It seems like I just got back to blogging, and already I’m taking a break.
I’ll be back. Meanwhile–let freedom ring:
Three months into the Justice Department’s reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released.
Via Ann Althouse, who comments:
Be like Bush. But blame Bush. The magic formula.
Well, yeah–it’s called politics.
Tiresome, isn’t it?
I suspect that the arguments about whether or not Obama was tough enough on Iran’s thugocracy coming out of the gate will soon give way. Events are overtaking the whose-side-are-you-on? tenor of the “debate.”
Haaretz gives a blow-by-blow of the escalating war of words between A’jad and Obama. This is a long excerpt. Read it and mark the date [e.a.]:
“From now on we will push you to a court of justice in every international meeting,” Ahmadinejad said, without elaborating.
“This time the reply by the Iranian nation will be decisive and harsh and make you [the West] regret and be ashamed, he said in an apparent reference to Western criticism of the election.
The president said “the destiny of [former U.S. president George W.] Bush is still fresh,” adding that world powers should return to their own orders, stop interfering in other states and not damage their prestige with imperialistic and arrogant rhetoric.
Obama’s criticism of Iran turned Friday into an unusually personal war of words. To Ahmadinejad’s demand he apologize for meddling, Obama shot back that the regime should “think carefully” about answers owed to protestors it has arrested, bludgeoned and killed.
“The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous,” Obama said. “We see it and we condemn it.”
The president spoke at an East Room news conference capping his third set of meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of several European leaders who spoke out more forcefully, more quickly than Obama on the unrest in Iran that followed the disputed June 12 elections.
“We will not forget,” Merkel said.
Ahmadinejad told Obama Thursday to “show your repentance” for criticizing Tehran’s response.
“I don’t take Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran,” Obama responded sternly.
“I would suggest that Mr. Ahmadinejad think carefully about the obligations he owes to his own people,” he added. “And he might want to consider looking at the families of those who’ve been beaten or shot or detained. And, you know, that’s where I think Mr. Ahmadinejad and others need to answer their questions.”
It was Obama’s first direct criticism of any of Iran’s leaders. Even more, it was coupled with his first specific boost for Mousavi. “Mousavi has shown to have captured the imagination or the spirit of forces within Iran that were interested in opening up,” Obama said.The remark sought to clarify what many view as Obama’s biggest misstep – saying last week in a television interview that there may not be much difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. But it appeared to swing over to an outright endorsement of Mousavi, though White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denied it was meant that way.
Obama also said for the first time that his offer to loosen the decades-old U.S. diplomatic freeze with Iran through direct talks is now in question.
“There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,” Obama said, without elaborating.
Gibbs said Obama was “more stating the obvious” that no talks are possible while developments are still unfolding. And Obama said that an existing system of multilateral talks with Iran over its suspected goal of building a nuclear bomb, involving nations including the U.S., Europe, China and Russia, must continue.
“The clock is ticking. Iran is developing a nuclear capacity at a fairly rapid clip,” he said.
Merkel agreed there must be no letup among nations trying to stop Iran’s nuclear development, which Tehran insists is aimed at providing only electric power, not weapons. She said “we have to bring Russia and China alongside,” referring to the two nations most historically unwilling to get tough with Iran over the nuclear standoff.
The Obama administration leaves behind childish things and starts leading now…or it doesn’t.
An Iranian journalist (writing under a pseudonym) explains what powered the uprising [e.a.]:
Before the Revolutionary Guards stepped into the fray on June 20, the young militants of the Green Wave withstood days of unrelenting attacks by the fanatic Basij militia and the regular riot police.
What powers this new militancy? The Islamic Republic is not a dictatorship in the normal sense of the word. Its practitioners believe they are doing God’s work on earth. Guiding the wayward by persuasion and coercion is among their chief tasks. Nearly every young person in Iran, particularly young women, can recount dozens of stories of humiliation and discrimination at the hands of government agents and supporters. For them, each rock thrown at the police, each hand-to-hand combat with the militiamen and vigilantes, each confrontation with the heavily armed Revolutionary Guards is not just an act of political defiance but a cathartic experience of personal liberation.
Makes sense to me.
(via Sullivan)
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, explains why totalitarian regimes are doomed [e.a.]:
“The internet is the strongest force for individual self-expression ever invented,” Schmidt said, during an interview hosted by Maurice Levy, the chief executive of ad agency holding company Publicis Groupe.
“Governments around the world, even democratically elected, have difficulty with [the flow of] information online. Dictatorships and closed communities one after the other will try and shut down communication from inside. Strategies governments use trying to shut down people’s speech are terrible strategies and will not succeed,” he added.
/code>
(via Gateway Pundit)
via Nico Pitney at the HuffPo:
Mickey Kaus has his “undernews.” A lot of the stuff that I’m interested in doesn’t even reach that low level. For instance:
Where in the world is Hillary Clinton?–and where in the world are the reporters on her beat? While she remains almost completely absent from the “news,” there’s a war going on over her characterization of the agreement between the United States and Israel over settlements; Dennis Ross has been shoved out of State; and Obama joked that she slipped and broke her elbow because Richard Holbrooke splashed WD-40 all over her path. Hardy-har-har. No wonder she brought Sid Blumenthal into her orbit once again.
Also, where in the world are the TV “news” folks on the Iraq beat? At least the print media is on the case, but everyone else seems to have forgotten about Iraq–except those seeking to make trouble there (and I mean Iran, to deflect attention from itself) [e.a.]:
Iraq Struck by a Wave of Bombings
New York Times – Alissa J. Rubin, Campbell Robertson – 1 hour agoBAGHDAD – At least seven bombs exploded around the country Thursday amid a uptick in violence as American troops prepare to withdraw from Iraqi cities on June 30.
Obama got–or took–no questions about Iraq at his news conference the other day.
Just sayin’.
He’s just a reporter doing his job, but Jake Tapper’s persistence gets kudos from a colleague:
ABC’s Jake Tapper is being called a “mensch” — a Yiddish term loosely meaning a “good guy” — by Mother Jones’s David Corn after yesterday’s Presidential press conference.
Corn lauds Tapper for following up on what Tapper felt was a colleague’s unanswered question. “Before I ask my question,” Tapper said after President Obama called upon him at the presser, “I’m wondering if you could actually answer David’s. Is the public plan non-negotiable?” He was referring to a healthcare question from USA Today’s David Jackson.
“That’s your question,” the President replied. “Are you the ombudsman for the White House press corps?” he asked, to laughter.
Tapper repeated Jackson’s question, and the President responded.
Not that it matters much, of course, since the media has moved on to sniff out even more juicy details of the Sanford “scandal.”
No longer featured in Memeorandum’s hierarchy of headlines at the moment is an excellent piece by John Dickerson, who, by total coincidence, I happened to praise the other day as a good practitioner of journalism.
Dickerson noted the repellent tone of the journalistic and blogospheric “reports” on this “scandal” yesterday:
The snap judgments failed to acknowledge a grain of the fundamental human carnage we were witnessing. You can laugh at Sanford, as you can laugh at a video of a wrecked Amy Winehouse falling all over her house. But at some point, even though they did it to themselves, you have to feel sorry for them as human beings. You can do that, I think, and not be a fan of adultery or drug use.
I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.
This is a good observation, but I’m a little surprised at Dickerson’s surprise. Cold-heartedness, cynicism, Schadenfreude, punitive vindictiveness, and a profound lack of empathy are the hallmarks of our public “discourse.”
Surely this has long been self-evident.
A lesson for our deeply self-enamored president: Being in bed with a TV network to sell your health care “crisis” proposals doesn’t help if they don’t meet the smell test:
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people — like the president himself — wouldn’t face. …
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge…
Are you surprised?
update: All for naught, it seems. ABC News put its integrity(ha!) on the line, and the Obama Show was trounced in the ratings.
The one-hour ABC News special “Primetime: Questions for the President: Prescription for America” (4.7 million viewers, 1.1 preliminary adults 18-49 rating) had the fewest viewers in the 10 p.m. hour. The special tied some 8 p.m. comedy repeats as the lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network.
Slate’s John Dickerson stands out from the crowd–as in, he reports, he gives context, he misses nothing, and then he lets you decide whether you like what you’ve heard.
I will not begin a piece with a pretentious literary quote. Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. By this measure, President Obama was first-rate at his press conference Tuesday afternoon. He escalated his rhetoric about the violence in Iran but insisted he hadn’t changed his posture. He claimed to be outside the 24-hour news cycle while simultaneously manipulating it.
Obama’s supporters will call this performance evidence of an admirably supple mind. His detractors will call it slipperiness.
Indeed.
Trita Parsi explains the ramifications of too much American support for the protesters in Iran:
Having the US on your side is not necessarily a good thing in Iran.
True dat. So what’s a president who (rightly) doesn’t want to stir the hornets’ nest to do? Well, he could certainly disapprove of the regime’s actions a little more forcefully:
But here is one legitimate criticism , the Iranians are missing two words from Obama: “I condemn.” Protesters and political leaders I’ve spoken to in Iran want the US to speak out forcefully against the government’s human rights abuses and condemn the violence. Philosophical formulations about respecting the wishes of the Iranian people aren’t enough: The president should clearly condemn the Iranian government’s violations and use of brutal force against its own people.
After all, condemning violence is different from taking sides in Iran’s election dispute. Not only would it be compatible with American values, it would also reduce pressure on the president to entangle the US in Iranian politics. Clarity on the human rights front strengthens the president’s ability to avoid siding with any political faction in Iran. [e.a.]
Condemning extreme state violence against its own citizens won’t give anyone the neocon cooties, I trust.
Does Andrew Sullivan believe he is gaining moral authority for his intemperate and ill-willed name-calling–his flirtation with Jew-baiting–by citing Brzezinski?
Ha ha HA!
President Obama has no brief for the democracy agenda in foreign policy and yet he has been moved off his position by events, Ben Smith notes:
The violent day in Iran, and the White House’s condemnation of the government’s reaction, seemed to move America ever further from the hard-headed negotiations with a distasteful regime that Obama had promised on his campaign, and toward a focus on freedom and democracy more associated with Obama’s predecessor.
Notably, however, Moussavi also seems to have been moved off his position (which was hardly an Enlightened one) and swept up by events much larger than himself (indeed larger than anyone in Iran–which is the whole point: the myth of the “Supreme Leader” has been shattered).
The concept of a myth being shattered was first raised by Azar Nafisi on June 15:
“Khamenei would always come and say, ‘Shut up; what I say goes,’ ” said Azar Nafisi, the author of two memoirs about Iran, including “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” “Everyone would say, ‘O.K., it is the word of the leader.’ Now the myth that there is a leader up there whose power is unquestionable is broken.”
Roger Cohen made the point strongly yesterday:
A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura as Iranians Flock to the Streets
Today, Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader who says the same thing, and puts a name to the aura, for which there is a concept in Persian thought [e.a.]:
I find it very hard to believe that if Mousavi’s movement succeeds there will still be a supreme leader. He has talked about returning Iran’s government to its people, and he is openly defying now Khamenei. In Persian thought there is a concept called Farr, the aura around the emperor. Roger Cohen wrote about this idea yesterday. Well it’s gone. And that aura, this notion that the people’s institutions, the presidency and the majlis must be checked by clerics, is gone too. None of this means that Islam will not thrive in Iran, but it will be a quietist Islam, the kind advocated by Montazeri and Sistani. Khomeinism, if Mousavi succeeds, is finished.
The other day, “Shane M,” a student in Iran, in a NYT op-ed, described the sweep of events that brought us here:
The truth is, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The open-air parties that, for one week, turned Tehran at night into a large-scale civic disco, were an accident. People gathered by the tens of thousands in public squares, circling around one another on foot, on motorcycle, in their cars. They showed up around 4 or 5 in the afternoon and stayed together well into the next day, at least 3 or 4 in the morning, laughing, cheering, breaking off to debate, then returning to the fray. A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style. Four boys parked their cars in a circle, the headlights illuminating an impromptu dance floor for them to show off their moves.
Everyone watched everyone else and we wondered how all of this could be happening. Who were all of these people? Where did they come from? These were the same people we pass by unknowingly every day. We saw one another, it feels, for the first time. Now in the second week, we continue to look at one another as we walk together, in marches and in silent gatherings, toward our common goal of having our vote respected.
No one knew that it would come to this. Iran is this way. Anything is possible because very little in politics or social life has been made systematic. We used to joke that if you leave Tehran for three months you’ll come back to a new city. A friend left for France for a few days last week and when he returned the entire capital had turned green.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Until last week, Mr. Moussavi was a nondescript, if competent, politician — as one of his campaign advisers put it to me, he was meant only to be an instrument for making Iran a tiny bit better, nothing more. Iranians knew that’s what they were getting when they cast their votes for him. Now, like us, Mr. Moussavi finds himself caught up in events that were unimaginable, each day’s march and protest more unthinkable than the one that came before. [e.a.]
An outside observer, Yaacov Lozowick was skeptical about the probably course of events in Iran at the beginning. But he’s a historian and has knowledge to draw on:
Gorbachev never intended to go where he ended up going, either. Never ever. He wanted to fix Communism and the Soviet Union, not kill them. Yet the logic of the events was such that by questioning the regime, he unleashed the forces that demolished it. One of the profound differences between Enlightenment-informed democracies and all the rest is that ability to change course without changing everything. Fascism didn’t have it, Communism didn’t (though as I’ve noted, Chinese autocracy is proving surprisingly resilient).
So whatever the Iranian movement was a month ago, or even only a week ago, I think it’s something admirable now. When their Supreme Leader took sides and threatened the demonstrators to desist, and they didn’t, not even in the face of death, this isn’t a squabble, it’s large numbers of people demanding freedom. Are they a majority of Iranians? Perhaps. I have no way of knowing. The beauty of democracy, however, if they ever attain it, is that it shouldn’t matter. If a majority of Iranians – or even only a minority – wish to continue to live in a religious society, no-one will tell them otherwise.
Yes, that’s the beauty of democracy. Long may it live,
The NYT’s Roger Cohen redeems himself:
I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basijis. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted.
I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”
Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.
There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.
“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”
The world is watching, and technology is connecting, and the West is sending what signals it can, but in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.
… something happened further to the east:
David Rohde, New York Times Reporter Held By Taliban, Escapes
Excellent.
The Ayatollah Khamenei, quoted here in the NYT’s Lede blog, blaming foreigners’ interference for the troubles in Iran:
Update | 8:42 a.m. In his sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei attacked what he called attempts by foreign governments to stir up opposition to the election results. He seemed to be saying that reports by foreign media outlets are actually veiled attempts to overthrow his regime. Reporting on what was in part an attack on the corporation itself, the BBC, which maintains an active Farsi-language news service, explained:
He said the election was a “political earthquake” for Iran’s enemies – singling out Great Britain as “the most evil of them” – whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.
“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” the Supreme Leader said.
In its own way, the BBC was quick to strike back – passing on reaction to the Supreme Leader’s speech from users of its Web site who claimed to be inside Iran.
or Andrew Sullivan, blaming “neocons” for the firing of a WaPo blogger:
I suspect neocon pressure to remove anyone holding Cheney to account.
The mind reels.
Eli Lake tweets the state of play in Iran this morning:
Shorter Khamenei: Ajad won, u are all going to take it, if u don’t my goons will murder u. #iranelection
I was most amused last week to read Andrew Sullivan counsel everyone to avoid reading Iran through an American lens and then to follow up with innumerable posts that presented the situation exactly through an American lens. But never mind, because Sullivan has done great work in this past week.
For a different view of things, we need to go directly to Iran. And today’s NYT gives over most of its op-ed page to a student there who goes by the name Shane M:
WE look over this wall of marching people to see what our friends in the United States are saying about us. We cannot help it — 30 years of struggle against the Enemy has had the curious effect of making us intrigued. To our great dismay, what we find is that in important sectors of the American press a disturbing counternarrative is emerging: That perhaps this election wasn’t a fraud after all. That the United States shouldn’t rush in with complaints of democracy denied, and that perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the president the Iranian people truly want (and, by extension, deserve).
Do not believe it.
Just sayin’.
