So according to Michael Ledeen, Mohammed Khatami, the former prime minister of Iran, is analogous to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Quoth Ledeen, on Khatami’s upcoming visit to the United States: “Would FDR have given Goebbels a visa while the Reich was attacking Czechoslovakia?” If Khatami–you know, the “dialogue of civilizations” guy–is Goebbels, what does that make Ahmadinejad? Hitler? Super Hitler? Super-Duper Hitler? (OK, OK, Khatami and Ahmadinejad are political foes, but we’re playing by Ledeen’s rules here.) A wise man once wrote that Hitler is dead, but he apparently neglected to anticipate the rise of Extra-Strength, Protein-Packed, Gamma-Irradiated Hitler. ~Spencer Ackerman, The Plank

More to the point, if Khatami is today’s Goebbels, what country is playing the role of Czechoslovakia in this fantasy?  Lebanon?  Israel?  Does it really matter when you’re barking mad and see Nazis everywhere?  Also, to play out the analogy fully, that would mean that Mr. Bush is Chamberlain and must have “capitulated” to Iran/Germany at the U.N./Munich.  I guess if you take no account of the radically different contexts and international political scenes, the comparison is flawless.

As it happens, I happen to agree that granting Khatami’s visa to go a-roaming around the country was a mistake, but not because he is the second coming of Goebbels or because this “coddles” Tehran, which is in no danger of being coddled or even negotiated with by this administration.  It is typical that the interventionists, who berate their adversaries for wanting to build “Fortress America” and engage in “isolationism,” are terrified at the prospect of any foreign leader of whom they disapprove even setting foot in this country; I do not recall their lamentations and wailings over Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington being nearly this strained and fanatical. 

Allowing Khatami’s visit is a mistake for the same reason that it was a mistake for the Episcopalians to ask him to National Cathedral (in all seriousness, and without wanting to insult any actually faithful Episcopalians who may be reading the blog, is there anything that these sorts of Episcopalians get right anymore?).  Whatever else you might say about him, he presided over a regime that persecuted every kind of religious minority, so to have him come and speak on matters ecumenical is not simply offensive but is in itself deeply perverse.  As it is not a state function, but an entirely private tour, Khatami will not be here in an official capacity, nor will he be in any position to negotiate on anything, so that his visit does not represent an opportunity for an opening to Iran, which might justify allowing his visit, but manages to achieve nothing concrete while indulging Khatami and his liberal well-wishers in his PR campaign and their delusions of religious dialogue. 

Someone will have to explain to me how liberals in this country, who supposedly find the onset of theocracy in America to be very real and very scary, see Khatami as a sort of friendly, bearded professor of religion who has come to offer his wisdom rather than the theocrat that he is.  I don’t use the term theocrat pejoratively; it is not his theocratic tendencies as such that offend.  In my view, it is much harder to defend the proposition that serious religious believers should not implement their religious vision in the community than that they should and indeed must.  But the theos he worships and the religion he and his impose on Iran coercively do offend.  I would be inclined to let Iranians concern themselves with the problems of Iran, but if we are going to have an Islamic theocrat come to this country I think we can plainly say what we think of the man’s Islamic revolution and his form of Islam itself. 

Of course, this is the last thing that is really on the minds of the interventionist critics of Khatami’s visit; the visit offends them not because it may help to spread a false impression about Islam as the “religion of peace,” but because it empowers some mythical “Islamofascism” and makes the hegemon look weak.  Power, not truth, is what interests these people (obviously), and you can tell this by the enthusiasm with which they embrace this heinous neologism Islamofascist.  I wonder: given the penchant for the Sovietisation of language that these people have, how long before we go from accusations of appeasement and anti-Semitism to the natural conclusion of all this “fascist” talk?  How long before their opponents are declared to be “objectively Islamofascist”? 

Presumably if a leader with as appalling a “human rights” record as Khatami has came here (like, oh, I don’t know, Hu Jintao!), but was someone who could not readily be aligned with fascists of one sort or another (unless you are of the very real “ChiComs are fascists now” school of fascist-obsession), you would hear few complaints from the usual suspects.  Very soon the Kazakh autocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev will be received at the White House and hosted by Bush at the family digs in Maine, but, you see, he is a good autocrat, a happy autocrat, and one of ours, so all will be well.  When Secretary Rice hosted the infamously corrupt and despotic President Nguema of Equatorial Guinea (the one Mark Thatcher allegedly tried to have overthrown by a small army of mercenaries two years ago), I’m also quite sure this had nothing to do with the lake of oil beneath his tiny country, but was based in his deep and abiding respect for the norms of democracy. 

In Nazarbayev’s case, he will be received as a guest of the President, and Nguema was hosted by the Secretary of State; Khatami will be the guest of some private liberal talking shops.  But which is the one that is driving the supposed friends of “freedom” absolutely crazy?  Of course, one can justify Nazarbayev’s visit by acknowledging that virtually every Central Asian state is a despotism of one kind or another (Kyrgyzstan is a tribal society with a nice democratic veneer) and that the Kazakh despotism has been on “our” side over the past many years and that this serves some grander scheme that is allegedly all to the good.  Relations with the hideous Nguema might be seen as a necessary evil to diversify our sources for oil.  But it becomes increasingly difficult to moan and lament about the repression of Tehran while hosting the dictator from Astana or cultivating security and economic ties with such humanitarians as Turkmenbashi the Great, known in his mere mortal form as Saparmurat Niyazov (who is a solid 18 on a scale of lunacy from 1 to 10), after our relationship with our last protestor-murdering despot, Islam Karimov, got a bit rocky.  

I am not some fantasist who believes that international relations will involve alliances only with saints and “reformers,” and I fully expect that we have to deal with ugly regimes all the time, which is why the refusal to even talk to Iran strikes me as the height of fantastic idealism.  Moreover, to listen to the interventionists tell it you would think Iran was the only despotism in the area (and, I would hasten to add, the specifically democratic elements of that despotism have tended to reinforce the worst in their system, rather than alleviate it) and that allied states, such as Saudi Arabia, do not engage in precisely the same kind of repression of religious minorities that Iran does.  “Human rights” deeply concern these people, provided they can be used as a pretext for war or interference in the internal affairs of a country whose government they despise for other reasons, but are otherwise neither here nor there.  That is worth bearing in mind when enduring the screeching of pundits about Khatami’s visit.     

But inviting Khatami is precisely the sort of thing I have come to expect from ecumenism and “outreach” efforts from liberal Christians of all confessions, who somehow manage to see only Rumi and Ibn Arabi when they look at Islam and somehow manage to see only oppression and Inquisitors when they look at their traditionally-minded fellow Christians.  The entire enterprise of ecumenism as it is now constituted is one dedicated not to truth or even reconciliation nor even good relations between religions and confessions within Christianity, but simply a pose of tolerance and “making nice” with the Other on the assumption that the gravest religious error that has ever been made was to look askance on those of different religions.  In fact, one of the worst errors is to confuse those who use the whip and the knout with those who preach peace and reconciliation or to indulge a basically unreasonable Muslim cleric to justify your own myths about the reasonableness and peacefulness of Islam-in-the-abstract.