"A number of writers seem to know exactly what the Iranians in the streets want from us, and what they want is for us to stay out of it. I wonder how many Iranians these writers have talked to. But even if you don’t have Iranian contacts, you can still try to imagine your way into the situation of the protesters. Every day you have to summon the courage to go out into the streets (where the death toll is now reportedly at thirty-two), and your awareness of international opinion is steadily diminishing as Internet and phone access is choked off. A part of your mind is alert to the danger of being labeled an American agent, always a factor in the regime’s propaganda; but given the enormous risks you’re already running, a much larger part of your mind is afraid that the world is going to lose interest or write you off, that the regime is going to stop feeling any international pressure to behave with restraint, and that when the guns start mowing protesters down in earnest, no one will be watching. When the stakes are this high, being the object of too much foreign concern is not likely to be your number one fear." Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer writes: Iran Reveals Us
Iran Reveals Us (2)
from Interesting Times by George Packer
Obama’s carefully chosen remarks about Iran yesterday made just the right points in just the right tone. And not a moment too soon. He said that the U.S. won’t interfere in Iranian politics, but that the violence inflicted on unarmed demonstrators violates “universal values” and demands a response; that the U.S. didn’t monitor the elections and has no direct evidence of fraud, but circumstances and Iranian public opinion seem to point in that direction; that none of this will change current American policy to seek a dialogue with the regime in Tehran. Finally, and most powerfully, he said: “I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days. And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.”
Just when Obama seemed to have fallen a step behind events, he emerged from his silence to do what no politician in our time could have managed: emphasize American respect for Iranian sovereignty and yet, in measured terms, make it clear that the U.S. cannot be indifferent to the tragedy unfolding in Iran. He spoke with calm eloquence to the millions of people who have filled the streets at great risk—spoke to their hopes and their courage. He proved that an American President can lend his voice to “universal values” without sounding like a self-righteous fool. And he showed the emptiness of the eternal argument between realism and idealism. When foreign policy is articulated by a thoughtful politician in the middle of an intense and unfolding drama, the abstractions melt away. It’s actually possible to be pragmatic without being indecent. Why shouldn’t it be?
And yet the crisis in Iran has flushed out all the pathologies of American foreign-policy thinking, or feeling, in the post-Bush era. It’s become weirdly difficult for commentators on both the right and the left to have anything close to a normal reaction to what the world is seeing. Instead, everything gets filtered through what you think about Bush, Iraq, Obama, Israel, and other subjects that have extremely tenuous connections to internal politics in Iran and the actions of the people and the state there. On the one hand, certain neoconservatives and hard-line defenders of Israel (Max Boot, Daniel Pipes) have sounded not in the least sorry about Ahmadinejad’s corrupt re-election, or even come right out and welcomed it, demonstrating that neoconservatism is an offshoot of Leninism in its preference for the morally bankrupt position of “the worse, the better.” (Credit where it’s due: Bill Kristol’s view on the events in Iran is uncharacteristically restrained.) Martin Peretz so despises the Islamic world that he’s convinced himself (going on nothing more than a “sense”) that Iran, contrary to all the evidence, is overwhelmingly Ahmadinejad country.
This is also the view of Peretz’s ideological opposites, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, who twist the facts into a remarkable contortion of perverse interpretations, narrow legalisms, and ill-informed suppositions to prove what they must have wanted to believe from the outset. Why would a pair of dovish realists end up in the same place as a pro-Israel hawk? Because in both cases they want Ahmadinejad to represent the “true” face of Iran—in the Leveretts’ case, because they want the U.S. to negotiate with him; in Peretz’s case, because he doesn’t. Utterly lost are the subtleties, the dynamics, the aspirations of Iranian politics and Iranians themselves. As Stephen Walt, an ideological ally of the Leveretts and mortal foe of Peretz, wrote: “In the end, what really matters is the content of any subsequent U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, not the precise nature of the Iranian regime. If diplomatic engagement led to a good deal, then it wouldn’t matter much who was running Iran.” Unless, of course, you’re an Iranian.
A great many left-leaning pundits have ended up in Walt’s position, which is the classic expression of foreign-policy realism. Commenters on my last post maintained that the only position America, with its inglorious track record of recent years, should take is none at all (presumably they deplore what Obama later said). Spencer Ackerman chides me on different and less reflexive grounds, for not seeing that the Administration’s tip-toeing was motivated by a desire not to imperil the Iranian dissidents with the fatal American embrace. Even if this were true (and the statements that came out of the White House and State Department over the weekend were mainly focussed on American interests, not Iranian demonstrators), it’s not a smart approach to the brutal suppression of a largely peaceful electorate asking that its votes be counted. Anyway, it’s impossible for the U.S. to “stay out of it.” A non-response is itself a response—one of tacit acceptance of the regime’s actions. On Saturday, Ahmadinejad taunted the world by saying that Iran would decide its foreign policy based on how other countries treated the election results. Even from the point of view of cold-blooded self-interest, for the U.S. to have acceded to that kind of blackmail would have been a disastrous impression to give Iran’s rulers. By Monday, American silence had become intolerable, which is why Obama chose to speak.
But I think Ackerman’s view, motivated as it is by a concern for human rights, is wrong in a more fundamental way. It’s true that the Bush Administration’s noisy support for Iranian dissidents put many of them in peril, which is why they told America to keep its seventy-five-million dollars in democracy-promotion money. What we’re seeing right now is a far greater sort of peril. The demonstrators are risking their lives just by being in the streets, and being called agents of America is among the least of their worries, which may be why, in the days since Saturday, more and more of them (and of their Iranian supporters abroad) have been asking the world at least to speak up. Not for one faction of Iranian politics, but for the “universal values” that Obama defended yesterday—the right to a fair election, to peaceful protest, to be spared the baton blows of the state’s thugs:
Popout
It’s remarkable how difficult it’s been for writers of many different ideological persuasions to say that scenes like this (via Andrew Sullivan, the number one source for Iran news these days) are shameful. The reason, of course, has everything to do with the wars of the Bush years, at home and abroad, which have left so many thoughtful people incapable of holding onto the most basic thought. But it’s a mistake to let your attitude toward historic events be shaped and deformed by the desire not to sound like a neo-con, or to sound like a neo-con reborn. Trust the evidence of your eyes.
