by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n Remember when the liberal punditariat sneered at George Bush for putting Iran in the \u201caxis of evil\u201d in his 2002 State of the Union address? Whole legions of sophisticated, nuanced thinkers rushed to explain the crudity of Bush\u2019s thinking, not to mention his indulgence of dangerous religious ideas like \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil.\u201d Iran is not a Hitlerian totalitarian state, they sniffed, and elections are held there, offering some level of democracy.<\/p>\n Typical of such thinking is a column not long ago by the\u00a0New York Times\u2019<\/em>Roger Cohen, in which this nuanced thinker wrote:<\/p>\n Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable. Most of Iran’s population is under 30; it’s an Internet-connected generation. Access to satellite television is widespread. The BBC’s new Farsi service is all the rage. . . . The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared to the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned down the Majlis, or parliament.<\/p>\n I wonder what the people in the streets of Tehran would think about this \u201cgenuine contest,\u201d or whether they appreciate Cohen\u2019s sophistries like \u201cun-free\u201d and \u201cintermittently brutal\u201d and \u201cmargins of liberty\u201d and \u201ccomplete subservience to the state.\u201d What percentage of a citizen\u2019s freedom has to be eliminated before a regime will meet Cohen\u2019s criteria for \u201ccomplete subservience\u201d? Let\u2019s see, all candidates for office have to be approved in advance by the mullahs, and even then the election is blatantly stolen, after which protesters are killed and beaten, opposition leaders and their families arrested, the media silenced and internet interdicted, the \u201cSupreme Leader\u201d (sic!) Ayatollah Khamenei publicly threatens violence against his own citizens, gangs of paramilitary thugs rampage through Tehran like storm troopers \u2014 looks pretty totalitarian to me, though time will tell whether it ultimately lasts or not.<\/p>\n The real issue, however, is not Cohen\u2019s verbal quibbles, but how should the United States respond to the events in Iran. Cohen\u2019s article was really carrying water for Obama\u2019s new policy of \u201cengaging\u201d the \u201cmalleable\u201d mullahs in order to keep them from acquiring nuclear weapons, financing terrorists, and being in general a disruptive force in the Middle East. How does that policy look now? What can Obama offer a regime willing to rig an election and kill its own citizens, that will make them give up the enormous regional prestige and power nuclear weapons would bestow?<\/p>\n All this \u201cengagement\u201d talk sounds eerily like the British in the Thirties, with their \u201cshuttle diplomacy,\u201d conferences, commissions of inquiry, soothing diplomatic assurances to Germany, and responses to Hitler\u2019s serial violations of the Versailles Treaty carefully worded so as not to alienate or anger the Fuhrer, all of which were exploited by Hitler to pursue his aggression. Of course, Iran is not Germany in the Thirties, but the lesson to be learned from the failure to appease a regime bent on aggression still holds: an aggressor motivated by passionate ideology will be stopped only by force or a credible threat of force.<\/p>\n Nor will the Iranian aggressors care a bit if the President carefully nuances his verbal response to their violence and tyranny. We did that all through the Cold War, to the anguish of millions of oppressed Russians and Eastern Europeans, who desperately wanted the West to call a totalitarian spade a spade, and who rejoiced when Ronald Reagan finally said the obvious in the \u201cevil empire\u201d speech equally derided by sophisticated liberal thinkers. Nor do the arguments in favor of verbal restraint hold up \u2014 for example, that we\u2019ll discredit the protestors because they\u2019ll be characterized as agents of the Great Satan and thus more easily crushed. Well, they\u2019re already being called British and American stooges, and they\u2019re already being brutally crushed. Meanwhile, what we used to call the \u201cleader of the free world\u201d carefully parses his words while brave men and women die in the streets of Tehran.<\/p>\n Whatever the President says, the regime in Iran is going to hold on tightly to power and pursue its acquisition of nuclear weapons in order to maintain its pelf and privilege and to pursue its apocalyptic brand of Shi\u2019ism. Nor will they give up until a critical mass of Iranians make them give up. But the President\u2019s words at this moment, assuming they are backed up with subsequent meaningful action, can encourage such Iranians and tell the regime and the world where the United States stands \u2014 on the side of freedom and the dignity of man.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Remember when the liberal punditariat sneered at George Bush for putting Iran in the \u201caxis of evil\u201d in his 2002 State of the Union address?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,715],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Gh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":868,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/appeasement-bode-war-not-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":0},"title":"Appeasement Bode War Not Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America\u00a0by Bruce S. Thornton. (Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1126,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-forgotten-anniversary\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":1},"title":"The Forgotten Anniversary","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 17, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Declared in 1979 Iran's war on the US continues. by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Even in years when a national election doesn't dominate our attention, we seldom think much about an event that happened the first week in November 31 years ago. On the fourth of that month, a band\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5514,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/just-deserts\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":2},"title":"Just Deserts","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 11, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Separating Hussein's execution from therapy. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers In Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0Tom Sawyer, a \"committee of sappy women\" petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe.\"If he had been Satan himself,\u201d Twain snorts, \u201cthere would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2825,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-world-likes-us-it-really-likes-us\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":3},"title":"The World Likes Us, It Really Likes Us!","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com Watching Obama\u2019s recent journeys to Europe and Latin America, I was reminded of actress Sally Field\u2019s embarrassing acceptance speech at the 1985 Academy Awards: \u201cI've wanted more than anything to have your respect,\u201d she gushed to her colleagues, adding in the same needy vein, \u201cI\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":949,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iranian-threat-heats-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":4},"title":"Iranian Threat Heats Up","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 26, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Iran announced Sunday that it was cutting off crude oil sales to France and England, a mostly symbolic act given that Iran provides England less than 1% of its crude, and France claims that it \u201cpractically stopped importing Iranian oil,\u201d according to the head\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6808,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-munich\/","url_meta":{"origin":2621,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Munich","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The interim agreement negotiated by the Security Council and Germany with Iran is a serious advance toward what Winston Churchill\u00a0called\u00a0the Munich agreement: \u201ca total and unmitigated defeat\u201d\u00a0and a \u201cdisaster of the first magnitude.\u201d\u00a0Nothing in the agreement guarantees that Iran will fulfill its promises, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2623,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions\/2623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}