A military attack on Iran in the near future strikes me as extremely risky and potentially devastating. But negotiation with Savonarolas is equally insane. ~Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan manages to combine bad historical analogy (15th century Florence was never anything like a Khomeinist theocracy), historical ignorance and his own contempt for traditional Christianity in one post.  Now if only he could have worked in “Christianist” somewhere, it would almost be his ideal post.  There are a few things about Savonarola that Sullivan (and quite a few other people like him) seems not to know: 1) he personally held no political power, and so cannot seriously be compared to Iranian theocrats; 2) he neither exhorted people to the use of violence, nor did he condone it (he was a Dominican friar, for goodness’ sake); 3) he was a strict moralist and reforming preacher who focused his sermons on the abuses of the Papacy under Alexander VI and the crimes of the Medici, two things which ought to make Savonarola into a kind of hero for someone like Sullivan, who cannot ever get enough of bashing his own hierarchy; 4) he was judicially murdered by his political enemies.  Sullivan manages here to show his ignorance about his own church’s history and conflates, as all anti-traditionalist bigots do, an inoffensive friar who combated moral laxity and political corruption with Muslim clerics who persecute and brutalise every religious dissident in sight. 

He also happens to be wrong about the possibility of negotiating with the clerics in Iran, but that is really secondary to this expression of his own casual contempt for a decent Christian, who was not without his flaws, who attempted to reform the morals and politics of his time through the preaching of the Gospel.  Since Sullivan instinctively views any such attempt as the same as brutal persecution–it is fundamentalist, you see–he literally cannot discern the difference between a friar preaching a sermon and a theocratic state persecuting and killing dissidents.  I submit that, as usual, Sullivan has nothing serious to contribute when it comes to analysing the sanity or reasonableness of theocrats or traditionalists, because he has no sense that there is any difference between the Ayatollah and Savonarola.