fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

What Split?

The outlines of that split don’t strike me as entirely clear, with old allies deeply disagreeing and Buchanan not exactly where you’d expect him. But if anybody’s got a lucid interpretation, send it my way. ~Ben Smith The disagreements among the “old allies” Smith notes aren’t really that deep, and Buchanan is pretty much exactly […]

The outlines of that split don’t strike me as entirely clear, with old allies deeply disagreeing and Buchanan not exactly where you’d expect him. But if anybody’s got a lucid interpretation, send it my way. ~Ben Smith

The disagreements among the “old allies” Smith notes aren’t really that deep, and Buchanan is pretty much exactly where one would expect him to be. Supporters of Mousavi on the American right and those who preferred to mock the entire exercise as a sham from the beginning are not very far apart at all. The former believe that there was a slight chance for some democratic change, however small and superficial the differences between the candidates, and because they remain wedded to embarrassing democratist enthusiasms of the past decade they are committed to backing the relatively more “pro-Western” side just as they did during the “color” revolutions. The latter believe that the fix was always in because they narrowly judge everything about Iran through the lens of Iran’s foreign policy and nuclear proliferation. Because Mousavi did not differ significantly on these questions from his rival, they regard the election as meaningless, they regard the conventional distinctions between Iranian hard-liners and moderates to be equally meaningless, and they laugh at the idea that the Iranian regime had any “real” democratic element at any time since the revolution.

Most of those Smith mentions share the same goal, however, which is to oust Ahmadinejad and ultimately to bring down the current Iranian regime, which pretty much all of them regard as an intolerable and major threat. The hawks want to hasten what they see as the collapse of the regime from within, which they think will happen faster if Ahmadinejad remains in power, while most of the others seem to be content with gushing sentimentally about people power and waxing nostalgic about 1989.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here