Andrew:

But there is a glee with which the Leveretts write about this that I find somewhat callous given the suffering and deaths and torture of so many young lovers of freedom in that imprisoned country.

This is extremely unfair. The Leveretts are not expressing “glee” or anything like it when they say that the regime is not going anywhere. They are acknowledging a reality that far too many Westerners have had enormous difficulty acknowledging.

Iraq war opponents were not gleeful when the political chaos and sectarian violence some of them predicted broke out. We were not pleased when the disaster we opposed unfolded. They were going to draw attention to the mistaken judgments of the people who up until the previous hour had denounced them as so many water-carriers for despotism and agents of foreign governments. The Leveretts are doing no more than re-stating their original arguments and pointing out that all those legions of pundits and bloggers who mocked them were rather impressively wrong on the main questions of the strength and potential of the Green movement and of the endurance of the current regime. Of course, the Leveretts know just as well as everyone else that there is no real accountability in foreign policy commentary. Their basically correct analysis will not make people more interested in their arguments, and the basically flawed analysis of dozens of others will not prejudice the reading public against their arguments in the future.