The Olympics are like Iran

Kevin Drum points out the, umm, unanimity of reaction on the right to Chicago losing its bid for the Olympics:

Ponnuru: Chicago is out of contention….But I’m sure that Obama will be a lot more persuasive with the Iranians.

Miller: Wow, what an embarrassment for Obama. If he can’t work his personal magic with the Olympians, why does he expect it to work with the Iranians?

Lowry: We Can Take Some Comfort….in this distressing hour that the Iranians, Russians, Chinese et al. are push-overs compared to the International Olympic Committee. Right?

It’s true that talking doesn’t always get you what you want. But if we’re using this moment to point that out, I guess we should reverse engineer it. Clearly, the folks at National Review would’ve preferred we bomb the International Olympic Committee until it complied with our demands.

What appeasement isn’t

The Obama Administration will send an emissary to meet directly with an Iranian diplomat to discuss that country’s nuclear program. Predictably, folks on the right are crying “appeasement!” (Do they ever cry anything else?) But here’s a quick lesson: Appeasement is not talking to people. Appeasement is surrendering something to those people that they don’t have any right to have. Like, say, Czechoslovakia. We have to see the results of those talks to know if appeasement happens; the talks, in and of themselves, are not appeasement. Talking is not surrendering. Surrendering is surrendering.

Guess the ‘Islamic’ part of ‘Islamic Republic’ is just a joke

If an “Islamic” regime has to choose between celebrating Ramadan and holding onto power and it chooses power, can we all agree that Islam is the tool, not the purpose, of that regime?

Moral equivalence

This kind of treatment is obviously needed to protect our national security:

“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”

Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall.

The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.

Walling. Sleep deprivation. Stress positions. The threat and implication that even worse forms of pain will result if the suspect doesn’t talk: These are all means of keeping our country safe from attack.

…

Oh, wait. Sorry. These are the techniques Iranians are using to extract false confessions from democratic reformers. Well, then: Torture is bad!

What do Republicans want?

Joan Walsh in Salon, about continuing GOP criticisms that President Obama hasn’t spoken more forcefully against the vote-stealing and violence by the Iranian government:

Sen. John McCain in particular should be ashamed of himself; he really knows better. The callow Eric Cantor may in fact not know better; he’s a camera hog and an opportunist. The Republicans calling Obama “weak” and “passive” have no formula for an effective U.S. reply to the protests. We have no diplomatic relationship with Iran, so we can’t call home our ambassador and staff there. On “Hardball” today, GOP Rep. Mike Coffman said Obama should be demanding a “recount,” as though Iran’s Guardian Council would listen. Even the recount the council completed, which showed that in 50 cities there were irregularities — more people voted than live there — only led the Council to reaffirm the election’s validity.

As it happened, I saw this piece just as Barack Obama began his press conference with another statement criticizing Iran’s leaders:

First, I’d like to say a few words about the situation in Iran. The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.

Seems clear enough, right? Wrong. A conservative friend of mine Tweeted an angry response:

“appalled,” “outraged.” … “Islamic Republic of Iran.” Way to confirm that the mullahs, not the people, run that country, Obama

At some point, I don’t know if Republicans are genuinely outraged about what’s going on Iran or if they’re using any issue they can as a cudgel against the president. It’s hard not to suspect the latter.

So if Obama says he’s angry, Republicans wail and gnash their teeth that he’s not angrier. If he were to beat Ayatollah Khameni senseless with his bare hands, the GOP would complain he didn’t use a baseball bat. If he said the sky is blue, Republicans would be outraged he didn’t sufficiently express his love of the color blue. Or something.

This is politics, and that’s the way it goes, I suppose. But it makes it hard for an observer to know when the GOP and its minions are offering substantive criticisms of Obama, and when they’re just making noise.

Andy McCarthy: President Obama likes Iranian theocracy better than democracy

Andy McCarthy actually gets paid for these opinions at National Review:

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of “social justice,” and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, ”There Is No God but Politics”, comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — “equal rights” and “social justice” are always more rally-cry propaganda than real.

Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely.  That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.

I don’t quite know how to rationally respond to this because I don’t think it’s rational. It’s paranoid and delusional — this idea that the president secretly hates freedom and secretly hates democracy and secretly loves Stalin: Basically, that President Obama secretly hates everything that makes America America. In short: President Obama is evil.

I don’t want or need Andrew McCarthy to like Barack Obama or his policies. I do think that he has a responsibility to confine his critiques to what is provable and knowable about the president instead of spinning out a crazy fantasy that presumes to know the president’s inner thoughts. He’s got plenty of ground to disagree with Obama on what Obama has done without resorting to feverish speculation.

That’s not really McCarthy’s style.

I should be clear here. These assertions that Obama is a secret communist, secret fascist, secret lover of totalitarianism are gutter talk and gutter thinking on the same level as the “Obama is a secret Muslim” crap. And I’d dismiss it except that National Review is one of the leading organs of mainstream conservative thought. If this is what mainstream conservatives write and think, we can only guess and fear at what’s going on with the extremist loons.

Why isn’t Obama making a bigger deal about Iran?

That’s the question, more or less, in my Scripps Howard column with Ben this week. Conservatives have criticized the president for not making a dramatic statement in support of the reformers and demonstrators; I argue that Obama is on the right track:

America is a great country with great ideals, but it has not always allied itself with freedom and democracy. In 1953, U.S. and British agents helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq. That coup empowered a pro-American — and harshly tyrannical — shah who ruled the country with deadly force for nearly three more decades, before the 1979 Islamic revolution chased him from power.

This history is sometimes forgotten in America. It is vividly remembered in Iran — where even moderates continue to view the U.S. with some suspicion.

Which is why President Obama is wise to err on the side of caution when making public statements about Iran. Perhaps a “Reaganesque” statement in support of freedom would inspire that country’s protesters and reformers to throw off the shackles of theocracy. Perhaps.

But it is certain that Ahmadinejad and the conservative mullahs who back him would use Obama’s statement to portray those reformers as stooges of America and the C.I.A. — a charge that could well undermine popular support for Mir Hossein Mousavi, the presidential candidate who stands at the head of the reform protests.

This is not to say the U.S. should be completely passive. Iran’s government is trying to restrict the reporting of western journalists; the Obama Administration should do everything it can to preserve news coverage of the demonstrations there. And the administration has already aided the reformers by persuading the operators of Twitter — a key avenue of news about the protests — to defer maintenance that would have temporarily shut down the “microblogging” site at a critical juncture. Such efforts should continue.

But the proclamation demanded by Obama’s critics could very well strengthen America’s enemies in Iran. The cause of freedom is sometimes best served by restraint, not bluster.

Ben has a more idiosyncratic take.

Twitter and the Iran protests

There’s been a lot of talk in recent days – much of it on Andrew Sullivan’s blog — about how invaluable Twitter has been in enabing Iran’s protesters to communicate with each other and send news of their situation to the outside word. There’s something to it; heck, even the Obama Administration intervened with Twitter to defer some maintenance so the revolution wouldn’t end with a “fail whale.” Matt Yglesias and Jack Shafer have useful counterarguments to all this: Twitter is a good communications device, but it won’t help a revolution succeed if the regime decides to start using guns.

What’s interesting to me, though, is the way Twitter has made consuming foreign news a truly interactive affair for the American audience. In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve seen tons of people “green” their Twitter avatar in support of the demonstrators. Many have used the #iranelection and #cnnfail hashtags to help facilitate — they think — communication or call media to account for its failures of coverage. Many Twitterers even changed their location to Tehran in order to try to throw the regime’s snoops off the track of real Iranians.

What does all this mean? I have no idea.

But 20 years ago this summer, millions of Americans sat at home on their couches and watched the Tianenmen Square protests and massacre. We felt it deeply. But aside from watching the news and perhaps writing a letter to the editor about our anger, there wasn’t much we did or could do.

American Twitterers, meanwhile, have made a personal investment in the Iranian protests. It’s not a huge investment — Americans aren’t risking anything with their support of the protests — but it is real. Perhaps it’s a fad that will soon be forgotten; that wouldn’t surprise me. But it might also augur a new grassroots American engagement in the world that his simply never been possible until this moment. The possibilities are fascinating.

#CNNFail: The lame defenses of CNN’s Iranian election coverage

Something that looks like a revolution — maybe, maybe not — has been taking place in Iran this weekend, but you wouldn’t have known it by watching cable news. While Iranians were marching in the streets, CNN was re-airing an old Larry King interview with the guys from American Chopper. The result? #cnnfail became one of the top trends on Twitter Saturday night, and deservedly so.

Worse than CNN’s lame coverage of Iran has been its lame defense of its coverage. Howard Kurtz — the Washington Post media critic and host of the network’s Reliable Sources show  — has been defending CNN on his Facebook page. And I’ve found myself so irritated by his defenses that, in a rarity for me, I’ve been arguing right back.

It started Sunday morning with this post from Kurtz:

Howard Kurtz: On Reliable, Gregg Doyel calls Twitter the “teenybopperification” of news. Guess he doesn’t know most users are older and (presumably) wiser.

I responded:

Joel Mathis at 11:56am June 14: But… Twitter seems to be more on top of the Iran developments than CNN. Have you seen the #cnnfail trends on Twitter? It seems like a bad day for anybody on the network to mock Twitter’s approach to news.

Kurtz, a few hours later:

Howard Kurtz: I’m not getting the argument that CNN fell short on Iran. Christiane Amanpour has been there and the net has devoted hours to the story.

Howard Kurtz: In fact, CNN stayed with Ahmadinejad’s endless rant this morning long after the other cables broke away.

Other commenters pointed out that the King interview and reruns of Campbell Brown’s show dominated CNN’s Saturday programming in America, not breaking news in a country critical to U.S. security in the Middle East. Meanwhile, CNN International viewers were getting breaking coverage of the Iran situation. I posted another response to Kurtz:

Joel Mathis at 1:00pm June 14: Due respect, Howard, that’s kind of lame. CNN missed most of what was happening in the streets — but hey, at least they spent extra time broadcasting Iran’s “official” version? That actually makes the network look worse, not better.

So, Kurtz started to backtrack.

Howard Kurtz: Maybe CNN should have taken CNNi feed last evening. But it was middle of the night in Iran, and even journalists have to rest sometimes.

(Sigh.)

Joel Mathis at 4:53pm June 14: Howard: I hope I’m not coming across as one of these people who nag you constantly. Not my aim.

But Iranians were on their rooftops at 4 am – their time – chanting “Allahu Ackbar!” in protest. You’re telling me that journalists had to go to bed when the country itself was awake with protest? I’m not a CNN hater. But this might be a good case for CNN to say: “You know what? We kind of fell down on the job of reporting the most important news story of the weekend. Mistakes happen, but we’ll work to prevent a repeat.” I would respect that. It’s difficult to respect the defenses being offered on CNN’s behalf.

And I say that with sincere respect

Another commenter challenged me:

Don Jones: Joel, just curious…what kind of “first hand bureau” reporting by the other 24 Hour News Networks have you seen? And by that I mean not showing the same video loops of rioting taken from Iranian TV or Al Arabia (now banned for a week) or video pulled off the internet…but real life first hand (meaning they shot it, did “stand ups” with demonstrators, talked to opposition politicians) Middle East Bureau reporting.

And my final thoughts, for now:

Joel Mathis at 5:52pm June 14: Don: I haven’t seen better from the other news networks. They’ve all failed, frankly, but it’s no laurel to CNN if it failed a little bit less than its competitors.

And we’re in the 21st century: Aggregation happens. It would be nice to get more bureau reporting from Teheran, but a good fallback is to do what Andrew Sullivan has spent the last 48 hours doing and collecting information and analysis — including video, TV’s lifeblood — and kept his readers pretty well abreast of developments. CNN makes a big deal about reading blogs on air and using “citizen journalists” through its IReport program. It seems like they could apply those lessons to a big important news story like this.

Obama wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. That makes Hitler happy

By now it’s well-established that there’s a certain type of conservative who invokes “appeasement” and World War II so often that it has become meaningless and self-parodic. As if there were any doubt, William Kristol places himself definitively in that camp with his column in today’s Washington Post.

Just taste the first two sentences:

In Prague on Sunday, President Obama committed his administration to putting us on a “trajectory” toward “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Of course, we had a world without nuclear weapons not so long ago — say, in 1939.

Kristol goes on to suggest — with no evidence other than his own suspicions — Obama stands with those who believe the U.S. sinned with its use of atomic bombs at the end of World War II. But that’s a diversion. The real case that Kristol wants to make is that as long as there’s war, the U.S. would be irresponsible to give up its weapons.

Yet to justify a world without nuclear weapons, what Obama would really have to envision is a world without war, or without threats of war. That’s an ancient vision. It’s one reason American presidents have tried to encourage the spread of liberal democracy and responsible regimes around the world.

But we have a long way to go before achieving a world of pacific liberal regimes. George W. Bush’s hope for a world without tyranny is the necessary — though perhaps still not the sufficient — precondition to a world without nuclear weapons.

That’s not true, strictly speaking. The world already recognizes that there are certain acts so horrendous that they are impermissible, even in war. (Torture, for example, though Kristol’s part of the camp that resists limits on the U.S. in this case, as well.) That’s not to say those acts never occur, but they have been singled out and are prosecutable. Nuclear weapons, when used, wreak genocidal levels of death and destruction; one can accept that war will occur and still think that the use of nuclear weapons is always and everywhere a monstrous evil.

Kristol finishes out by suggesting that Obama is hypocritical by not making war and threats of war against North Korea and Iran for their own development of nuclear weapons.

But notice what he didn’t do:

He didn’t say that a nuclear-armed Iranian regime is unacceptable. He didn’t express a commitment to preventing such an outcome, or confidence that the United States and international community would prevent such an outcome. He simply suggested that it wouldn’t be optimal for Iran to choose that outcome. And if the rulers of the Islamic republic disagree? In the very speech in which Obama outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, he weakened America’s stand against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Because, clearly, urging the entire world to give up the use and development of nuclear weapons is an implicit endorsement of Iranian nuclear ambitions. You wonder if Kristol ever listens to himself.

In the end, Kristol would have us choose between a world of unrestrained barbarism or a world of complete and total peace. We know the latter is impossible. The former is all too easy to imagine — and, if Kristol’s views hold sway, all to easy to achieve.