The American Conservative

But the almost exclusive focus on what Ahmadinejad does has been misplaced, because all the evidence indicates that it is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad, who is directing Iranian foreign policy.

Despite Ahmadinejad’s clever exploitation of the nuclear issue to strengthen his domestic political position, he is a second-stringer on the issue. As David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, the most experienced non-governmental expert on Iran’s nuclear program, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty immediately after his election, Ahmadinejad “doesn’t have much to do with the nuclear issue.” Albright observed that the policy on Iran’s nuclear program is run by the Supreme National Security Council “directly under the supreme leader.” ~Gareth Porter, Antiwar.com

As with so many other things related to Iran, the hysteria over Ahmadinejad has been focusing on the sensational rhetoric of the elected front man while entirely ignoring the supreme authority in the country. There is a convenient assumption that “the mullahs” and “the ayatollahs” must share not only Ahmadinejad’s convictions but also his combative temperament. This is, I’m afraid, to conflate the the sensibilities and attitudes of a Richelieu and a Thomas Muentzer. Conservative clerical authorities and common demagogues might make tactical alliances when it suits them, and they might both be committed to some of the same general goals, but they are fundamentally different types of people with entirely different priorities.

What obtuse pundits typically miss is that Ahmadinejad was originally the anti-regime candidate, the representative of poor Iranians fed up with the mismanagement, corruption and anemic economy of the current authorities. Rafsanjani was the Ayatollah’s preferred candidate. Khamenei could very well see Ahmadinejad as a political threat to be handled and contained, and has allowed this bellicose rhetoric because it serves to deflect attention away from the economic “reformist” reasons why Ahmadinejad was elected in the first place. Ahmadinejad is useful for making all the right nationalist noises, but real policy will be decided by those with a much more long-term stake in the Iranian regime’s survival.

It’s been more than three weeks since a Darfur peace accord was signed, bringing hope for an end to the genocide in Sudan’s western territory. Since then the news has been terrible. The two rebel factions that refused to sign the peace deal have continued to snub it. Violence between rebel factions has generated blood-curdling attacks on civilians. Human Rights Watch has reported fresh evidence of atrocities committed by government-backed Janjaweed death squads across the border in Chad. The cash-strapped U.N. World Food Program has been forced to reduce the already meager rations it distributes to 6 million Sudanese, including 3 million in Darfur. And Sudan’s government has waffled on the crucial question of whether it will allow in an expanded peacekeeping force, without which violence, hunger and mass death are likely to continue. ~The Washington Post

One wonders whether the rebel groups committing atrocities against the other’s civilians are committing genocide. I don’t want to be flippant about something so grim and serious, but ultimately what distinguishes the massacres and brutality of the rebels from the massacres and brutality of the Janjaweed? These things are all atrocities and war crimes, but are they “acts of genocide”? Clearly they are not. If they were, and if every side is committing genocide under the exceedingly loose definition of the genocide convention, what can the term possibly mean anymore except to say that everyone is fighting and killing?

I don’t want to beat this into the ground, but it is a little perplexing to me what makes the conflict in Darfur a genocide when the seven-nation Congo War in central Africa from 1998-2003 (with some lingering conflicts still flaring up from time to time) that caused the deaths of somewhere between 3 and 4 million people from violence, disease and famine barely registered on anyone’s radar. If you didn’t read The Economist or newspapers from Africa itself, you would have almost never heard of it. That seems to tell us something else about what makes something a genocide in the Western mind: if we have seen it in the media, and it has been sensationalised, it may be a genocide. If it is not on TV, it probably isn’t.
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Last year, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United Nations reiterated its founding promise–Never Again. Unfortunately, it has been an empty promise. Countless genocides have occurred on the UN watch. After much hand-wringing over its failure to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the UN repeated the promise. Yet twelve years later, the world finds itself in a now familiar situation–staring genocide in the face as the UN sits paralyzed by its less humanitarian members. ~Jason Barnes, Brainwash

The thrust of Mr. Barnes’ article is predictable enough: the liberals want to save Darfur, but are too inured to U.N. processes and must now recognise that they have to go outside the U.N. This is supposed to be a great conflict for good Bush-hating liberals, as it forces them to acknowledge their “slide” towards neoconservatism, but there is no slide going on. They’ve been living in the swamps of humanitarian interventionism for a long time already. This is nothing new for liberals–they had no worries about ignoring the U.N. process when their man was intent on bombing Yugoslavia (again to stop an even more fictitious “genocide” in Kosovo), and if they had one of their own in power they would be only too happy to cheer on bombs and mayhem for humanity.

Update: Norman Singleton at LRC Blog takes a similar view of the Barnes article.
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For many years, American scholars believed the Orthodox were, like leprechauns, unicorns, and Eskimos, purely the product of the fanciful imaginations of medieval writers. Recent evidence leads us to tentatively conclude, however, that Eastern Orthodoxy may have somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 million adherents. Protestants tend to see the Orthodox as “Catholics with beards,” while Catholics confess to a haunting sense that they are simply “Orthodox without beards.” ~Holy Office

Via The American Scene

Also at this blog, whose style could best be described as theological comedy, is the Internet Theologian’s view of The Da Vinci Code.

Clark Stooksbury marks Chesterton’s birthday today and remembers Russell Kirk’s words of admiration for Eugene McCarthy. Bill Kauffman reflects on the perversion of meaningful holidays into Three Day Weekends and considers the problem of exporting regional cuisine. (On a related note, see Clark Stooksbury’s post at his own blog on Memorial Day here.) Dan McCarthy posts on Dorothy Day and links to Dwight Macdonald’s essay about her and the Catholic Workers.

I sat within a valley green
Sat there with my true love
And my fond heart strove to choose between
The old love and the new love
The old for her, the new that made
Me think on Ireland dearly
While soft the wind blew down the glade
And shook the golden barley

Twas hard the mournful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
Ah, but harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, “The mountain glen
I’ll seek at morning early
And join the brave united men”
While soft wind shook the barley

Twas sad I kissed away her tears
Her arms around me clinging
When to my ears that fateful shot
Come out the wildwood ringing
The bullet pierced my true love’s breast
In life’s young spring so early
And there upon my breast she died
While soft wind shook the barley

I bore her to some mountain stream
And many’s the summer blossom
I placed with branches soft and green
About her gore-stained bosom
I wept and kissed her clay-cold corpse
Then rushed o’er vale and valley
My vengeance on the foe to wreak
While soft wind shook the barley

Twas blood for blood without remorse
I took at Oulart Hollow
I placed my true love’s clay-cold corpse
Where mine full soon may follow
Around her grave I wondered drear
Noon, night and morning early
With aching heart when e’er I hear
The wind that shakes the barley

This old Fenian song, which has one of the most moving melodies of any Irish song, came back to me (it is one of the songs I learned as a teenager) when I saw that a movie by the same name had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Hat tip to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria

Although sanctions would not be directed “at the country or people of Iran,” the measures “can be expected to bear second-order consequences for the people of Iran,” according to a footnote on a Treasury Department task force memo sent to Rice last month. ~The Washington Post

Iraq sanctions supposedly weren’t directed at the people of Iraq, either, but enough of them died thanks to “second-order consequences” of poverty, malnutrition and disease.

At the heart of the issue lies the Iranian regime’s aspiration to become a hegemonic Islamic and regional power and thereby position itself at eye level with the world’s most powerful nations. It is precisely this ambition that sets Iran apart from North Korea: Whereas North Korea seeks nuclear weapons capability to entrench its own isolation, Iran is aiming for regional dominance and more. ~Joschka Fischer, The Washington Post

Let’s assume for the moment that Mr. Fischer is right that Iran aims for regional dominance. Will acquiring nuclear weapons give it regional dominance? I suppose it depends on the region we are talking about. In what is properly called the Middle East, Iran faces Pakistan, which has a greater population, larger army and much more established and developed nuclear arsenal than Iran. Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will not make it the dominant power to its east. Meanwhile, to its north Iran faces Russia and what are increasingly her satellites (try as Washington may to make them into our satellites), backed up by one of the two greatest nuclear arsenals on earth. Dominance to the north is not really a danger. The idea of a threat to Europe from Iran is the product of some European paranoia.

To the west and south, Iran might seem to have more options, except that the one country whose domination Western nations actively worry about, namely Israel, has more than enough in its own arsenal to match and deter any Iranian threat. The current Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government, such as it is, has welcomed Iran’s development of its nuclear program–if Iran is set for regional domination, the Iraqis seem much more sanguine about it than we do, yet they ought to be the ones who are most concerned about being dominated. If the Turkish government has made a great deal of noise about Iran’s nuclear program, I must have missed it.

So what are Western governments really concerned about? There is the fear that Iranian nukes would allow it to dictate terms to Saudi Arabia and thus achieve some greater control over oil exports, which brings up two questions: is American hegemony in Arabia as important for U.S. security as current policy makes it out to be, and are “we” willing to see the Saudis develop their own bomb in response? But it is nonsense to speak of Iranian “hegemonic aspirations” in a vacuum, as if no other state has hegemonic aspirations of its own. The question is not, as Mr. Fischer put it, whether the U.S. or Iran will dominate the Middle East, but whether the U.S. will insist that Iran cannot be on par with several other Middle Eastern powers as part of the maintenance of its own domination. The real question Americans should be asking is whether maintaining our hegemony throughout the Near and Middle East is worth the wars we are being compelled to fight to enforce it. It seems clear to me that the answer is no.

Cathedrals narrate the centuries that build them. Medieval structures reflect a unified and cohesive worldview marked by symmetry. God is One, a Unity discerned in the unifying, unchanging principles of mathematics. Seeing God manifest in the underlying coherence of sacred geometry, masons felt privy to the secret knowledge of the divine architect of the universe. ~John Desjarlais, “Deconstructing the Cathedral,” The New Pantagruel

A profounder liberal criticism is made by those who say that the health of the western empire is shown by the extent of dissent against [the Vietnam] war. They maintain that only the traditions of the West make such dissent possible and that the possibility shows us the essential goodness of liberal society. This argument turns on a judgement of fact–an extremely difficult one. Does this dissent in the West present a real alternative of action, or is it simply froth on the surface which is necessary to the system itself as a safety valve? I am not sure. I lean to the position that dissent on major questions of policy is impotent and that the western system has in truth achieved what Michels called “the bureaucratising of dissent.” ~George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” Technology and Empire

When I read this the other evening, blogging immediately came to mind. (Grant would likely have viewed the entire phenomenon of the mass Internet with some dread, seeing in it further encroachments of the “religion of progress” on normal, sane life. Blogging would be an ultimate expression of that encroachment in some sense.) But on the more specific point of dissent, Grant would likely see political blogging as precisely this sort of release of built-up pressure into harmless diversionary channels, irrelevant samizdat for the allegedly “open society” in which the range of debate extends between two (or possibly three in a really exciting society) alternative methods for achieving the same bland, inhuman goals of the managerial social democratic and state capitalist structures. Unlike printing samizdat, blogs do not operate as a genuinely alternative source of news and information in direct opposition to official news outlets, but rely heavily on “the MSM” that we bloggers all love to hate and end up generally replicating the patterns of that media and feeding off its information for our own. It is only to the extent that blogging provides a venue for genuinely alternative or opposition voices that it can be a forum for generating moderately effective resistance to any given policy.
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