My response to a blogger's support of the idiot Andrew Sullivan's views concerning reform in Iran:
I love how the left likes to base its grandiose arguments on broad assumptions - like the reform movement in Iran is of course a good thing, or even a coherent and knowable thing for that matter, as Robin Wright points out on CFR's website:
"The Green Movement is a coalition of disparate forces who reflect many sectors of society and many different visions of the future. It includes former presidents [Rafsanjani, Khatami] as well as people who've never voted at all. We should have no illusion that they speak with one voice or they want one thing beyond the ouster of this particular president who commands a dictatorial rule. If they succeed in bringing about change, this coalition is almost certain to fall apart as traumatically as the revolutionary coalition did in 1979."
If the 'reformers' manage to topple the little dictator, what then? You can't simply assume it will be good, will lead to a more stable, more amenable, more approachable, more open Iran - in the chaos and disarray of conflicted goals and beliefs and intentions that follows the coming upheaval you want to sanction into being who knows what fills the vacuum? It could be worse, more extreme, more reactionary - Ahmadinejad has his supporters, conservative clerics have their supporters, the Republican Guard has an agenda - these people are not going to just simply fade into the background. Even if a 'reform agenda' manages to win out, given the inchoate nature of the movement we can't know what it will look like - it may not look much different from what exists now, simply absent the little dictator - maybe with a more palatable little dictator in his place.
As bad if not indeed worse than a possible extremist backlash that follows a 'reformist' upheaval in Iran is that should 'progressives' come to power they may prove to be reformers in name only but because the cowardly West will want to see them as 'liberals' we will turn a blind eye to the sham - for instance the supposed reformers could still want to pursue a nuclear program - there's plenty of evidence to suggest that's possible - but because they are viewed as 'progressives' the West won't be able to muster the will to stop them. Sullivan is already using preservation of the reform movement as a reason why a military intervention against Iran's nuclear ambitions is utterly unthinkable.
And then when a potential scenario unwinds of a governing reform coalition inevitably falling apart and the Republican Guard stepping in to re-establish dictatorial control, do they do so now armed with nukes?
If this country is listening to idiots like Andrew Sullivan we're doomed.
