Tweet
For perhaps a sharper example of what’s going on in U.S. elite opinion circles about the Iranian opposition, Jackson Diehl has a rather appalling column today. The opposition is “unlovely” for not embracing everything that the American right wants to do to Iran.
Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.
What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program. Mohajerani, who served as culture minister in the liberal Iranian government of Mohammed Khatemi in the 1990s, distanced himself from the current president’s denial of the Holocaust and remarked at one point that Iran “should not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.”
Seriously now. We should expect dissidents to present positions of widespread unpopularity among their actual constituencies? Would an Iranian Jackson Diehl lament, say, candidate Barack Obama’s position on the campaign trail to end the Iraq war but keep 30,000 troops as a residual force? Would that demonstrate his “unlovely” similarity with George Bush?
So now we see that solidarity with the Iranian opposition has broken down because it turns out that the Iranian opposition is made up of Iranians. The democracy-whiskey-sexy days were so much more appealing, I suppose.
Update: Alex Massie goes hard here as well.
6 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
Those ungrateful Iranians! Here we are all set to kill thousands of their fellow country men and they refuse to give us cover to do so! It’s like they don’t even want the infrastructure of their country turned to ruins!
There is not and cannot ever be such a thing as “an Iranian Jackson Diehl.” Jackson Diehl and his fellow neocons are the coddled products of an empire. Their default position is bombing and invading, and they give themselves enormous credit for even considering (before rejecting) the idea of doing anything else.
There certainly are “unlovely” militants in the Middle East, but even they do not have the particular imperial delusion of thinking that we should invade other countries for their own good.
Has Jackson Diehl been largely accurate or intelligent about any topic of which he’s written?
Um, Jackson? Some of us already knew that the Iranian opposition wasn’t necessarily pro-American.
See, we read their party platform.
I actually found this to be one of the more useful Jackson Diehl columns I’ve read. It actually acknowledge that the opposition doesn’t have the opinions that Diehl would want them to have. I don’t like the use of the word “unlovely” and such, but it’s actually rather refreshing to hear a neocon acknowledge a few of these things.
It’d be even better if he then contemplated the implications of this fact for some of his other arguments, but hey, baby steps.
Would an Iranian Jackson Diehl lament, say, candidate Barack Obama’s position on the campaign trail to end the Iraq war but keep 30,000 troops as a residual force? Would that demonstrate his “unlovely” similarity with George Bush?
I understand (and agree with) your larger point, but the answer to this is yes.