More Anti-Iran Propaganda

The propaganda machine pushing for the U.S. to "do something" about the freedom-hatin' Iranians kicks it up a bit today, with not merely one--but two op-ed pieces in the Washington Post.

The first, by the odious Anne Applebaum, is about a web site that catalogs thousands of political victims of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Applebaum's writing can only be justified to any literate person as being an affirmative action program on the part of the Post. 'Nuff said.

The second, is from the pen of our old friend, the ace op-ed man David Ignatius. I stopped sending him copies of my "appreciations" of some of his work, when he didn't have the courtesy to respond with even the briefest GFY to one of my classic pieces.

Ignatius is his usual moderate self today, restraining himself from the all-out call for war that his "people" may have wished him to craft.

How should the United States think about Iran? What explains the fanaticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and what can America and its allies do to change it?

These baseline questions are at the heart of an informal review of Iran policy that's taking place at the highest levels of the Bush administration. The discussions, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley, are an effort to anchor America's opposition to the Iranian nuclear program in a broader strategy. The goal is not simply to stop the Iranians from making a bomb but to change the character of a regime that under Ahmadinejad has swerved onto a new and dangerous track.

Why is it our duty to change the Iranian leader's fanaticism?

Rice and Hadley recognize that the United States carries a lot of baggage in its dealings with Iran. They want to avoid, if possible, a situation that appears to be a Bush vs. Iran confrontation. The administration decided last year to work the nuclear problem through the European Union countries negotiating with Iran -- Britain, France and Germany -- in part to avoid making America the issue.

The master of the understatement shows his hand.

Now to the whole reason for his piece:

A key question for U.S. officials is how to assess Ahmadinejad's radicalism.

National security types are often uncomfortable with anything harsher than Joe Lieberman style whining.

Now the geo-political hat comes on:

An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who is an expert on revolutions. He argued that Iran wasn't conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton's famous study, "The Anatomy of Revolution," which argued that initial upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. Instead, Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called "the return of the radicals." Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the Russian and Chinese revolutions -- with Stalin's purges in the late 1930s and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict.

The gist of Goldstone's analysis gradually percolated up to Rice, Hadley and others. What has intrigued policymakers is the argument that Ahmadinejad's extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction -- much as the Cultural Revolution in China led to the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. Officials see signs that some Iranian officials -- certainly former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and perhaps also the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- are worried by Ahmadinejad's fulminations. Unless the Iranian president moderates his line, wider splits in the regime are almost inevitable, officials believe. They also predict that his extremism will be increasingly unpopular with the Iranian people, who want to be more connected with the rest of the world rather than more isolated.

The above would be fine if the policy recommendation was to simply sit back and let what's going to happen naturally occur. That's never the plan with the architects of the national security state. The minimum involvement would have to involve CIA covert action, because doing nothing (the way of Tao) would be un-American.

Getting Iran policy right is the biggest foreign policy challenge of the new year. Ahmadinejad's wild statements have had the beneficial effect of concentrating the minds of policymakers, who in the past have often differed over Iran and have had trouble framing a formal policy. Officials don't yet have a clear strategy that could bend Iranian radicalism back toward an acceptable norm, but they're assessing the tools that might work. This time they are looking carefully -- and thinking seriously -- before they leap.

That's what all the propaganda buzz is about. Part of the "assessing the tools that might work."