Blog category: Iran
You heard it here first: Neverland is the new Graceland.
Man, what a week for news. It’s been a while since we had such a contrast of the important (Iran) and the junk-ridden (Transformers 2 = 2nd highest grossing opening ever).
- My vote for biggest story: Considering that I live in the U.S., it has to be the start of American withdrawal from Iraqi cities. There’s the potential for the sectarian pot to boil over again now that American troops won’t be piled onto the lid anymore, but the alternative of policing the country forever isn’t going to work. This is all after the fighting there has been all but forgotten by the general public. I’d put Iran second, and the dramatic turnaround the nation’s opinion of Michael Jackson third, but in my mind it was a return to the big story of the decade.
- Michael Jackson: it’s sad that the guy fell so far from the heights of the ’80s and never made it back, but the country this week seemed to forget the past 15 years in a single afternoon. This is the same thing that happened when Richard Nixon died — granted, Nixon did real harm to the country, while Jackson was just weird — but I wonder if it’s a uniquely American thing for national opinion of a controversial guy to turn on a dime whenever that guy passes on.
- I first heard about Jackson’s death on Twitter myself, but this is just incorrect. You know what I did after I first read that whiff of the story on Twitter? Started hitting the NY Times, CNN and BBC news sites. You can’t note that people check the “respected” news outlets before they really believe an account of something, then turn around and say that this proves those respected news outlets are pointless. Plus, I don’t get the comment about TMZ representing “the new realities of journalism” when they got their scoop through old-fashioned reporting. The truth is that the base of all news will always be reporting, and obviously you don’t have to be a giant, 100-year-old paper to do that, but it still has to happen somewhere along the line.
Let’s also face the fact that TMZ had nothing to lose by claiming Jackson was dead at the very first moment there was speculation. He’s not actually dead? “Well, they’re just a tabloid anyway.” He died? “Brilliant job getting the story!”
- Guy who benefited the most from Michael Jackson’s death: Mark Sanford.
Guys who benefited the least: Anybody out on the street in Iran. Just as the Iranian government counter-reaction gets ugly, too.
- Gail Collins said it better than I can on Sanford: it’s not that he committed an affair or that he’s a total moral hypocrite that makes him a bad governor; it’s the fact that by definition, bailing out on being governor tends to make one a bad governor. And no, I don’t feel bad for him, even if I give him credit for a more human response than most politicians caught cheating.
- And speaking of red-state moralists, who knew that Utah has the highest rate of subscription to pornographic sites?
- Transformers 2 has been a lot of fun for me, and I haven’t even seen it: every critic has sharpened the knife for the review, so at that point it’s a contest to see who can get it the sharpest. Naturally Roger Ebert’s review is brilliantly written, but I also liked Dana Stevens in Slate and The A.V. Club. I like my wit dry, with just a hint of acid.
The funniest part of it all is that Transformers 2 has been critically hated-on more than any movie I can remember, yet it also had the second-highest opening of all time. (Thankfully for the American cultural soul, Dark Knight barely kept the top slot.) One of the commercials this week even ran a bunch of critical excerpts with the tiniest possible font for attribution. Interesting move by the studio to do a Terrell Owens on the Dallas 50-yard line.
- R.I.P., Billy Mays. As I felt the need to tell anyone each time he showed up on TV, the dude was from Pittsburgh. The guy sold some bizarre products, but he was the rare salesman where I enjoyed the pitch.
As a tribute to the man, I will republish that in the style he knew best:
R.I.P. BILLY MAYS! AS I FELT THE NEED TO TELL ANYONE EACH TIME HE SHOWED UP ON TV, THE DUDE WAS FROM PITTSBURGH! THE GUY SOLD SOME BIZARRE PRODUCTS, BUT HE WAS THE RARE SALESMAN WHERE I ENJOYED THE PITCH!
The TV world lost a truly fun character. Vince from ShamWow just isn’t the same.
Morning, all.
I was reading my Morning Coffee links today and clicked on this story at the WSJ:
Republicans Press Obama on Iran
It details some criticism of the President for not speaking out loudly enough in support of the protests, particularly by Lindsay Graham. Fortunately, for once I agree with George Will, who called the criticism “foolish”, because that’s just what it is.
In case you haven’t noticed, Iran’s rulers like to refer to us as “The Great Satan” and blame us for pretty much anything that ever goes wrong in their state. Cat in Qom can’t stop hacking up a hairball? Gotta be covert anti-feline agents of the Great Satan. That’s not to say it’s all based in fantasy; there was that 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh and the subsequent Shah-endorsing that we did for decades. With that realization, which the G.O.P. is conveniently ignoring, the President is right to keep his mouth shut and let the protests run on. There’s probably no one else in the world with as much of an interest in the weakening of the Iranian regime than the President of the U.S.A. — that’s a lot of headaches in one government — so it’s pretty silly to think that Obama doesn’t support the protests. He’s just being smart about it: the very instant he says anything in support of the protesters, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei will be glad to jump all over it and transfer blame. Hell, they’re already trying it, even with the President supposedly doing nothing about the situation.
So while it’s easy to sit back and reflexively hate on whatever the Administration is doing, in this case it’s hella misinformed. You’d think these dudes would have learned a lesson from the last President about well-intentioned election endorsements that then backfire, but then the G.O.P. reps really have little to lose by going on the attack. That doesn’t mean it’s not ill-informed.
The U.S. government says attacks in Iraq are down 55 percent since last summer, thanks to the American surge and better cooperation with Iraqi police. (Although the fact that the surge is about to end is worrying.) The interesting and hopeful side note in the piece, which I’ve read in a few places, are the claims that Iran is stemming the flow of weapons into Iraq.
I hope this is true, because it represents two potentially good outcomes: one, it dents Shi’ite militias’ ability to kill Americans and other Iraqis; and two, it would be a good-faith gesture by Iran indicating that they’re not hell-bent on destroying America at all costs, as right-wing dudes would have us believe.
TIME editor/soulja Tony Karon wrote a while back of the importance of reaching an agreement with Iran to promote Iraqi stability, and this reduced weapons flow would seem to be an opening to approach such an agreement. As much as many Americans believe we shouldn’t negotiate with the Axis of Evil (despite it happening exactly that way in North Korea), reaching a stabilizing agreement with Iran would do far more for America’s interests–a calmer Iraq, a calmer region and, let’s face it, undisrupted oil supplies–than a bombing campaign. We’d also have more legitimacy to pressure them should they break the agreement in the future, and the evidence from North Korea seems to be that negotiation is the best way to prevent what the world really fears: nuclear Iran.
Realism | September 28th, 2007
Abizaid: World Could Abide Nuclear Iran
Assuming Iran actually is trying to get nuclear weapons, which is still an assumption, I agree particularly with his note about Iran not being suicidal. The Iranians also know that slipping a weapon to Hizballah would be so easily traced that they might as well just openly launch a missile, so the terrorist route is equally unlikely. (Al-Qaeda would do better to approach North Korea than Iran about such a deal. On the whole, I think mullah-run Iran has behaved a lot more rationally than the Kims.) Mostly, I agree that the cost of another war is higher than the alternative, so it’s ultimately a cost-benefit analysis.
I think that if every Army general retired and went into politics at the same time, the U.S. would certainly have a more calculated approach to world affairs. I know soldiers can’t speak their mind publicly about policy while in uniform, but I desperately hope they voice the same reasoned opinions to their civilian commanders that they do in public after retirement.
It’s also interesting that only a military guy could make such a calculation without being excoriated as a coward with his head in the sand.
More here.
This morning I was on the subway thinking about the Korean War, just on the DL as usual, when it occurred to me that President Bush could learn a lesson from his professed exemplar, Harry S Truman. (No period after the S.)
People in the Administration and the military have regularly accused Iran of aiding Iraqi Shi’ite militias in their attacks on Americans. I don’t know if Iran is actually building the IEDs, but they certainly have a sympathetic Shi’ite proxy in Iraq, and it’s unlikely that they aren’t somehow involved. Whatever the nature of Iran’s help in the mayhem, this assistance is one of the leading casus belli (plural of that?) for a potential strike on Iran. (For a level-headed assessment of what would likely happen in that event, you can read this.) Here’s where history offers some perspective.
In October 1950 the U.S. and its United Nations allies were, by all measures, winning the Korean War, having pushed to the Yalu River and taken the majority of what is now North Korea. It was then that Mao Tse-Tung sent an army of Chinese regulars into Korea and pushed the United Nations halfway back into South Korea. Eventually the front lines stabilized around the 38th Parallel and stayed roughly there until the ceasefire in 1953, which obviously is still the border today.
What does this have to do with Iran today? Well, General MacArthur was loudly calling for a nuclear attack on China to punish them for getting involved in Korea, and with an entire Chinese army fighting directly against the Americans, China’s involvement was far more overt and deadly than anything Iran has done in Iraq. It also had a more direct cost, as North Korea would likely have gone down in utter defeat without Chinese help.
Truman, however, knew that the U.S. public–not to mention the military and America’s allies fighting in Korea–would not support a widened conflict that could easily turn into World War III only five years after the end of the biggest war yet, and an attack on China would likely have widened things a great deal. So rather than attack China directly, Truman fired MacArthur (hugely unpopular at the time) and kept the conflict limited to Korea, which eventually led to his leaving office at record low approval ratings. Was his decision unfair to American forces fighting in Korea? I don’t know, but I do know that he was smart to avoid a broader war that would have turned nuclear. (MacArthur could have even volunteered an attack on the USSR: Soviet pilots were flying North Korea’s jet fighters against the U.S. and UN. Imagine how an American attack on Vladivostok would have played out for the world.)
The Korean War was a mixed bag: the U.S. avoided a wider conflict and halted communism’s advance on the peninsula, but we’ve been stuck with Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il for 50+ years, and there was the fact that South Korea only became a real democracy in the 1980s after several awful dictators. The lesson here for President Bush is that his predecessor knew that he was playing with fire if he widened the war, fire that could quickly burn out of control and sweep the war-exhausted U.S. into a tremendous fight it didn’t want. Attacking Iran would be a similar regional tinderbox, no matter how grumbly Dick Cheney states otherwise.
I hope this is all overblown and the President’s team is just doing a “Look how crazy we are that we’d make it look like we want another war; you better not mess with us because woo! Crazy!” act to scare potential critics and enemies into keeping their mouths shut. (Kind of a stretch if true.) But, either way, the President can learn from all those historical biographies he’s supposedly reading and gain some valuable insight.
Hey readaz.
I went through a series of feelings on Iran’s catch and release of the British sailors in the Persian Gulf in the past month. At first, I wondered how Iran, which has displayed no shortage of savvy in taking advantage of its shifting regional reality, could be so unaware as to play directly into the plans of Cheney and other American planners looking for a pretext for war with Iran. Had the sailors been American, the Tomahawks would be flying within about three days. But, being sailors from America’s closest ally, it was still a possibility that the U.S. would take action on Britain’s behalf. So at first, the atmosphere was one of dread that another war was about to begin, and disbelief that Iran would be equal parts defiant and self-immolating.
But then as time went by, and the Iranians paraded their apologetic captives while the British government kept nearly silent in terms of displeasure at the situation, I worried less about war and more about how great of a propaganda victory this was going to be for the Iranians. And sure enough, Iran released the hostages with perfect timing, allowing Ahmadinejad to come out looking benevolent (even though it was likely Khamenei and Ali Larjani who pushed him into the release) and–even though they got what they wanted and avoided a broader conflict–Britain looking supplicant. With the sailors selling their stories to the Daily Mirror, there’s no shortage of criticism of their behavior. I can’t speak to that, mainly because I don’t know the full circumstances of their capture and that makes me hesitate to join in the chorus of boos. But seeing things go down as they have is still surprising in contrast to the behavior of British civilians in the July 2005 London bombings.
After that terrorist attack, British stiff-upper-lipism was in full swing. Workers and residents wasted no time going back to their daily routine, very publicly demonstrating their resolve not to bow to those who would call for Britain’s destruction. One of TIME’s cover subjects from that attack stopped by the office in New York, and he was the most chilled-out guy, both in general and about what had happened and how he had helped the injured woman through the whole ordeal.
It’s some weird stuff here to see expected societal roles turned on end, in this case the civilians playing stoic in contrast to the anxiety-ridden military. I give credit to Britain for avoiding a wider war, but I don’t think this is the public image they wanted to present, nor does it fit in with how they’ve reacted recently on the world stage.
