Obama and Iran: Cool Under Fire
June 19, 2009 – 9:46 amPat Buchanan is correct: In the Great Game, President Obama’s non-interference in Iran’s ‘ Square moment’ (Buchanan’s phrase) is smart. We are not liked by any faction of significance in Iran, and our support would amount to a de facto kiss of death. Not only that, but we cannot be sure that any action on our part would have the intended result. More blowback we don’t need. Finally, as an old-schoolo conservative, I support a foreign policy of non-intervention abroad. Let Iranians work out the destiny of their 2,600 year-old nation without the interference of a people on the far side of the world who do not know them, their language, customs, or desires well. With the region a tinderbox ready to burst into the flames of war – perhaps even nuclear war – non-intervention is the only sensible, indeed, the only sane policy.
8 Responses to “Obama and Iran: Cool Under Fire”
Iranians will work out NOTHING. The Mullahs and their minions will aim their guns at Iranian heads and tell them what’s what. That’s the meaning of tyranny, a concept isolationist Americans aren’t very familiar with.
Americans are very popular with the vast majority of ordinary Iranians. If they felt free to, they’d admit what a horrible mistake the revolution of 1979 was.
By Sally Morem on Jun 20, 2009
1.) It’s not our business how Iranians work out their destiny, and only a fool would try to stage-manage the world, as if anyone had the foresight and wisdom to do so.
2.) As far as ‘isolationist’ Americans, like me, knowing nothing about tyranny, I will put my knowledge and experience up against anyone’s. I am more concerned about preventing the tyranny that is in our midst from willing the day, and THAT is the tyranny that Americans should be concerned about.
3.) Iran had been a nation since at least the time of Darius I, and they have never had any form of government, prior to 1979, that even remotely resembled a ‘democracy.’ Their natural cultural state may be authoritarianism, and if so, that is their affair. ‘Democracy’ is not for everyone, and is arguably not the best form of government, as history has shown repeatedly.
By ssgconway on Jun 20, 2009
Then don’t bother telling us that “Iranians are working out their destiny” if you know so much about tyranny. You know they aren’t doing any such thing.
The way Germans, Russians, Italians, Japanese…worked out their destinies. This is a joke. A truly sick one.
Science and technology is making the world smaller and smaller. What the tyrants do to their people IS our business. Ever hear of Sept. 11?
America IS doing something about Iran through technology, but not as directly as I’d prefer. And it will continue to help free people around the world through various means, direct and indirect, until everyone is free. That’s my prediction. The 20th century is a clear indicator of that trend.
Do you really, really think we can actually enjoy liberty while others are enslaved? Didn’t work out so well in the 1860s.
Iran was NOT a nation during the era of Darius. That area was run by the Persian Empire. Not the same thing at all. The Persian Empire was a good deal larger, and involved many more different peoples than today’s Iranian boundaries incorporate.
Modern nation-states were invented by Europe in the 17th century. Read up on Westphalia. By so doing, they carved up ancient empires into (roughly) what are today’s European nation-states.
No one’s “natural culture” is authoritarian. That’s propaganda handed out by the anti freedom folks. The Communist propaganda about the Vietnamese comes to mind.
The problem with isolationist libertarians is that they don’t give *** about anyone’s freedom except their own.
CPT reply on June 30th, 2009 4:08 pm:
Waaaaiit!! I’m the “libertarian” here
Non-interventionist foreign policy is hardly a “libertarian” monopoly. Rather it is shared by anyone who isn’t an internationalist (Neo-cons and Statists all).
This debate extends all the way back to the old “white man’s burden” arguments of the late 19th Century.
By Sally Morem on Jun 20, 2009
We disagree on all counts:
1.) I ‘heard’ of 9/11 while still in uniform (27 years, total), and stayed several years longer in the service than otherwise, voluntarily, because of it. (The military service is the ‘family business,’ as it was/is for my father, all four uncles, both brothers and two children in it.) When America is attacked, there is usually a plentiful supply of my family’s men ready to take up arms in her defense, which is how it should be.
9/11 may well have been blowback for our meddling in the middle east. (The 9/11 Commission Report tense to support this contention.) And our post-9/11 response veered away from our mission – putting bin Laden’s head on a stick at Ground Zero – into invading a country that did not attack or threaten us, costing us the goodwill of much of the world. The silly notion that the Sunni Muslims, mostly Saudis, who attacked us did so because they ‘hate our freedom’ is beneath a serious response. They did it, according to their own propaganda, because of our support of Israel, interference in Iraq, and the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia. I fully supported, and continue to support, our being in Afghanistan, since that is where bin Laden is. (Or he’s at least nearby.) I may disagree with some points of that war’s execution, but not in principle on our being there. This war, at least, meets the test of a ‘just war.’
2.) The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 only created the modern, European nation-state. To assert that the Persian Empire, the Sassanid Empire, or the various other states that have governed Persia (with Persians doing the governing) were not nations is not supportable. “Nation’ also encompasses a people and their culture, and the Persians have been in Persia, as I said, since at least Darius I, living, when not under the control of invaders, under their own laws. They therefore meet any reasonable definition of ‘nation.’
3.) Whether well or badly, they are working on their destiny, by their action or inaction. The truly sick joke is thinking that we can play God and tell them how to be ‘free’ or whatever. The utter foolishness and hubris of such a mindset astound me. Id it is our business, by what right? If we can act in a positive way, by what right, with our borders wide open, fighting two wars already, and bankrupt besides? If our ‘security’ overrides the law of nations (see Hugo Grotius on that score), then why won’t ‘security’ override the Constitution here? ‘National security’ is the most commonly used excuse of tyrants throughout history.
3.) I hope that your prediction is correct, but it won’t be. The world became less free in the 20th Century, in part because of liberal, Wilsonian do-gooderism. Without Wilson lying us into World War One, the world might have been spared Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin. Can anyone seriously think that the world became freer when Communism replaced the ancien regieme in so much of the Old World, when utopian governments murdered so many millions, and when so much of the world was/is plunged into darkness? What more is to be gained by foisting ‘freedom’ on cultures alien to it?
4.) Non-interventionists (“isolationists” to their opponents) don’t give an damn about anybody’s freedom but their own? No one is stopping the interventionists from forming volunteer brigades to pursue their crusades. The loudest shouters for adventurism abroad, I find, are generally those who have not followed up words with deeds.
By ssgconway on Jun 21, 2009
If you don’t like “Neocons” (a historic misnomer, the real neocons who are still alive are in their late 80s and early 90s. They’re the ones who were Commies in their college days in the late 30s and early 40s), you’ll really hate me. Why?
1. The libertarian myth of an America protected from foreign powers by two oceans in the 19th century is just that, a myth. Our early 19th century leaders were playing power games with England, Spain, France, Mexico, and even Russia until we gained control over what we now call the Lower 48. They never followed Washington’s advice, because that advice was wholly impracticable to an expansionistic power.
2. Even if it were semi-true back then, it is flatly untrue now. We are bound up with the other nations and peoples of the world in so many ways, I can’t count them. Non-intervention hasn’t been an option, at least since the Zimmerman Telegram. If you don’t know what that was, read some good history about WWI.
3. Our American ideals about freedom are human ideals, not reserved unto Americans. They are our basic axioms about what human beings are and what rights and responsibilities human beings have merely by being human. Since we are a nation founded upon very high ideals, we are an idealistic nation, and can’t turn our backs in the cold, uncaring manner libertarians counsel, to those who are ruthlessly suppressed. In other words, cold-hearted realism in foreign affairs has been and can never be an American long-term strategy.
I realize that a large number of people, both on the Left and on the Right have an enormous amount of trouble trying to reconcile the old stereotype of the Evil Overlord Great Power oppressing the Poor Bedeviled Little Power with the fact that America is a genuine hyperpower that does not oppress but liberates.
This planted axiom of the nature of great power is what gets in the way of those who believe that America is evil when it uses its massive power in the world. But I’ve never accepted that axiom (shared by libertarians with Obama, BTW) and I never will. I know my country. I know what we stand for. I know what we fight for and sometimes die for. And what that thing is is very simple: Freedom for us and freedom for as many people as we can manage to free in many and varied ways. Which has already numbered in the hundreds of millions.
3. I’ve got further news for you. With our accelerating technological developments, the world will grow ever more entangled, ever more dependent. In that kind of world, if you twitch a muscle, you automatically intervene. Anyone pay any attention to the wild and woolly stock market in the last year? Those shock waves were rocketing around the world, and rocketing right back at us.
And the technological ramifications of accelerating change will not be limited to consumer products and stock markets. The military will be, will have to be, heavily involved. If not, the bad guys will get that tech and Sept. 11 will be seen for what it was, a reconnaissance mission, a testing probe, for something much, much worse.
So. I’m much more than a neocon. Much worse from your viewpoint. I believe we should be consciously intervening against the tyrants around the world every day in every way we can manage it. We must act as if a time bomb were ticking, because it really is. Either we develop and use that tech…or they will. I value my life and that of my country. If we do what the libertarians (and in this) their leftist allies want us to do, we will consign ourselves and everything we hold dear to extinction.
Unfortunately, we now have a non-interventionist president who apologizes to the world for American use of power and excuses the tyrants for their real mass tortures and murders. This will end on January 20, 2013…hopefully that will be in time (barely) for us to save ourselves.
By Sally Morem on Jun 30, 2009
Typo Alert and Fix. Here’s how the sentence above should really read: “In other words, cold-hearted realism in foreign affairs HASN’T been and can never be an American long-term strategy.”
That typo really screwed up the meaning of that sentence.
By Sally Morem on Jun 30, 2009
I have no problem with “Neo-cons” misnamed or not. I was just making an observation upon the comment thread because I saw it purported that (as I interpreted it) libertarians are isolationist. Actually, many folks for “open borders” are libertarian (leaning anarchist some are).
I certainly meant no attack or insult to you who state your positions so well. Labelling is necessary but we have to be sure that we quantify and specify, which I didn’t. Internationalists tend towards statism usually. In our political system they are invariably either “neo-con” or some variety of statist (progressive, socialist, marxist etc) who believe “social contract” and other buzzes justify impingements of individual liberty.
By CPT on Jul 2, 2009