Yglesias and Ed Kilgore have already discussed the problems with this Gallup poll on ideological self-identification by ethnic group, and they are right that how many respondents define themselves ideologically has no bearing on how they vote or what policies they prefer. We can see how unreliable these labels are when we look at Gallup’s state-by-state surveys of ideological self-identification and then compare them with state-by-state party ID numbers. There are just five states with significant (+5 or more) Republican party ID advantages, and 33 states where the Democrats have a significant advantage, but if you were to look at the state-by-state result for ideological self-identification you would find that liberals outnumber conservatives nowhere outside D.C. Defenders of the “center-right nation” thesis might be tempted to rejoice at this point, but this just shows how politically meaningless conservative self-identification is in many parts of the country. By party ID and most recently by voting preference, most of the “center-right nation” prefers the center-left party.

Almost 36% of Maine respondents say that they are conservatives, and maybe in some ways they are. However, this tells me that the label has no conventional political or policy content for most of these people, but serves a different function. Using the label conveys how they wish to be seen by others. It is a cultural marker that most of these people are using to describe an attitude or disposition that they believe they have or want to have. It does not signal their agreement with movement conservative arguments, and it definitely does not reveal sympathy for a national Republican agenda. To the extent that people still associate the word with prudence, caution and restraint, they are making more of a statement about their personal habits (or what they would like those habits to be) than they are expressing adherence to an ideology. One reason there is such a disconnect between the number of self-identified conservatives and the fairly constant leftward drift of national politics is that people who are effectively saying they have a conservative disposition do not necessarily share the goals of ideological activists bearing the same name. This is most obviously true of “conservative” minorities who are actually ideologically on the left in their voting and beliefs, but it applies to others as well.

Yglesias and Kilgore focus on the high percentage of blacks identifying themselves as conservatives (29%), but the criticism could be applied just as easily to the numbers for any of the other groups. I have sometimes wondered why so many people identify themselves as moderates. This is the second-largest group among whites, and the largest in all of the other groups. These are the people who make up the political center, but in their voting preferences almost all of the people who say that they are moderates vote for Democrats. Moderate is a label people take on to define themselves in opposition to what they regard as extreme and ideological thinking. They want to convey that they are reasonable, tolerant, open-minded people. Self-identifying moderates assume that to adopt one of the other labels is to commit to rigid, inflexible and unreasonable views. Thus you get four out of ten people adopting the moderate label while the overwhelming majority of them votes quite predictably for center-left candidates. Indeed, the moderate label masks how relatively left of center moderate voters tend to be.

I was thinking about the “center-right nation” claim the other day after I saw an item by David Boaz in which he was touting a poll result that Americans preferred smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services by a hefty 58-38 margin. That sounds impressive until you realize that anyone openly running a sincere campaign for cutting services and shrinking government would not even get 38% of the vote today. People routinely say that they favor fewer government services in the abstract, but they don’t want to eliminate anything that benefits them. Paul Ryan has presented an impressive proposal to balance the budget and essentially eliminate the government’s entitlement liabilities over the long term, but everyone who has looked at it knows immediately that it is a political non-starter. Obviously, one reason why it is a non-starter is that there are simply too many constituencies benefiting from the programs that would be changed by Ryan’s proposal, but another reason is that for at least the last thirty years political conservatives have become steadily worse and worse at persuasion because they have allowed the “center-right nation” myth to make them complacent.

The “center-right nation” story has been something of a curse for conservatives, because it has convinced many of them that the public is automatically and instinctively on their side, and they keep relying on this to provide them with political success. If conservatives recognized that they are not facing a “center-right nation,” they wouldn’t necessarily be able to sell the public on proposals such as Ryan’s, but they would at least understand that they have to persuade a public that does not share their views. They might then realize that the public is not going to reward them simply for showing up and declaring their opposition to the other side.

The message out of the NATO meeting in Bucharest was “as good a deterrence message as voting them into” a formal path to membership, said Hadley. Vladimir “Putin was under no illusions about our commitment to Georgia and our commitment to Saakashvili. We’d been sending Putin a message about Georgia ever since Saakashvili was elected president.” ~Politico

Via Andrew

The frightening thing about this claim is that Hadley probably believes that advancing Georgia’s NATO membership sent a message of deterrence. Of course, it was actually a provocation and was viewed as such in Moscow. Along with the recognition of Kosovo independence earlier that year, the promise made to Georgia in Bucharest was one of the main reasons why Moscow began baiting Saakashvili later in 2008. It was also the promise of future NATO membership that gave the Georgian government the false impression that the U.S. would ultimately come to its aid in the event of a conflict. Had Georgian membership been approved at Bucharest, Moscow would have been even more outraged and Saakashvili would have become even more reckless. It would have changed none of the things that led to the escalation, but it might have required the U.S. to become involved in a conflict in which we had no interest. Had some of the staffers for Cheney and Hadley had their way, there would have been a major international war that could have engulfed Europe and perhaps escalated beyond that.

Hadley apparently cannot grasp that it was the U.S. commitment to Georgia and Saakashvili that made Putin and Medvedev so angry and combative. It’s true that no one in the Kremlin was under any illusions on this score. They regarded our backing for Saakashvili and Georgian NATO membership as an intolerable intrusion and another example of Western encroachment and provocation. Moscow had to put up with these things before, but at the height of the oil boom and before the financial crisis it no longer had to tolerate these provocations.

What is startling when reading this article is how clueless Asmus and Hadley still are as to why the conflict happened and how it might have been avoided. Like so many hawks, Asmus thinks the problem was that NATO did not make Georgian membership even more certain, and he thinks that Bush did not engage in enough threatening bluster. This is foolish, but it does at least acknowledge the possibility that the administration mishandled things. Asmus’ analysis is very wrong, but given his horribly flawed assumptions about foreign policy his argument has some internal logic. Hadley is simply oblivious. He cannot conceive how administration policies created the poor state of U.S.-Russian relations, and he also has no understanding of how our reckless encouragement of Saakashvili and the dangerous projection of our influence into a region in which we have no interests precipitated the crisis in 2008. He refers to the Russian invasion as if it were something that came out of nowhere.

Remember that Hadley was National Security Advisor for several years before this. He was partly responsible for crafting the policies that led to the crisis and the war. The obliviousness on display in this article helps to explain why those policies were so flawed. Be very glad that he and people like him are no longer in government. This reminds us that the differences in the responses of our two main presidential candidates to the war in Georgia were not great as a matter of policy, but they were meaningful. In the end, both fell back on the conventional narrative that put all of the blame on Russia, but what we saw initially was that McCain was an unstable, dangerous person and Obama was at least rational and calm. Had McCain won and a similar crisis occurred, it is easy to imagine McCain authorizing military intervention. Whatever else happens, I don’t think anyone can seriously argue that the United States would be better off with that maniac in charge.

Alex Massie finds Daniel Pipes’ recent call for attacking Iran disgraceful, and he is right about that. What is more remarkable is Pipes’ conceit that Obama could somehow “save” his Presidency by launching yet another unnecessary war of aggression in the Near East. Reviewing the last seven years, we can see that this is simple insanity. After the initial rallying-to-the-flag effect that always occurs, unnecessary wars or wars that achieve nothing are political disasters for the leader and party that pursue them.

Bush launched such a war in Iraq, and within three years his party and his administration were wrecked. They have not yet recovered, and there is no evidence that they have figured out why they lost power. Olmert escalated a minor border skirmish into a major international war, and he attempted to retrieve his government’s political fortunes with another excessive military operation, and he managed to botch both badly enough that he and his party were swept from power shortly after the strikes on Gaza ended. Jose Maria Aznar went against public opinion in his country in joining the war in Iraq and he attempted to exploit a terrorist atrocity provoked by that involvement for political gain. His party was driven out and has remained in the opposition ever since. Were Obama foolish enough to launch strikes on Iran or allow strikes on Iran to be launched by an ally, he would destroy any chance at re-election as the ruinous consequences of that decision unfolded over the next two years.

It is true that a majority of the public supports bombing Iran in the event that Iran acquires a nuclear weapon. This is madness, but it is not entirely their fault. This is a result of the ceaseless fearmongering about a non-existent Iranian threat that Pipes and his allies have engaged in for almost a decade. It is also a result of the public’s lack of understanding of what a war with Iran would mean for our forces in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a complete obliviousness to the economic consequences of turning the Persian Gulf into a war zone. There would likely be some short-term boost in the polls for Obama after the initial attacks on Iranian facilities, but as the conflict dragged on, the price of oil skyrocketed and American casualties rose the public would rapidly lose their taste for it. Nothing would be a more certain ticket to a failed, one-term Presidency than ordering an attack on Iran.

These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process. But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad. ~Steven Kull

Via Kevin Sullivan

The new WPO report released today compares a number of polls taken both within and from outside Iran and considers several important matters: the presidential election, public views of regime legitimacy and the views of the opposition. I have already touched on some of the things WPO learned from their polling done during the late summer of last year, but it seems worth revisiting them as February 11 approaches.

One thing that is consistent across all of the polls is the self-reporting by a clear majority of respondents that they voted for Ahmadinejad. The GlobeScan and WPO polls showed similar numbers for self-reporting Ahmadinejad voters: 56/55%. That is remarkably close to the last pre-election poll result for Ahmadinejad (57%). Obviously, it is significantly lower than the final, official result of 63%, and it is in the difference between the two that we may be able to see the effects of fraud. Self-reporting Mousavi supporters shrink in number over time (32% in GlobeScan, 14% in WPO), and we can see in the WPO poll the respondents who refused to answer more than double. These respondents are likely Mousavi voters who did not want to admit to supporting him. That leaves a hard core of 14% who are still willing to admit that they voted for Mousavi, and even among these half accept Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president and believe the election was free and fair.

If only half of the 14% deny Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy, the movement that is openly opposed to him probably accounts for no more than 6-7% of the Iranian public. Meanwhile, 70% of the public accepts Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president. So when skeptics of the movement have said that it is unrepresentative and small, and when they have argued that Ahmadinejad would have won outright even without cheating, this evidence seems to indicate that they were right all along.

When the official election results came out immediately after voting and on account of other irregularities in the numbers, it was reasonable to assume that there had been some fraud. The main question then was whether the fraud was significant enough to change the outcome of the election. The WPO report’s evidence suggests that Ahmadinejad’s outright victory in the first round of voting was real and that Mousavi’s support, while substantial, would not have been enough to force a run-off.

Why perpetrate electoral fraud when you are already going to win? As in Afghanistan and Russia, the incumbent who already commanded majority support decided to boost his numbers to make the victory even more lopsided. In Ahmadinejad’s case, as the WPO report mentions, his steadily falling poll numbers during the first weeks of the campaign may have been what inspired the effort to commit fraud. Even though the incumbent’s numbers recovered as the election approached, he was already prepared to commit fraud to secure victory if necessary, and carried out the plan even though it now seems that it was unnecessary.

Enthusiastic Mousavi supporters evidently believed that their candidate was going to win, and this conviction grew stronger as the election approached. The report notes that just 18% of Mousavi supporters expected Ahmadinejad to win. This was at the very time that Ahmadinejad was actually regaining support outside Tehran, but the Mousavi supporters had no reliable way of knowing this. The “Green Wave” encouraged them and apparently rattled Ahmadinejad enough to engage in electoral fraud, but Ahmadinejad’s anxiety and the Mousavi supporters’ confidence were apparently equally baseless. As it turns out, Mousavi was never going to force a run-off, much less win the election, but his supporters strongly believed that he would win. There was a moment at the start of June when a run-off might have been possible, but Ahmadinejad managed to pull away in the final weeks. When Mousavi supporters’ expectations were not met, they latched on to the very real fraud that had taken place to explain away the reality of the loss. But even after accounting for the fraud, Mousavi supporters’ expectations were at odds with reality. Not only were his supporters not representative of a majority of the country, but they seem to have had no awareness of what the majority of their countrymen believed.

Looking at the WPO poll again, we see that even among admitted Mousavi supporters (14% of respondents) there is actually limited dissatisfaction with the Iranian political system. Just 27% of Mousavi supporters said that they were somewhat or very unsatisfied with the current system. Overall, just 10% express similar dissatisfaction. 16% of the general public and 42% of Mousavi supporters are dissatisfied with the electoral system specifically. Granted, this poll was taken several months ago. It is possible that opinions have shifted and dissatisfaction may have grown, but from what we see in this report it appears that last July was the low point for the regime. Whether it is because of resignation and disillusionment or for some other reason, even among admitted Mousavi supporters Ahmadinejad has regained ground that he had lost during the first weeks of the protests.

On the matter of Iran’s nuclear program, we should remember that the attitudes of Mousavi supporters do not differ significantly from those of the general public. 37% of them want nuclear power and weapons, while 57% of them want just nuclear power. This is almost identical to the general public’s views (38/55). There is no significant constituency for abandoning the nuclear program all together. Even on the question of enrichment, majorities of the general public and Mousavi supporters oppose giving up enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iranian policy would not have changed significantly had the outcome been different. For our part, the United States should not be defining its Iran policy around an unrepresentative political movement.

But Haass might also be called a principled realist. He believes that diplomatic engagement of repressive regimes must be justified by outcomes. And the benefits of engagement with the Iranian regime have been slim. ~Michael Gerson

It is a pretty low thing to be condescended to by the likes of Michael Gerson. Richard Haass might think about the fact that he is now being complimented by an “idealist” whose speechwriting and rhetoric helped pave the way for aggressive war and torture. This is the sort of person who is now declaring him to be a man of principle. These are the people with whom he has aligned himself.

Of course the benefits of engagement with Iran have been slim. The administration’s policy of engagement with Iran has been a joke. It is no surprise that it has yielded few results. It has been given barely ten months to work, and half of that time has been consumed by the domestic paralysis created by the post-election crisis in Iran. As Leon Hadar has recently argued, “President Obama has failed to devise a coherent strategy for engagement with Iran similar to the one that created the conditions for Nixon Going to China.” In absence of such a strategy, engagement meant nothing and was going nowhere. Gerson’s “principled realists” are people who feigned interest in engagement when it was fashionable and abandoned it as soon as it became controversial. Thirty years of isolation and vilification have completely failed, but engagement must provide results within a year or be found lacking.

Leon Hadar has responded to Haass’ call for regime change in a much more balanced way:

But as someone who is a “card-carrying realist” I find Haass’s recommendation to “promote” — he does not actually call for “doing” — regime change in Tehran as running contrary to any sensible realist viewpoint. As Machiavelli (or your dad) cautioned you, never start a fight — especially with a bully — you are not sure you could finish and win. There are so many “what ifs” involved in any scenario under which the U.S. pursues a policy of regime change in Iran: What happens if Iran retaliates by destabilizing Iraq? What happens if tensions between the U.S. and Iran degenerate into full-scale war? And what happens if the political upheaval in Iran evolves into a bloody civil war?

This appropriate skepticism and caution are remarkably different from Gerson’s fantasies. Gerson writes:

This change [regime change] would not solve every problem between America and Iran — some in the Iranian opposition support their country’s nuclear ambitions — but a more representative regime would certainly be less aggressive, less tied to terrorism and more open to international influence.

There is no reason to assume this. Why is a “more representative regime” going to abandon Hizbullah? Why will it not pursue its interests in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why is it going to be any less assertive in its pursuit of what it perceives to be Iranian national rights? Why will it be any more responsive to international influence if other nations make unreasonable demands that the Iranian public oppose? A “more representative regime” is also a regime that cannot impose policies that a large majority of the population rejects. Gerson’s statement is democratist fantasy on display. It is the flawed assessment of someone who analyzes every foreign policy problem through an ideological lens.

Every time “idealists” such as Gerson speak on such matters, it is necessary to emphasize that everything they have touched has been a disaster for the United States and the alleged beneficiaries of their “idealism.” Whatever the administration decides to do, I hope they do not sacrifice the welfare of the Iranian people to satisfy the fantasies and self-importance of Gerson and his confreres.

My new column for The Week explores why aiding in Haitian recovery is unlike most other interventions.

Bret Stephens has a column (subscription only) on “seven myths about Iran,” which a quick read will reveal not to be myths at all. These are seven propositions with which Stephens disagrees, but in his responses he cannot produce even a minimally persuasive answer to any of them.

He starts with the effectiveness of military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. The myth is is that these would “accomplish nothing.” He then notes that Secretary Gates has said as much and stated that military attack would only “buy time” and “send the program deeper and more covert.” Stephens somehow thinks that buying time is sufficient justification for embarking on an unnecessary military action that would have calamitous consequences for the entire region.

Stephens tries to rebut the idea that military action would rally Iranians to the side of the regime. Even though this is what happens in every military confrontation, especially when the government in question is attacked by other states, Stephens uses what might be the weakest argument I have seen:

The case would be more persuasive if the regime had any remaining claims on Iranian patriotism. It no longer does, if it ever did.

Stephens has evidently acquired magical powers that allow him to know how all Iranians view their own patriotism and whether or not they believe the government has any ability to appeal to that patriotism. This is most impressive. What we have here is an example of a commentator who makes an unfounded assumption about the sentiments of an entire nation based on what he guesses must be their reaction to their government’s treatment of dissidents.

Stephens continues:

It also would be more persuasive if the nuclear program were as broadly popular as some of the regime’s apologists claim.

Well, I don’t know what any apologists claim, but people minimally informed about Iranian public opinion find time and again that a majority of Iranians consistently support a peaceful nuclear program and even more believe that Iran has a right to enrichment (which it does). Consider this passage from a 2006 WINEP report:

Perhaps most telling in this regard is the previously mentioned poll conducted by the ISPA in January 2006. The official Iranian News Agency (IRNA) highlighted only the general finding of 85.4 percent majority support for the resumption of the nuclear program. ISPA revealed, however, that the level of support drops to 74.3 percent in the case of referral to the UN Security Council, and drops further in other scenarios—to 64 percent in the case of economic sanctions and to 55.6 percent in the case of military actions against Iran.

So, it is true that Iranian support for the nuclear program drops as the program leads to increasingly difficult conditions for the country, but what is startling about this finding is that there was still a majority of respondents that supported resuming the nuclear program even if it meant suffering military attack. Obviously, that has some bearing on how the public would respond to military attacks aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Admittedly, that was an older finding. Perhaps things have changed significantly in the last few years? According to WorldPublicOpinion.org, the change has not been all that great. Their September 2009 report states:

Only one-third would be ready to halt enrichment in exchange for lifting sanctions. However, another third, while insisting on continuing enrichment, would agree to grant international inspectors unrestricted access to nuclear facilities to ensure that that there are no bomb-making activities.

Meanwhile, the report states that 22% oppose both possible agreements, which means that a majority (55%)favors continuing enrichment. Is that broadly popular enough? 14% had no answer, so it may be that support is higher. Of course, these results can be misleading. The question takes for granted that there is actually the possibility of making such a deal, trading enrichment for the lifting of sanctions. If Iranian respondents were asked whether they would support giving up nuclear enrichment in exchange for nothing, the numbers would probably look a bit different. An important point to emphasize is that two-thirds of Iranians are willing to make a deal that would ensure that nuclear weapons are not developed, but nearly as many are just as supportive of a nuclear program that does not lead to a bomb.

The reality is that even if Iran made concessions on the nuclear program, this would likely have no effect on existing sanctions. Haass made that perfectly clear in his call for regime change:

Working-level negotiations on the nuclear question should continue. But if there is an unexpected breakthrough, Iran’s reward should be limited. Full normalization of relations should be linked to meaningful reform of Iran’s politics and an end to Tehran’s support of terrorism.

In other words, Iran must yield on every point before it receives anything significant. It seems unlikely that that most Iranians would accept such an arrangement.

Stephens continues:

Yet even if the nuclear program enjoyed widespread support, it isn’t clear how Iranians would react in the event of military strikes.

This doesn’t make any sense. If the program enjoyed widespread support, and Iran were attacked because of that program, the public is not going to blame the Iranian government for whatever results from those attacks. They will quite rationally blame the people attacking them. Even opponents of the nuclear program will find the attack on their country outrageous. We see this all the time. Serbs did not turn on Milosevic when NATO started bombing their country; Lebanese did not turn on Hizbullah regardless of sect; Gazans did not turn on Hamas because of last year’s conflict. Even if people are not motivated purely by national solidarity during wartime, wartime is the least likely time when dissidents can rise up and challenge the government. It is highly unusual for people to reject their own government’s authority when their country comes under attack from outside. Simply as a matter of self-preservation, dissidents will align themselves with their government against the attackers. If there is any example of a popular uprising against a government under attack, Stephens does not provide it. Call it tribal or nationalistic, but this is a natural impulse that people have when foreigners attack them for what seems to be no reason at all.

Stephens adds to his weak “myth”-busting by invoking the downfall of Galtieri after the latter lost the Falklands War, but the crucial point here is that Galtieri oversaw a failed war effort that he started. Of course a nation will turn against a government that starts and loses a war! If there are strikes on Iran, they will be part of a war that Iran did not start. Unless the U.S. could present genuine evidence of nuclear weapons proliferation, Iran would be coming under attack for nothing more than pursuing its legitimate rights under the NPT.

The “myth”-busting doesn’t end there. Stephens challenges the idea that sanctions are ineffective and tend to strengthen the regime. He acknowledges that the regime will find ways around sanctions over time, which basically concedes the main point, but then he says:

But in the critical short term, these sanctions might provoke the kind of mass unrest that could tip the scales against the regime.

This is also something that never happens. As Mousavizadeh made clear in his article, sanctions not only tighten a regime’s grip and destroy the economic and social foundations of any effective opposition, but they definitely do not trigger massive unrest that brings down the government. When a nation experiences the effects of sanctions, they do not associate the inconveniences, shortages and higher prices with what their government is doing. Instead, there is a ready-made target for blame for all their economic woes: the sanctions imposed by foreign governments. The blockade of Gaza has not made the people there rise up against Hamas. In the “critical short term,” Gazans have been terribly deprived and Hamas is as powerful as ever. Sanctions on Iraq did not cause mass unrest in the “critical short term.”

Next Stephens challenges the claim that we can live with a nuclear Iran. Granting the point for argument’s sake, he then holds out the specter of a nuclear-armed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Obviously this is not ideal, but there is no more reason to fear an Egyptian, Saudi or Turkish bomb than there is reason to fear an Iranian bomb. Last anyone checked, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are our allies. As a rule, we are not very bothered when our allies acquire nuclear weapons. Furthermore, if our allies acquired their own nuclear deterrents that could conceivably reduce the need to extend a nuclear shield over the region and it would all but eliminate the need for large deployments of conventional forces in the Gulf.

There are three more “myths” in the column, but this post has already gone on long enough and you already get the picture. Not only does Stephens not have remotely persuasive answers to these “myths,” but his attempted refutations drive home that these “myths” are largely reasonable, well-supported observations about Iranian realities. He is reduced to calling them myths because he has no serious arguments to advance against them.

Andrew:

And next week, we will see their latest battle, against a regime whose legitimacy has gone, whose isolation around the world is deeper than at any time in its history, and whose fate is as sealed as those tyrants in Moscow two decades ago [bold mine-DL].

The courage of Iranian opposition protests is undeniable and extremely impressive. It is all the more so when we realize that these last two claims are not true. The world is not isolating Iran, and the Iranian regime is not obviously doomed. As the Mousavizadeh article from the other day made clear, Iran’s international isolation is not only not deep, but it is also far less effective than it once might have been. As far as I know, no government that had diplomatic relations with Tehran before June 12 has severed them since the crackdown began. To date, there have been no additional sanctions imposed on Iran by any of its trading partners. As Laura Rozen reported yesterday, Japanese mediation efforts on the nuclear issue may be making some progress, and at present Japan remains committed to negotiating a compromise that will avoid sanctions. Neither Iran’s internal repression nor its nuclear program has led to deteriorating relations with new, increasingly assertive powers such as Brazil and Turkey. On the contrary, Brazil and Turkey have forged closer relations with Iran since the crackdown began. Virtually none of Iran’s regional neighbors disputes Ahmadinejad’s election, and none of them has tied the quality of bilateral relations to the regime’s internal behavior.

Despite all that, it could be that the regime could lose control, but this is far from certain. Indeed, it seems to be getting more improbable every day. So how can we say that the fate of the current Iranian leadership is “sealed”? The tyrants in Moscow accepted that their fate was to lose power. On the whole, to the extent that they gave up power, they went quietly. The Chinese and Burmese governments have offered different examples to follow. Following these examples, Iran’s leadership apparently believes it can outlast the protests and remain in power. So far, the opposition has given them and the rest of us little reason to think otherwise.

Why do I bother writing this? It is certainly not because I like the way things are. It is not simply to be contrary. Neither am I interested in assuming the worst about the situation just to do it. The danger in thinking that the regime’s fate is “sealed” and believing, contrary to evidence, that Tehran is isolated in the world is that it encourages misguided policy decisions. If one believes that Tehran is extremely isolated, pursuing sanctions of one kind or another might seem much more practical. It is only when we recognize that Tehran is not isolated and has many partners and allies around the world that we see the futility of going the sanctions route. If one assumes that the regime’s fate is “sealed,” and we just need to wait and watch the collapse happen, that militates against negotiations and engagement, and it encourages hawks to lobby for increased pressure and confrontation to try to push the regime over the edge. Such policies will not only work to the detriment of the people risking their lives protesting against the regime, but they will almost certainly not achieve anything that Washington wants. If we fail to see what is actually happening in Iran because we would prefer to see something else, our government is going to pursue the wrong policy options that will not serve U.S. interests or the interests of the Iranian people.

A new war would explode the myth that Obama’s outreach to the Arabs and pressure on Israel have set the Middle East on a new path. Israeli-Arab wars, this narrative holds, were the kind of things that happened during the Bush years, when the president ignored the peace process and alienated Muslims, and neocons imperiled world peace before breakfast. To have a war unfold in the enlightened, post-Cairo speech era, after dozens of visits by George Mitchell to the region — that would be quite an embarrassment.

How many days — much less weeks — would pass before Obama began criticizing the Israeli operation and refusing diplomatic protection at the UN? ~Noah Pollak

Via Scoblete

There are so many faulty assumptions in this quote. When did Obama ever cite the 2006 war in Lebanon as an example of Bush-era policy failures? As far as I can recall, he never said anything of the kind. What does the possibility of a new war between Israel and Hizbullah have to do with George Mitchell or the Cairo speech? Obviously, Mitchell’s time as special envoy has had no influence on the region one way or the other. The policy he was working to advance never really had the backing of the White House. This is why Walt recently argued that he should resign and go home. As I said soon after the Cairo speech, all mention of Lebanon one way or the other in the speech was conspicuously absent:

While I still think the Cairo speech failed, it failed because significant numbers of persuadable Muslims are not going to be won over by an appeal that urges a sort of satyagraha for the Palestinians at the same time that the bombardment of Lebanon and strikes in Gaza go unmentioned. Obama could have made similar acknowledgments of the costs of these campaigns, and thereby deflected attention from the foursquare backing the U.S. gave to both. Even better, he could have recognized that these campaigns were damaging to American and Israeli interests and benefited no one except for Hizbullah and Hamas, but there was no way Obama was going to say that.

What Pollak does not remember and may be unable to comprehend is that Obama fully supported Israeli military actions in Lebanon and Gaza. He uttered no criticisms of either one. If another war occurred, there is no reason to expect that Washington would pressure Israel to halt its military operations. In 2006 Israel expanded the war to the rest of Lebanon anyway when there was no good reason to do so, and it seemed to make no difference to Obama then. If there were more of a military justification for expanding a war to all of Lebanon, which the placement of Hizbullah’s rockets might provide, Obama would probably be even less inclined to call for a halt to the campaign. If we look at the substance of administration policy in the region, rather than fixate on superficial theatrics and stylistic differences, another war in Lebanon would not be at all surprising. Obama’s reliable support for such a war would be even less remarkable.

Except for a few Obama enthusiasts, who actually believed that the Cairo speech and the administration’s half-hearted efforts on Israel-Palestine had much positive influence on Arab attitudes towards the U.S.? Pollak says that another Israel-Hizbullah war would explode this myth of a “new path,” but no one believes the myth. Indeed, the only people who seem to talk about this idea of a “new path” these days are intellectually lazy hawks who want to have a foil for their poor arguments.

But although the opposition has lost some well-known leaders, their return to the fold represents a hollow victory for Khamenei. Notwithstanding their recent opportunism, these figures remain part of the fanatical old guard of Iranian society. Despite attempts to repackage themselves publicly, they symbolize fundamentalist Shiism and intolerant nationalism, rather than lasting transformation and the hope for a better future. ~Prof. Jamsheed Choksy

Had someone said seven months ago that the Green movement would no longer be able to count Khatami, Karroubi, Rezai and Rafsanjani among its supporters or sympathizers, and had someone said that by early 2010 Mousavi will have significantly watered down his demands, this would have been denounced by pro-Green commentators as a cynical or even “pro-regime” argument. Now we are treated to a sympathetic interpretation of all of these setbacks. We are meant to believe that losing practically every prominent political figure of any importance is really a boon for the Green movement. Now that they’ve cleared away all the dead brush of the old guard, the movement can really start making some headway! Why does this not seem persuasive?

Prof. Choksy refers to the “recent opportunism” of all of these figures, and this is right. These men were playing the part of opposition leaders or at least sympathetic supporters when they thought there might be something gained in doing so. As the fortunes of the movement have grown worse, the opportunists have been abandoning it or distancing themselves from its more outspoken members. As the regime has cracked down harder, the movement has started splitting along the fault lines that existed within it from the beginning. Regime-approved reformers and Khomeini-era functionaries who found common cause with the protesters in opposing Ahmadinejad’s victory have now started returning to full support for the regime. If these are hollow victories, the Green movement probably cannot afford to let Khamenei have many more.

When skeptics of the movement’s significance pointed out that Mousavi et al. were deeply compromised by past involvement with the regime and not meaningfully different in their policy views from Ahmadinejad, their arguments were sometimes met with angry rebukes from movement sympathizers. How dare Obama say that Mousavi and Ahmadinejad weren’t very different! Having spent much of the last seven and a half months insisting that it really would have made a difference had Mousavi won and been permitted to take office, movement sympathizers are hastening to remind us that Mousavi et al. wouldn’t have represented any meaningful change from the past.

Prof. Choksy claims that the reason these old regime hands are now giving up on the movement is that they did not want to “risk being swept aside by the wide-ranging changes the movement’s success would usher into Iran.” Put another way, we now see that several major political actors in Iran, whose alienation from Khamenei and the regime was readily taken as proof of the regime’s crumbling legitimacy, have chosen to defend the status quo rather than take their chances with whatever a successful protest movement might create. If we took their alienation to mean that the regime was weakening, their reconciliation with the powers that be has to be seen as a real win for the regime. In order for the movement to broaden its appeal and advance towards some significant political change in Iran, it cannot afford to lose the former regime loyalists that it once had. On the contrary, it needs to be winning over more of these loyalists and convincing the loyalists that the movement is a not a threat to their interests. Instead we see almost all of their main leaders have decided that the movement does not serve their self-interest. Is this the picture of a movement going from strength to strength? It seems increasingly clear that it is not.