I suppose I should be generous to Roger Cohen. According to Roger Simon, Cohen flew out to LA on his own initiative – and dime – in order to defend his defense of the Iranian regime. But Simon writes that Cohen was just self-involved and deaf to criticism.
So I knew I would find Cohen annoying at best, but I had no idea how boring he would be. He began by saying he would make some brief remarks before taking audience questions. Those remarks ended up filling the better part of an hour and were as predictable as they were lecturing. There was hardly a word the columnist said that surprised, even if you could give him plaudits for having the courage to say them in front of an audience of Iranian Jews who clearly voted against his views with their feet. They left the country.
Cohen’s opening statement ended, also predictably though inappropriately, with an impassioned defense of diplomat Charles Freeman, allegedly just pushed out of potential government office by that evil omnipotent cabal of AIPAC, right wing bloggers, etc. No word, of course, on Freeman’s execrable defense of the Chinese government in the face of the pro-democracy movement in that country and the student massacre at Tiananmen. This display of what Orwell might have called “objectively pro-fascist” behavior by Freeman apparently does not dismay Cohen, despite murmurings about China I heard all around me from a predominantly Jewish audience. In fact, Cohen didn’t have half the grace of that audience who actually gave a polite round of applause to his deadening speech.
Cohen’s own account of the talk in LA shows no more self-awareness.
I have, in a series of columns, and as a cautionary warning against the misguided view of Iran as nothing but a society of mad mullah terrorists bent on nukes, been examining distinctive characteristics of Persian society.
Iran — as compared with Arab countries including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — has an old itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The June presidential vote will be a genuine contest by the region’s admittedly low standards. This is the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel.
Notice how he can’t even avoid a dig at Israel. Not calling it the most democratic state in the Middle East, but the “least undemocratic.” He doesn’t point out that the only candidates who run, are those who are approved. True, it’s more open than Egypt but to compare it to Israel, is a mark of intellectual dishonesty, not an indication of sober reflection.
While Bernard Lewis, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, posits an epochal clash between “Islamic theocracy and liberal democracy” whose outcome will be decisive, I don’t see any victor in this fight. Rather, a variety of compromises between the two forces will emerge, as in Iran.
It is therefore in America’s strong interest to develop relations with the most dynamic society in the region. What autocrats from the Gulf to Cairo fear most is an Iranian-American breakthrough, precisely because it would shake up every cozy, static regional relationship, including Washington’s with Israel.
I’m glad to know that Cohen disagrees with Bernard Lewis. Lewis is, in fact, out of favor with the current trends in Middle East scholarship. Of course that’s more a reflection on the state of the scholarship than on Dr. Lewis. And given Lewis’s six or more decades of serious study, I don’t give much credence to the guy who just acted as a shill for the Iranian government who disputes hm.
Another distinctive characteristic of Iran is the presence of the largest Jewish community in the Muslim Middle East in the country of the most vitriolic anti-Israel tirades. My evocation of this 25,000-strong community, in the taboo-ridden world of American Middle East debate, has prompted fury, nowhere more so than here in Los Angeles, where many of Iran’s Jewish exiles live.
At the invitation of Rabbi David Wolpe of the Sinai Temple, I came out to meet them. The evening was fiery with scant meeting of minds. Exile, expropriation and, in some cases, executions have left bitter feelings among the revolution’s Jewish victims, as they have among the more than two million Muslims who have fled Iran since 1979. Abraham Berookhim gave me a moving account of his escape and his Jewish uncle’s unconscionable 1980 murder by the regime.
“Unconscionable?” Cohen throws out the word as a glib attempt to show outrage. But it doesn’t fit with the rest of rosy words to describe the Iranian regime. And while he derides the “taboo-ridden world of American Middle East debate,” Cohen is remarkably silent on the 75,000 Jews who left Iran in the past thirty years. He has studiously avoided mentioning that, focusing instead on the 25,000 who remain as if their presence is a testament to some great openness. In fact it is a reflection of how difficult it is for them to leave.
Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.
What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.
And no doubt it’s pragmatic to threaten a nearby state with annihilation with those very weapons. Come on, is there anything that Iran does that Cohen doesn’t see as a sign of pragmatism?
Cohen argues that the Iranian nuclear program is a sign of its pragmatism. A couple of Iranian dissidents argue that the very fact that the Iranian regime is so extreme is a reason not to trust it with nukes. (I don’t know if I agree with their argument in its entirety.) But here’s the gist of their argument:
Tehran’s nuclear ambitions must be viewed in context. The free world does not fear a nuclear Iran because of the bomb; the world is full of nuclear bombs. People fear a nuclear Iran because of the radical Islamist ideology of those who would be the holders of such a bomb. Nuclear power can embolden a government, and Iran’s ruling mullahs, regardless of their factions and infighting, are united in wanting to stay alive. The “Islamic bomb,” as the so-called moderate Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has proudly called it, can help ensure the survival of the regime.
Those in power in Iran are responsible for terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East, not to mention in Buenos Aires, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. They are fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy and its ensuing individual rights. They still imprison the young for having parties and listening to music and stone women to death for extramarital sex. In the name of God, they persecute religious minorities and imprison mullahs who speak of freedom. They still chant “death to America” at the official sermon every Friday and force children to do the same as part of the school curriculum. Drug addiction is common among large swaths of society. The regime’s oil-rich apparatus is rotted by extremes of corruption and unaccountability. Like communist totalitarian regimes of the past, it seeks to maintain a facade of revolutionary idealism for the outside — particularly for the liberation-hungry Arab world — while its people endure the bitter realities of life under an ideological state.
Since 1979, successive U.S. administrations have “engaged” the Iranian government in negotiations while maintaining a myth of no talks. All the while, Tehran has avoided any real change in behavior. It has amassed greater military might and regional influence, and escalated its repression of the Iranian people and its patronage of Lebanese Hezbollah and anti-Israeli, anti-American Islamist ideology throughout the Muslim world. And along the way, it has managed to convince some on the European and American left of its harmlessness, and even of “Islamic” progressiveness.
Put in that context, Iran’s government doesn’t sound nearly so “pragmatic,” does it? And why do these dissidents live abroad? Is it perhaps because they fear the “pragmatism” of the mullahs?
But in the end (as Roger Simon) noted, Roger Cohen comes back to the same thing. The real extremists are the people who objected to the appointment of Chas Freeman.
That, in turn, will require President Obama to jump over his own bonfire of indignation as the Mideast taboos that just caused the scandalous disqualification of Charles Freeman for a senior intelligence post are shed in the name of a new season of engagement and reason.
For Cohen engagement = reason. But when dealing with unreasonable regimes that equation is non-existent. But no matter how discredited Cohen’s premises are, he persists. He defends tyrants with tiresome but irrelevant platitudes.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.