The Iran Narrative: Searching For Black Hats And White Hats

By Steve Hynd

Steve Benen notes the number of conservative voices raised in praise of Obama's carefully incremented approach to the current turmoil in Iran and writes:

we're not dealing with a dynamic that pits the left vs. the right, or Dems against Republicans. Rather, this is a situation featuring neocons vs. everyone else.

You'll notice that President Obama's strategy has not only been endorsed by Democratic lawmakers, but also prominent Republicans who are in office (Dick Lugar), served in Republican administrations (Henry Kissinger, Gary Sick, and Nick Burns), or are prominent Republican voices in the media (George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Pat Buchanan).

The president's leading detractors, meanwhile, primarily come from a motley and discredited crew who cling to neoconservatism -- McCain, Graham, Kristol, Krauthammer, Wolfowitz.

When we see reports indicating that "Republicans" are outraged by the president's tack on Iran, let's not forget it's mostly just a certain part of the party.

Meanwhile, John Cole quips:

�Today on face the Nation, John McCain, and he is not happy with the President�s response to Iran.�

Fifty bucks says that Schieffer won�t be bothered to mention �Bomb bomb bomb Iran� when we learn how much McCain cares for the Iranian people.

There's apparently some folk who'd make a case that the neocons are a spent force and we shouldn't worry what they think. But I'd reply that the Republican Party at the moment doesn't have a foreign policy vision other than the neocon one, and that folks like McCain, Krauthammer, Kristol et al have plenty of available bully pulpits in the media to advance that vision still. And as such, they're worth pushing back against.

I also worry that both neocons and interventionsit neo-liberals (e.g. the Obama administration's foreign policy crew) both have an overwhelming faith in the transformative power of American-style democracy and faith in America's God-given right to push that transformation on others - they just disagree about how best to go about that pushing. I'd argue that it's a singularly un-nuanced attitude which almost inevitably leads to the kind of mistakes we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, I try very hard to be just as sceptical about the "anti-Imperialist" camp's arguments too, even though they more closely resemble my own feelings on interventionism. When I write "it's not about us", I'm arguing for getting away from both arrogant, self-cenetered and homogenous interpretations.

On exactly those lines, Peter Beaumont writes at the Guardian today:

Those who intervene, by and large, do so to confirm their credentials to their own audiences. The framing of issues like Iran in terms of a western-style, pro-democracy argument can also have unintended consequences. In a country whose leaders have an almost paranoid suspicion of the US and the UK, it offers an open invitation to interpret commentary as "interference" as inevitably has happened in the last few days.

In the case of events in Iran in the last two weeks, the reaction has been drearily familiar. For the dissenting left, confronted by what looks suspiciously like another "colour revolution" - after the "rose revolution" in Georgia and the "orange revolution" in Ukraine, which received support from the pro-democracy groups - the response has been to back the "anti-imperialist" Ahmadinejad, friend of the poor and foe of Zionism, as the likely victor. More victim of an attempted coup than responsible for a coup in office, it is a version of events that, through the necessity of bolstering his case, has tended to airbrush out the more unpalatable features of Ahmadinejad's Iran.

That critique has been more than matched by an equal barrage of opinion, often by those more familiar with Tel Aviv or Tallahassee than Tehran, who have bought wholeheartedly into a "freedom" narrative that seeks to interpret the mass demonstrations of those supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi in an equally simplistic fashion - as representative of the aspirations of all of Iran.

It is a version with its own lacunae. Investing so much in the reformist opposition, and beguiled by a particular version that emanates from north Tehran's unrepresentative suburbs, it fails to acknowledge either the nature of Mousavi's agenda - a self-described "fundamentalist reformist" who is far less radical than they assume - or the reality of the huge support both for Ahmadinejad in his constituency and the Islamic revolution.

The domination of the debate by two such facile and self-interested arguments is important, precisely because the picture that we have of Iran matters.

And over Iran right now, there is an overwhelming need for a careful examination of what is occurring, which goes beyond the usual glib depictions of Ahmadinejad as nothing more than a dictatorial Holocaust-denier or Mousavi as a receptacle for hopes of a kind of liberal western reformation of Iran's revolution.

...We are at a crucial moment not only for the Iranian nation, but for the geopolitics of the wider region. The challenge is not to mould Iran's reality into a shape we feel most comfortable with; to confirm our prejudices or our hopes. The challenge is to understand. Because only in understanding will we avoid setting up the conditions to repeat the worst errors of the last decade. 

Bingo.