Month: April 2009

Behind Ahmadinejad

In a really helpful piece in the new New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson gives us a glimpse of the Iranian president’s arts adviser. I favor a good faith attempt to see if the Tehran regime can be prodded to be of use to America’s strategic interests and do not believe it seeks to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel. But it would be deeply naive to misread some of the rhetoric coming from some parts of the regime. There is evil there:

Mohammad Ali Ramin advises Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and is said to have shaped the President’s views on the subject. One morning this winter, Ramin met me and an interpreter on the campus of the Message of Light University, in Tehran, where he teaches comparative philosophy …

Ramin explained that the prevailing history of the Holocaust was unfair. The West, he said, had transferred its “Jewish problem” to the Middle East. “But it seems that the U.S. and other Western governments have finally decided to get rid of the Jews,” Ramin said. “By bringing Hitler, and by taking the Jews to the Muslim world, they have created a situation in which the Jews will be destroyed. They have created a situation where, because they are killing Palestinians, the Jews are more hated than ever.” He put on his glasses, and, for the first time, met my eyes. “And so you can see that Israel has been created to destroy not only Muslims but the Jews themselves.”

It had grown cold, but Ramin was reluctant to bring us to his office. Finally, looking unhappy, he led us in, glancing around as he entered. As we sat in front of his desk, Ramin informed me that the Jews had carried out the 9/11 attacks.

“The Zionists have blamed it on the Muslims so that they have an excuse to attack some Muslim nations,” he said. But it was all for naught. The Jews had also helped Nero, and it had not saved the Roman Empire from collapse.

A large bookcase ran the length of the wall behind Ramin’s desk. A couple of pictures propped up on one of the shelves caught my eye. One was of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah commander, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus, in February, 2008. The other depicted a group of men, Orthodox Jews, silhouetted against a yellow background. Loops of Farsi script ran in red across the base of the picture. When Ramin was called to the door for a moment, I asked my interpreter to quickly translate the words on the picture. He said, “It says ‘money-grubbers, bloodsuckers.’ ”

A Tea Partier Explains

I’ve been having a back and forth with several readers on the “tea party” protests. A key issue on my part is why their concern with fiscal recklessness seems to date from January 20, 2009. This morning Glenn Beck insisted that he’d been concerned with Bush’s spending spree. He’s right about that, although his hysteria was nowhere near as intense as it is now, and, naturally, not on Fox, where conservative principles were routinely sacrificed during the Bush years. But here’s one response that seems honest to me:

I was one of those people that was shell shocked for a long time after 9/11. I thought it was all about not being attacked again so spend, spend, spend. Kill all the crazies, I thought. I thought the whole prescription drug thing was stupid. But I was 4 – 8 years younger than I am now, I didn’t pay attention to that stuff. I knew wars cost money, but I had no idea all this other pork barrel spending was occurring. It wasn’t reported on TV.  I watch the news regularly and the MSM totally dropped the ball on all the spending.

Until I began using the internet and finding things like you, Daily Kos, Drudge, WSJ online to get different points of view, it was already election season in 2007. By then our crappy W was just sitting there with his thumb up his ass waiting to get out of office.

I think his intentions were good, but the road to hell is paved with them. Like I said below, this is the first time I have become involved because it is grass roots and not driven by any paid public relations machine like the whole Obama administration. I’m mad at republicans too. They have all let us down, and that is what I’m protesting. If it were McCain and Palin in the WH proposing the same thing, I would still protesting.

I’m not sure this protest has no professional organizers behind it. But I am glad that many are concerned about the growth of government and the necessary increase in taxation/borrowing/inflation that it must and will bring about. I stick by my view, however, that railing against pork is insufficient. The major issues are Medicare, Medicaid, defense and social security. Until conservatives offer clear alternatives to our current trajectory, alternatives that will indeed higher premiums or fewer healthcare services for middle class retirees, considerable deleveraging of our neo-empire, and unpopular trimming of social security or increases in the retirement age, the protest is theater, not politics.

The good thing about Ari Fleischer’s op-ed, by the way, is its breaking the taboo on the necessity of taxes. Realistically, none of the cuts I favor will happen without some attempts to raise revenues as well. I favor a major 1986-style tax code simplification – with special aim at corporate tax shelters and the mortgage deduction – to improve the revenue side. Maybe these protests are a beginning for such a sane conservatism in future. But I fear that, as currently constituted, they perpetuate a kind of childish irresponsibility rather than an attempt to confront the fiscal crisis head-on. That’s my issue with them.

So We Beat A Few Pirates, Ctd.

A reader, among many, makes the following point in rejoinder:

The difference between the two situations is proliferation. The region where Afghanistan and Pakistan are located is extremely nuke heavy. India, Pakistan, and China are confirmed nuclear states. Iran is under international scrutiny for its nuclear program, plus the former Soviet republics to the north may still contain nuclear material. Destabilization in this region runs the risk of nuclear material getting into the hands of people we would prefer did not have access to this material. Piracy in Africa, while technically equivalent to terrorism, does not pose the same kind of threat and thus requires a different scale of response.

Yes, that makes sense.