When your op-ed begins with a tired neo-con cliché you know you're scraping bottom
Friday, October 02, 2009
That's in response to this op-ed that begins with the sentence When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom. It comes from a tired cliché trumpeted during the Bush years that France is somehow supposed to be the epitome of weakness and appeasement (and thus anyone seemingly weaker than France must be weaker than weakness itself), a country that does anything to avoid a fight and usage of its military. Oh, except when they have 3,700 troops in Afghanistan. And a force in Côte d'Ivoire. And troops in Haiti. And a few hundred in Lebanon. And the largest military in the EU. Time to take an axe to this sorry excuse for a column.
(the basic argument by the way is that Obama isn't tough enough)
In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogatedWrong - the original plan wouldn't have taken effect until 2017, and the new one to deploy sea-based interceptor missiles will take effect in 2011, and is designed to protect Europe. Whether the new system is even needed is a matter of debate, but there is certainly no selling out here.
More complaints on what Russia does in return:
we get from Russia . . . what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authorityNope - in the first week alone they got from Russia a scrapping of their plan to deploy missiles in Kaliningrad. Looks like somebody missed that.
He then goes after the Obama administration for its "feel-good posturing":
all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.Sure it is. Except when Iran agrees to send its enriched uranium to Russia to be turned into fuel there, significantly reducing its ability to quickly make a nuclear weapon.
Then a statement on the situation with Iran as being "the most serious security issue in the world." Really? More serious than nuclear Pakistan's fight with terrorists that have every intention of acquiring and using the nuclear weapons the country owns?
This is not an isolated incident either - here's another column (among many, many others) saying pretty much the same thing, also from the Washington Post. The gist of that column is that it's time for the President to begin acting like a president (in other words, less diplomacy and more bombing more stuff).
And who wrote that column? Richard Cohen. He's the guy that acted as a cheerleader for the Iraq War as well before its inception and later admitted (in 2008) that he had been completely wrong in his assessment. But for some reason he must be right this time, even though negotiations with Iran are looking anything but hopeless.


What is of crucial importance is that no new sanctions are enacted on Iran that could damage the middle class. The reason for this is very simple: the stronger the middle class and the more access to technology Iranians have, the better. In 2005 when Ahmadinejad was elected only 9 million Iranians had access to the internet; this is now 23 million in 2009 (out of a population of 66 million). Mobile phone ownership also jumped from 40% to around 75% today, and it is thanks to this that we have been able to see so many images and videos of events inside Iran in spite of the efforts by the authorities to stop them. Even if Ahmadinejad's government manages to survive a full second term, without a serious change in the way elections are conducted 2013 will see record low turnout, and more and more Iranians online that will be able to show the election to be a farce if the next one is conducted as the same one in June this year.
So in short: it's time to chill. Iran is not a threat, the opposition continues to protest against the illegitimacy of the current government, and negotiations appear to be moving along quite well especially with the aid of Russia, which is one of the only countries in the world that has any real clout with Iran. And there's no reason to worry about Ahmadinejad's government being strengthened by successful negotiations, because 1) Iranians aren't protesting about the nuclear issue anyway; 2) successful negotiations are good for the US as well regardless of which government is in power; 3) Mousavi and Karroubi were also for negotiations with the US with the end goal of securing a solution for Iran where it would be able to produce nuclear energy, so this isn't an issue that they couldn't have solved themselves anyway.
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