The Dish

by Andrew Sprung

The latest political football in Iran is the alleged burning of the image of Ayatollah Khomeini during the student protests on December 7. From the AP today:

TEHRAN, Iran – Hundreds of students at Tehran University renewed anti-government protests for a second week on Sunday, accusing authorities of fabricating images of demonstrators burning photos of the Islamic Republic's revered founder.

Students moved to the forefront of opposition on the streets with massive protests last week. They say authorities are using the images of burning photos as a pretext to crack down on their protests, which have helped revitalize the pro-reform movement.

State television has repeatedly shown images, ostensibly taken during student-led protests on Dec. 7, of unidentified hands burning and tearing up pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was a grave and illegal insult against the former leader, still widely respected in the country. The elite Revolutionary Guard, the country's most powerful military force, called for the trial and punishment of those responsible.

The regime is using these images to turn the screws on opposition leaders. In a speech earlier today, Supreme Leader Khamenei portrayed the act as a kind of blasphemy, an attack on the foundation of a "divine" state. While he did not accuse opposition leaders of direct responsibility for the alleged desecration, he accused them of fomenting conditions enabling it. From PressTV, the Iranian government's English language news organ:

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei condemned the desecration, saying it was the result of the violation of law and clinging on to the encouragement of foreign media. Now to cover up this travesty, the Leader said, they have turned to "philosophization and false reasoning."

Ayatollah Khamenei said the group which violated the law was responsible for encouraging riots, laying the grounds for insults to the late Imam Khomeini, and helping the "frustrated, hopeless" enemy gain momentum.

"The geometry of this establishment is divine, its basis was established by a divine man and its survival relies on a divine nation," the Leader said. "Its enemy will not achieve its goals."

The Leader reiterated that the defeated presidential candidates, who have failed to prove their claims of vote fraud, should return to the right path as the election file has come to a close.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who called for calm to return to the country, said those who call for protests should stop such moves as the riots are backed by the enemies of Iran.

The Daily Telegraph quotes excerpts of Khamenei's speech that constitute a more a direct warning to opposition leaders:

"Those who shout slogans in the name of these people (opposition leaders), hoist their pictures and speak of them with respect are in a point which is the exact opposite of the Imam (Khomeini), revolution and Islam," the Supreme Leader said on state television.

"When you see this, step aside," he said in remarks addressed to the two opposition leaders, who he referred to as his "former brothers".

"I don't believe in purging, I believe in maximum attraction, but it looks as if some people insist on distancing themselves from the system and they have turned a family dispute into a battle against the system," the Ayatollah said.

Khamenei's speech comes in the wake of reports suggesting that the regime is finally on the point of arresting Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami. Scott Lucas relays the following from the Iranian expatriate scholar/journalist Alireza Nourizadeh, who, Lucas says, "lives outside Iran but claims good sources inside the country":

"Dear iranians! According to confirmed and very reliable news source, this evening, there was a 3 hour meeting in the house of the Leadership of Iran between all coup leaders including Commander Vahid, Commander Jafari, Commander Firoozabadi, Sheikh Hossein Taeb, Asghar Hejazi, Mojtaba Khamenei, Gholamali Haddad Adel, Ahmadi Moghadam, Heidar Moslehi, Commander Mohamad Reza Naghdi and the leadership Seyed Ali Khamenei himself and his chief officer Mohamad ali Golpayegani.

During the meeting the majority of participants requested the arrest of Mirhossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, Seyed Mohamad Khatami and putting Rafsanjani under survellience. Khamenei however postponed his final decision to tomorrow.

Nevertheless according to a very reliable source it is very probable that the coup leaders take series of important measures including arrest of a number of opposition figures tonight.

Lucas adds an update:

Based on the Supreme Leader’s speech this morning, we think the Green movement(s) are on a “final warning”. That would mean no immediate arrests of opposition leaders, but if there is protest during Moharram….

I would add as a postscript that Khamenei is acting very much in Khomeini's own spirit in waving the flaming photo, the desecrated icon, blaming that alleged desecration on outside enemies, and suggesting that the perpetrators are in league with Israel.  More of Khamenei's speech from PressTV:

A sign that the enemy supports these riots, the Leader said, was when in the rallies on Quds Day, which were supposed to defend the rights of the Palestinians, some chanted slogans against the people of Palestine and backed Israel.

"How are they not awakened when leaders of oppression and arrogance — which can be characterized by the United States, France and Britain — show their support for them?," the Leader asked. "Why don't they realize [they have taken the wrong path] when fugitive, corrupt monarchist and communist figures lend their support to them?

Compare a crux from one of Khomeini's most influential speeches, the denunciation of the Shah's regime delivered in Qom on June 3, 1963, which led to his exile. The occasion was the 40-day anniversary of a raid on the prominent Faiziyeh madreseh, in which many students were beaten, some arrested, and two killed. Khomenei cast that assault as an attack on Islam itself, ultimately directed by a certain ally of the Shah:

We come to the conclusion that this regime also has a more basic aim; they are fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and to the existence of the religious class. They do not wish this institution to exist; they do not wish any of us [mullahs and talebs] to exist, the great and the small alike.

Israel does not wish the Koran to exist in this country. Israel does not wish the mullahs to exist in this country…It was Israel that assaulted the Faiziyeh madreseh by means of its sinister agent. It is still assaulting us, and assaulting you, the nation; it wishes to seize your economy…to appropriate your wealth…The religious scholars are blocking [Israel's] path; they must be eliminated  (quoted in Roy Mottadedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran – elisions in the original).

The continuities are worth keeping in mind as the regime and the established opposition continue to compete for the "mantle of the prophet."

by Chris Bodenner

Remixed version here. Sleep well.

by Conor Friedersdorf

One pleasure of The Atlantic's offices, where I once worked, was wandering into the room where the magazine's archives are housed, choosing an issue at random, and exploring whatever fine writing editors past published that month. It is impossible to do that for very long without marveling at the number of cover stories that James Fallows has written. In fact, it is hard for me to understand how he ever found time to write anywhere else, but the 40th anniversary of the Washington Monthly, celebrated by a collection of the best stories published in that magazine, remind us that he worked there too, along with so many other greats inside and outside The Atlantic family.

Another one to single out is Nicholas Lemann, who writes:

The Monthly, methodologically, was always reportorial, and it was never conservative—but, when I joined the magazine, the other editorial employee besides me and Charlie was Tom Bethell, an actual conservative, and it seemed as if the magazine devoted its main energies to attacking conventional liberal positions. When I first came to the magazine’s office for my job interview in the winter of 1976, I was amazed to see an issue just back from the printer’s with the cover line “CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL.” Charlie thought we would purify liberalism, the naturally dominant strain in American politics since his New Deal childhood in West Virginia, by relentlessly ridding it of tired, automatic bromides and by insisting that liberals see government’s performance as it actually was, not as liberals wished it to be. He wanted to understand and call attention to government’s failures so that in the future it would work properly, not so that people would stop believing government could solve problems. Nonetheless, issue by issue, this entailed criticizing liberals more often than conservatives.

The Monthly was always hard to classify. It investigated, but it wasn’t exactly investigative in the traditional sense, because its main interest was not in catching officials breaking the law but in understanding why, without being corrupt, government agencies didn’t get the job done. It was reformist, but it lacked the patrician hostility to democratic politics that has often characterized good-government reformers. It was not conventionally liberal, but it wasn’t centrist, moderate, or pro-business in the manner of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded in the 1980s. It wanted liberal politicians to hold the policymaking reins, but, at least in the early years, it almost never published articles proposing winning political strategies for its side. It was interested in policy, but it mainly eschewed traditional policy analysis. It was interested in ideas, but—in contradistinction to the Public Interest crowd, as its views developed—it was far more interested in facts on the ground.

It is still a first rate magazine — may it last another 40 years.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I agree the heaping of praises on the greatest generation can get a little old.  But consider my grandfather.  Came from rural South Carolina.  After Pearl Harbor he got an operation specifically to allow himself to fight.  He was gone from my grandmother from 1941-1945.  He was in North Africa, Sicily, D Day, Battle of the Bulge.  He came back an alcoholic.  He never talked about the war except sometimes to my Dad.  And my sister said one time he told her, "You don't know what it's like to lie in an icy trench while bugs are crawling over the bodies of your friends."  I remember at the 4th of July asking him why he never would come with us to see the fireworks and he didn't say anything.  Now it makes me cry to think about it because I know they reminded him of being shelled.  He wasn't a perfect man free of prejudiced by any means.  But he and his generation did recognize that they couldn't allow a world run by Adolf Hitler.  And they sacrificed a hell of a lot for it.  For that I'll always be grateful.

by Patrick Appel

After Andrew's expounding on Obama's Niebuhrism, a reader passes along Reinhold Niebuhr's 1958 interview with Mike Wallace.

by Andrew Sprung

Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job's done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

by Seamus Heaney

by Patrick Appel

Marc D. Hauser argues that it stems from biology:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

by Patrick Appel

Drake Bennett reviews a book about Zomia, a largely lawless section of Asia. I don't buy this:

In his most speculative and contested claim, [Yale political scientist James Scott] argues that even the lack of a written language in many Zomian societies is an adaptive measure and a conscious societal choice. For peasants, writing was, first and foremost, a tool of state control – it was the instrument the elite used to extract money, labor, and military service from them. As a result, Scott argues, when those peasants escaped into the hills they discarded writing in an attempt to ensure that similar coercive hierarchies didn’t arise in the new societies they formed.

by Patrick Appel

Erik Kain counters Abe Greenwald's notion that Obama is "going neoncon":

Neocons like Greenwald assume that the only people who could possibly oppose war are liberals. Such is the state of affairs on the right, I suppose. But even worse, to weigh someone’s morals on their support for war (and to call the lack of support immoral) strikes me as fairly awful. The old trick is to question someone’s patriotism, and that’s cynical and arrogant enough, but to define an entire group’s morality based on their belief that interventionist wars are wrong is absurd.

Larison follows up.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Free will is the age-old question that keeps sophomores up all night. But Searle is not the best voice on this question, as he is ultimately a dualist, trying to bring in something from outside the physical world, but without evidence.

Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room is an oldie but a goodie on this topic, at least in part making the same argument that you do – we all live our lives as if we have free will, and we can't tell that we don't, so that's good enough.

Further, a big part of this question is what do we actually want when we ask for free will? Not randomness, I think, which takes quantum mechanics out of the picture. We want our decisions to be based on real preferences, which are determined by what? Well, by rules for what we prefer, of course. If we postulate some dualistic outside 'soul' or other driving force, we just push the question back a level – what are the rules by which the soul makes choices? Again, we don't want randomness, we want real preference. So we just can't get away from a rules-based, deterministic system. It might be chaotic, there might be a huge number of rules and inputs to those rules, so many that we can never be fully 'predictable,' but ultimately we WANT there to be rules. Searle usually seems to miss this point.

Another reader seconds:

My favorite book of all time is Elbow Room: Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.  Especially the chapter 'Could Have Done Otherwise' changed everything for me, articulating a stance toward responsibility and choice that permanently resolved an existential anxiety toward ethics that had always bothered me.  It's Daniel Dennett at his very best, before he started haring off into things of which he has no particular understanding (religion).

Anyway, I found that once the whole conundrum had been flipped upside down, it made vastly more sense. Better yet, our base intuitions about what is important and meaningful emerge reconfigured but strengthened, not invalidated.

Another reader:

William James pointed out that, not only is free will pragmatically true, but more generally any philosophical argument whose truth or falsity would not result in an actual concrete effect on our actions is a mere semantic game.