Dolchstoßlegende
Looking back now, it seems ironic that the day after the Iranian elections -- when it was clear that the government had rigged the results and the people took to the streets to protest -- there was little more than a few murmurs from the National Review Online's team blog, The Corner. In fact the longest response to the issue came from K-Lo, who linked to this post from Daniel Pipes:
[W]hile my heart goes out to the many Iranians who desperately want the vile Ahmadinejad out of power, my head tells me it's best that he remain in office. When Mohammed Khatami was president, his sweet words lulled many people into complacency, even as the nuclear weapons program developed on his watch. If the patterns remain unchanged, better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahmadinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep, even as thousands of centrifuges whir away.That seemed to be the consensus of the right at the time: bombing Iran is the objective, and Ahmadinejad would make it easier to achieve that objective than Mousavi.
But as the protests continued, and President Obama refused to inject the U.S. into the Iranian election controversy, the right wing clearly saw an opportunity. If the U.S. could be drawn directly into the Iranian elections, and made a primary stakeholder in the success of the protesters, then we would inexorably find ourselves committed to a policy of -- you guessed it! -- regime change! Whoo hoo! Doug Feith, call your office!
So now all that murmuring about Ahmadinejed being the better choice is no longer operative. Now we're getting teary-eyed, we-are-all-Iranians-now mawkishness, with a healthy dollop of dolchstoss thrown in for good measure:
The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
I guess this is the latest iteration of the "liberal fascism" meme: now all repressive regimes are "liberal", even the fundamentalist theocratic ones. The logic here is so circuitous and distorted that it only makes sense within the right-wing media cocoon.
And I suspect it doesn't make a lot of sense there, either.
UPDATE: Apparently, Obama also supports the brutal theocrats in Tehran because he's secretly a Muslim!While the mullahs may be "anti-American" as we understand that term, Obama doesn't think they would be resolutely anti the America that he intends to shape. I think he sincerely believes he could deal with the mullahs and make them less anti-American than they now are, once they realize how he is reversing a lot of what offends them (and him) about America.
I'm learning so much today.
