Friday, June 25, 2010
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Leon Wieseltier: The realism of seeking democracy in Iran - '...The Khameini-Ahmedinejad "oligarchy" represses and imprisons and rapes and tortures and murders its own citizens. It also promotes theocracy and terrorism in its region and beyond. All this is pretty plain. Why is Zakaria so fearful that American foreign policy will respond to such a government with stringency and loathing? Perhaps he believes that President Obama's policy of respect and accommodation will solve the nuclear problem and bring a measure of decency to the rulers of Iran, but there is no empirical basis for such a belief. It is a much greater fantasy than the "fantasy" that Zakaria deplores, which is no fantasy at all. Real realism consists of the recognition that nuclear peace and social peace in Iran will be reliably achieved only with the advent of democracy, and that since June 12, 2009, the advent of Iranian democracy is not an idle wish. Morally and strategically -- this is one of those perplexities in which they go serendipitously together -- President Obama's refusal to strongly support the Iranian resistance against the Iranian tyranny is not prudent, it is perverse. But when democracy comes to Iran, Fareed Zakaria will plummily assure us that this was his dream all along.'
False, heartless - and smooth - Wieseltier nails it with notable, with a laser guided precision.
Further, realism is likewise the apposite term to be applied. Because it (a more representative or Classical Liberal regime in Iran) is likely to happen in the near term? Well, no, but without prudently and wisely planting the right seeds in the present, the future is far more likely to produce noxious weeds in the future.
Wieseltier is to be roundly applauded for such a forceful and well considered piece.