Kristol believes that during this phase of diplomacy and sanctions, President Barack Obama should be talking about a military strike on Iran in order to [...]]]>
Kristol believes that during this phase of diplomacy and sanctions, President Barack Obama should be talking about a military strike on Iran in order to force the Islamic Republic to acquiesce to Western Demands.
Watch the Fox News clip, as captured by Think Progress:
Matt Duss, writing for Think Progress, points out that beyond Kristol’s certainty about the eventual use of force, his assertion that a public show of bluster by Obama will help bring Iranians to the negotiating table is built upon unsound reasoning.
He finds that Kristol, the co-founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, doesn’t take into account the evidence of many Iran experts considered President George W. Bush’s belligerent rhetoric a massive failure, which led to a period where the Iranian nuclear program rapidly advanced.
Duss’s post — worth reading in full — notes that, as Jim Lobe also reported at the time, the Iranian dissident activist Akbar Ganji said that military threats hurt the opposition in Iran. Duss writes:
Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji was adamant in a May 2010 interview that talk of a U.S. military option was harmful. “If you do not have the threat of foreign invasion and you do not use the dialog of invasion and military intervention, the society itself has a huge potential to oppose and potentially topple the theocratic system,” Ganji said, adding:
“What I’m trying to get to is that jingoistic, militaristic language used by any foreign power would actually be detrimental to this natural evolution of Iranian society.”
“Unfortunately, the policies of the United States have fanned the flames of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, particularly during the Bush administration,” Ganji said. “The belligerent rhetoric of Bush didn’t help us [the Iranian democracy movement], it actually harmed us.”
However, given his history of pushing for the Iraq war, it’s no surprise to see Kristol pushing for policies that might cause negotiations to wither and fail — it would allow hawks like him to tick-off diplomacy and sanctions from their pre-bombing checklist. If no deal is reached between Iran and the West, Kristol’s case for attacking Iran — which he thinks is likely to happen anyway — will be strengthened.
]]>No, what is revealing about the column is what it tells us about the intentions of Stephens and the rest of the neoconservative Bomb Iran crowd. In the year since the 2009 election crisis, these hawks have constantly (and rather smugly) proclaimed their undying support for the Green Movement, and sought to wrap their own hawkish stance — which originates primarily in a concern for Israeli interests — in the moral authority of the protesters. Of course, the notion that the protesters were fighting to have Israel bomb their country, or the U.S. “cripple” it with sanctions, was absurd on its face, but then the neocons have never been shy about claiming to speak on behalf of others. Thus the reverent mention of Neda Agha-Soltan became a staple of every warmongering op-ed, as if Neda died in order to maintain Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.
The only problem for the hawks was that the Iranian opposition began increasingly to speak for itself in the Western media, and rather unfortunately failed to stay on message. We saw this, for instance, in Akbar Ganji’s comments of last month, in which he warned that military strikes or economic sanctions would “destroy” the Green Movement, and stated that “any foreign intervention is bound to hurt us”. Similarly, opposition leaders have been outspoken in defending Iran’s right to enrich uranium, leading Stephens’s Washington Post counterpart Jackson Diehl to lash out at the Green Movement for failing to hew closely enough to the preferences of Washington neoconservatives.
It is in this context that we need to read Stephens’s obituary for the Green Movement; his column may be indicative of the tack that those pushing war against Iran will increasingly take in the future. If the opposition refuses to stay on message, in other words, the only way forward is to proclaim its irrelevance, and if opposition leaders warn that a military attack will destroy their movement, the only way forward is to declare it dead already. If nothing else, this trend may bring a little more honesty into the Iran debate, as the neocons stop pretending to speak on behalf of the Green Movement and admit that they couldn’t care less what it wants.
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