Krauthammer’s Projections

[laststeamtrain]

Krauthammer’s Projections

By Daniel Luban

Charles Krauthammer’s most recent column on Iran offers a concise distillation of neoconservative pathologies about the Middle East, and a demonstration of why the Iranian protesters’ self-proclaimed best friends in the U.S. may prove to be their worst enemies. In the course of excoriating Barack Obama for his alleged abandonment of the protesters, Krauthammer displays a deep indifference to the actual wishes and needs of the protesters that is extremely common among those pushing for more robust American interference in the Iranian crisis.

“The demonstrators,” Krauthammer informs us, “are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.” As it happens, Obama has offered many words of support for the protesters’ right to peaceful demonstration, but has stopped short of the full-throated denunciation of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad that Krauthammer evidently wants. Regardless, what is striking about Krauthammer’s assertion is that he does not deem it necessary to offer a shred of evidence to support it. He simply takes for granted, in the face of a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, that Iranians want a more aggressive U.S. intervention into the crisis. In this respect Krauthammer is representative of right-wing commentary on the Iran situation, which has been primarily concerned with striking the requisite “Churchillian” and “Reaganite” poses while displaying a remarkable disinterest in what actual Iranians might want or think. After all, why let the wishes of our intended beneficiaries get in the way of a fine opportunity for self-congratulatory moral posturing?

But Krauthammer is not done reading the minds of the Iranian people:

"People aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators…What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East. This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic. "

Once again, Krauthammer takes for granted, without seeing fit to offer any evidence, that the protesters loathe the Islamic Republic itself and that their goal is to topple it. But as Ali Gharib has written, Moussavi himself and the protesters as a whole have been driven primarily by a desire to reform the Islamic Republic rather than to topple it, and to get back to the principles of the 1979 revolution rather than to abandon them. The chants of “Allah O Akbar” that have been so central to the demonstrations are certainly a savvy political move, but undoubtedly reflect more deeply held belief as well. However, the actual aspirations that seem to motivate the protesters do not fit Krauthammer’s Manichean framework — in which the Islamic Republic in any form is unmoderated evil, and can only be overthrown, not reformed — so these aspirations are conveniently ignored.

Having dispensed with the Iranians as they are, and created in their place the ardently pro-American secular revolutionaries that he would like them to be, Krauthammer then lays out a vision of liberal transformation in the Middle East that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the grandiose claims made in the run-up to the Iraq war. Regime change in Tehran will “do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.” It will “launch a second Arab spring,” bolstering Iraq and Lebanon, isolating Syria, and emasculating Hezbollah and Hamas. He does not mention the so-called “moderate” Arab states, perhaps because they shatter his “pro-democracy” pretext — after all, it would not do for the second Arab spring to sweep out Mubarak and bring in the Muslim Brotherhood. Nor does he mention the Palestinians outside of Hamas, but presumably they will at long last recognize themselves as a defeated people and acquiesce to whatever arrangement Israel sees fit to grant them.

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http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=264

[tsuki]

1. I agree. Krauthammer is part of the Republicon Think Tank process

that starts with his conclusion first, then cherry-picks or projects the fact to support it.

[mwb970]

2. Krauthammer is one of the wingnut pundits I never read.

He joins Jonah Goldberg in my "no-read zone". Some (not many) conservative columnists actually have something worthy to say, but not these two pantloads. Every column by either is some variation on "conservatives good, liberals bad".

When every single thing you write can be summed up in four words, two of them with one syllable, it's a sure sign that you have nothing whatsoever to say.

[zbdent]

3. I always wonder why, with these amazing powers of telepathy that RWers claim,

(knowing exactly what terrorists and criminals and Dems are thinking, despite the fact that there's no evidence),

that they don't constantly win the World Series of Poker every time ...

[libodem]

4. Doesn't Iran have a Supreme Court

loaded with Conservatives who could just hand the outcome to Mockmood? Kruthammer go fuck yourself.

[Miss Authoritiva]

5. Love this line by Luban...

It would be rather remarkable, to say the least, if the goals and aspirations of Moussavi and his supporters turned out to be identical with the goals and aspirations of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the American Enterprise Institute.