they knew, the KPD could unleash the state apparatus and crush the protests. And who knew? Maybe they'd start here, with these students.
It takes a lot courage to stand up with a protest sign against an authoritarian government. Forget Reagan and conservative foreign policy: it was the courage of these students and other protesters that toppled the Iron Curtain, that democratized East Germany. Without millions of East Europeans rising and protesting, the region's Communist dictatorships might still be in power today.
Norman Podhoretz is p*ssed about the recently released NIE showing Iran isn't developing a bomb! Not only does he assert the NIE is the result of some shady anti-Bush intelligence effort (as predicted), calls into question the ability of the intelligence agencies who created the assessment:
I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.
A couple of things to remember:
--If the accusations that the intelligence agencies were actively trying to thwart a Bush-led attack on Iran were true, that's a good thing. Given the president's history on Iraq, his administration's deceptiveness, his complete bungling of the war, and his apparent and complete ignorance of Middle East politics, culture, and history, giving him the green light on Iran would be a bad thing.
--There was no one more wrong about Middle East policy and intelligence than Podhoretz and his neocon pals.
You're going to see a whole lot of questioning of the NIE from the cheerleaders for war with Iran. It's easy to see why: whatever tatters of their credibility that remains after Iraq is at stake. Me? I don't think we should go to war to save Podhoretz' ego.
That's right. Iran's not working on a nuclear weapons program. Like Kevin Drum, you may be wondering what all the bluster was about:
This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA - all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.
In any case, given the outcome of Iraq, that should still the saber-rattling around Iran, right?
More news out of MSU-Billings, this time from a talk given by professor Brian Gurney about what will "jump start" our investment into alternative energies.
Crude oil reaching $100 a barrel.
Which means tough times for a lot of people. Why we should sit on our *sses and wait for $100-barrel oil prices to do anything serious about these problems is beyond me, but apparently that's the way we run. (Coincidentally, the Good Guv today outlined some proposals to save energy in the state. Doesn't go far enough, IMHO. You be the judge.)
But here's the quote from the report I wanted to cull:
With some people taking side bets on when crude will top $100 per barrel, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has predicted crude could hit $200 per barrel if the U.S. attacks Iran.
If that happens, a depression could hit the U.S. that would make the 1920s look tame, Gurney said, but eventually there would be some kind of economic alternative.
"At $200 a barrel, we're going to be the most entrepreneurial people on earth," he said.
What was that what Senator Tester said? He'd be more surprised if Bush didn't attack Iran before he left office?
Buckle up, kids, we might be in for a couple of lean years.
Democratc Undergrounds' leveymg pens an exhaustive, information packed, and thought provoking analysis of who's who and what's what as regards American options in the Middle East.
Today the Senate passed the Kyle-Lieberman Iran amendment, which designates the military of a sovereign nation as a terrorist organization - Iran's Revolutionary Guards. It's a bad idea, and clearly lays the groundwork for military action against Iran.
In one amendment, the Senate has rendered the word "terrorist" meaningless, and has thrown a monkey wrench into international diplomatic relations. It could also give the Bush administration legal justification to do anything it wants with, or in, Iran, without Congressional oversight or approval.
Those who regret their vote five years ago to authorize military action in Iraq should think hard before supporting this approach. Because, in my view, it has the same potential to do harm where many are seeking to do good.
At best, it's a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action, without one hearing and without serious debate.
"I cannot support the Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran. To do so could give this President a green light to act recklessly and endanger US national security. We learned in the run up to the Iraq war that seemingly nonbinding language passed by this Senate can have profound consequences. We need the president to use robust diplomacy to address concerns with Iran, not the language in this amendment that the president can point to if he decides to draw this country into another disastrous war of choice."
Here's the roll call. Jon Tester voted against the amendment; Max Baucus voted for it.
Odd, isn't it? Just this week, Senator Baucus' op-ed decrying the diplomatic and political situation in Iraq and calling for the withdrawal of US troops from the country appeared in newspapers around the state, and today he voted for an admendment that could embroil us in another - perhaps worse -- clusterf*ck than Iraq. You tell me how any rational person could hold onto those two thoughts at the same time. It's a mystery to me.
Other notable votes include those of Republicans Lugar and Hagel, who crossed party lines to do the right thing; Democratic presidential candidates Dodd and Biden who voted against the amendment, and Clinton who voted for it.
Rick Perlstein has a fantastic post -- "Bedwetter Nation" -- on the reception Iranian president Ahmadinejad received on his trip to the United States compared to a similar one Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev made in 1959.
Basically, Kruschev - a real threat to the US, unlike Iran - was treated with dignity and allowed to speak freely.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country-the man who had faced down Hitler!-proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great.
Ahmadinejad, of course, received a less warm welcome. Conservatives are even threatening to sap funds from Columbia University, the one institution that dared allow Ahmadinejad to speak - albeit while the school's president in his introduction castigated him, and the audience openly mocked him.
The culprit is, of course, conservative rhetoric. The shrillness of the fear mongering is inversely proportion to the willingness of the American public to engage in the neocon's Next Big Thing, Iran. The media co-conspires. Or, as Perlstein writes, "The worst thing about it, however, is how many people who should know better have surrendered it. They've lowered us all to their own pants-piddling level."
Can we win our nation back? Or will we continue to grovel in fear?
I got some response from the post from a few days ago, calling the legislative out to take back the war powers rightfully theirs. The main question I got was how does Congress do such a thing? Is there anything that Congress can do? Yesterday Joe Biden told Secretary Rice that if President Bush went into Iraq that it would "generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate." This is good to hear.
For some good background detail, check out Greenwald on the subject. He is basically saying that there is no question that President Bush and company believe that they have total constitutional power. He uses the logically-challenged Yoo Memo to solidly prove his point. Make sure you check out his Update III, with a terrifying back and forth between Tony Snow and Chris Matthews about war with Iran. One thing he doesn't do in this post is advise Congress on stopping the President's poor assumptions (he may in his book, or in another post, but I am not sure).
