A long time ago I decided not to “do” the Middle East, and although I’ve been afflicted with Iranian matters over the years, I have generally stayed away from the Arab-Israeli thing.  There is no shortage of smart people who deal with it;  I don’t really know the history of the region;  and I don’t speak or read any of the languages. My one insight into Israeli matters has to do with bridge (the card game).  Back in the seventies I coached their national team for a year (with splendid results, so I retired before I could screw up).

But I do know about Iran, and I know that the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah have a lot to say about the Palestinian groups.  Both Hamas and Fatah are funded, armed, and trained by the mullahs and their creatures.  On many occasions Iran has exercised a veto, most recently–according to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas–wrecking a “unity” plan for a single Palestinian position in talks with Israel.  Abbas said that

“Iran doesn’t want Hamas to sign the Cairo reconciliation document…”  Abbas said Hamas objected to signing an Egyptian-brokered deal with Fatah because of opposition from Teheran, and argued that the Palestinians should be “free from Iranian tutelage.”

I draw a simple conclusion from this sort of thing:  it’s impossible to “solve” the Arab-Israeli thing so long as the mullahs rule in Tehran.  They have too much control over the Palestinians, and they don’t want peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ergo, the endless kabuki dances, the quartets, the international conferences, the endless schemes, the perpetual negotiations, all that and more,  are totally beside the point.  You have to “do” Iran first.  And the only happy way to do that is to support the Iranian people against the evil regime, and get a government in Tehran that wants to live in peace with its neighbors.

You want to make progress in the “peace process?”  Work for a free Iran.

The Iranian regime has always dreaded fun.  Western music is banned.  Unchaperoned boys & girls together is banned.  Women showing an ankle or some hair is banned, as is rental of bicycles to the ladies.  The color green is banned, whether it’s the green in the flag behind Ahmadinejad on national tv, or, even though Flynt Leverett denies it, the green stripes on street curbs in Tehran.  And even Rafsanjani’s face is banned.  The news editor of the official news agency IRNA has forbidden publication of Rafsanjani’s photo, and “the publishing of any images of programs that include the head of the Expediency Council is also prohibited.”

That will be very bad news to the former president, who loves to see his name and face in lights.  But there is no shortage of such photos, and IRNA has only made itself look ridiculous.  But then again, looking ridiculous is all the rage at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic.

Now comes Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with his latest joyless fatwa to forbid celebration of the fire ritual that Persians have celebrated for thousands of years.  It’s scheduled for Tuesday (Planet-Iran will liveblog it), and Khamenei is nervous.  For one thing, it isn’t Islamic, so it doesn’t pass religious muster (although the Islamic Republic not only does not prohibit, but actually requires celebration of secular events that bolster its nationalistic chest-thumping, such as “Jerusalem Day” or the anniversary of the 1979 revolution).  But what really matters to Khamenei and his ilk is that it would permit large numbers of Iranians to demonstrate their contempt for the Islamic Republic.  Green leader Mir Hossein Mousavi says so explicitly, and his nervy wife piles on, calling the regime “illegitimate,” and saying that victory is at hand.

Khamenei’s forces continue their campaign of random terror, alternating executions and arrests with releases and paroles.  Perhaps they are looking for just the right quantum of evil, in order to silence the opposition.  Perhaps the internal debate among Khamenei and his comrades swings back and forth.  Perhaps it is a reflection of internal confusion and the leader’s inability to make basic decisions.  I incline toward the last but who knows?

Tomorrow’s celebrations–or their absence–will give us yet another snapshot of what the Soviets loved to call “the correlation of forces,” the order of battle in the ongoing war between tyranny and freedom inside Iran.  We will also see the extent of the West’s fecklessness.  But there’s really no doubt of that, is there?  No doubt Obama et al think of the Iranian people the same way they think about the Israelis:  annoying ingrates who pigheadedly insist on being independent instead of nicely getting in line with the marching orders from White House HQ.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Instapundit and Planet-Iran for linking.

UPDATE 2:  Big demonstrations all over the country, including something that undoubtedly sent chills down the spine of Khamenei:  dancing in the streets.  Banafsheh has lots of videos.  So does Homylafayette.

David Brooks would have us believe that the Tea Partiers are much like the New Leftists of the sixties.

…the core commonality is this:  Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

I think he misunderstands the Tea Party movement, and he’s surprisingly uninformed about the New Left, which was anything but a bunch of Rousseauan romantics.  In 1962, when I was at the University of Wisconsin in 1962, the Port Huron Statement, the formal origin of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was drafted. I knew several of the drafters (the main author was Tom Hayden, at the University of Michigan).  They would gather in the Rathskellar of the Student Union, where I spent a lot of time playing bridge, and we’d talk.

The Port Huron guys fancied themselves serious intellectuals, not street theater people.  And they didn’t think that “the people are pure and virtuous;” they thought most people were alienated, apathetic, and manipulated. They were Marxists and Marcusians, students of the Frankfurt School, and the like. And they saw the university as the logical headquarters for a movement that could transform society.  Just read the first paragraph of their definition of a new left:

Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.

Brooks seems to believe that the New Left wanted greater individual freedom — as the Tea Partiers surely do — but in fact the Port Huron Statement calls for more centralized control.  Lots more: “not only solutions to our present social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness to enlarge the ‘public sector’ greatly.” Some of the language has become very familiar to us (and rejected by the Tea Partiers). For example:

.…medical care must become recognized as a lifetime human right just as vital as food, shelter and clothing — the Federal government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged, not just by making medical care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among children and younger people.

Brooks confuses the New Left with the Yippies, which is a pretty  serious confusion and it’s confirmed by his comparison of Glenn Beck with Abbie Hoffman.  Hoffman couldn’t pass the entrance exam to the New Left.

The failed Israeli ex-PM, Ehud Barak, gives us the benefit of his deep thinking about Iran.  It’s an Einsteinian metaphor about relative rates of the passage of time:

The clock for the Iranian regime’s downfall is ticking, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a lecture at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Friday. However, “it’s clear to me that the clock toward the collapse of this regime works much slower than the clock which ticks toward Iran becoming a nuclear military power,” Barak said.

How does he know that? — we  (or at least some of us) wonder.  I can imagine that the Israelis think they know the timetable for the Iranian atomic bomb, but I don’t think anyone has the schedule for the regime’s final days.  And anyway, this is a case where static analysis is totally inappropriate.  Any scenario has to include the likelihood of new variables being introduced.  There’s probably a big sabotage operation going on against the atomic project, and some day somebody in the so-called Western world might decide to help the Iranian opposition speed up the “downfall clock.”

With regard to the atomic clock, I am told that the Iranian regime intends to announce two more hitherto-secret enrichment sites in early April.  One is near Mashad, over by the Afghan border.  The other is in the mountains east of Tehran.  In keeping with the regime’s constant use of deception and misdirection, you can be pretty sure that there are other secret sites as well.

Does this mean that the mullahs are close to putting a nuclear warhead on an accurate missile?  Beats me.  But while various “analysts” give us their theories about just when Bomb Day will arrive, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps continue to kill Americans, and nobody seems to care about that.

I made this point in last week’s debate with Flynt Leverett at the Atlantic Council in Washington, and to confirm my claim, neither Leverett, nor the moderator, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, nor any of the sizeable audience, responded to it.  This drives me crazy;  it’s why I wrote Accomplice to Evil.  We refuse to see our evil enemies for what they are, and we refuse to act in time to prevent massive catastrophe.

No doubt Barak knows this, and also knows that, unless things change (hard to imagine), Israel will eventually have to do something on its own.  What’s harder to understand is why Israel is doing nothing to help the opposition, which is the only policy that holds out a chance of real success, and would avoid the terrible train wreck we can all see arriving in slow motion.

As for the other clock, the one ticking off the lifespan of the Islamic Republic, the mullahs continue their murderous and sadistic campaign against the citizens of Iran, and the citizens search for new ways to show their contempt.  The regime relentlessly arrests dissidents and accuses them of actions that only a fanatical regime in crisis could concoct.  For example, they went after Mohammed Maliki, 76 yrs old, the first chancellor of Tehran U after the Revolution, and arrested him during treatment for prostate cancer.  Maliki said to his captors, “I was afraid you would let me die in my bed,” and has refused to “repent” or confess.  He’s accused of being a Mohareb, one who fights against God.  They execute such men in Iran nowadays for criticizing the regime.  I honor them, and wish my leaders would do the same, instead of pretending to have a serious Iran policy.

I think the first time I grappled with this question was in an undergraduate philosophy course.  The professor was a Yalie, very very smart, and loved to provoke us.  His job, after all.  So one day, when a famous person had died, he said in his flippant way, “obviously this man was much more important than Joe Schmoe down the block, and the society should value him more, and try harder to protect him and tend to him if he’s sick, etc etc.”

And so we debated, in the way of young students.  Who is to say that one man’s life is worth more than another’s?  Maybe Mr Schmoe was a better husband/father than Einstein, where does that go in the balance scales of life?  Yes, we will long remember Einstein, and no one remembers Schmoe except maybe his dear ones, but still…

In a way, there’s nothing to debate, because Einstein had a far greater effect on far more people than Schmoe did.  But one of the great achievements of Western civilization is our conviction that every human life is precious, and that belief underlies the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise.  So, while Einstein will live forever, as they say, Schmoe was endowed with the same fundamental rights, and in that sense Schmoe was as important as Einstein.

So what to do with those who laugh at us, and who despise our love of life?  What of Nazis who murder millions who they judge unworthy or inferior?  What of the Muslim terrorists who tell us that they will destroy Western civilization precisely because we value life while they embrace death, ours and their own?  Do we ignore their threats, and treat them the same way as we treat one another?

I watched “Independence Day” over the weekend, which raises this issue very dramatically.  The aliens arrive and target mankind for annihilation.  We approach them in peace, with an outstretched hand;  they blow us up.  In the end, we have to fight, and a suitably diverse group from around the world defeats the aliens.  But the stars are American:  a black man and a white Jew.  If not for their heroism, all the efforts of all the world’s citizens would have failed.  Keep that thought for a few paragraphs.

It’s easy when the enemies aren’t even human, but in cases of human conflict we invariably take sides.  Mostly we see conflicts as “us vs. them.”  If Schmoe and Einstein were fighting to the death, we’d pick one and root for him.  Right?

Well, not always.  It’s not so simple. Lots of us didn’t take sides in the Iran-Iraq war, for example.  I, for one, rooted for the war.  And what about the cases where terrorists are fighting against a civilized country (even when its degree of “civilization” may be in doubt)?  Do you root for the Chechens or the Russians?  And how do you feel about ethnic terrorism against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

There has been a lot of “expert analysis” in the past ten days saying that the Green Movement in Iran is all washed up, and that the regime is firmly in control of events there. This follows two earlier periods of “consensus,” the first claiming that there was no chance of a revolution in Iran — this was the conventional wisdom even after the explosion of anti-regime passion following the fraudulent election results announced on June 12, 2009 — and then a shorter, more recent, period when the success of the revolution was taken to be inevitable.

The first was decisively shattered by the eight months of ongoing fighting against the regime;  the second is as much the reflection of a touching faith in vast impersonal historical forces as of empirical data. Iran is in a revolutionary crisis, and has been for many years, but the outcome will be determined by human decisions, many of which are unpredictable.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen so often, there’s a lot going on that we don’t hear about. The events of February 11^th — the massive repression in the streets, the bloody violence directed at Green leaders and their families — have been described as a serious setback for the opposition and a triumph for the regime.  Thomas Erdbrink, the Washington Post’s man in Tehran, provides a textbook example. Yet the supreme leader did not see it that way, and he probably knew more about the events of that day than foreign correspondents — who, by the way, were contained in a small part of Tehran and were invariably in the presence of regime watchers. On the 12^th, Khamenei spoke to several hundred of his aides and followers, and he chewed them out for what he saw as the great failure of the previous day. Why? Because Khamenei had called for a massive display of support for the regime, and it did not happen.

To be sure, regime leaders have been running around, proclaiming that tens of millions of Iranians demonstrated their fealty to the Islamic Republic, but the videos and the pictures from Google Earth show they were the usual lies. Khamenei’s rage was then taken out on his praetorian guard.  In the past few days, two top officers have been replaced, with more likely to follow:  General Ali Fazli was fired as head of the RG’s Tehran Brigade (his successor is General Hosseini Motlagh), and General Azizollah Rajabzadeh was purged as police chief of greater Tehran, after only six months on the job.  At his retirement ceremony, Rajabzadeh went out of his way to blame the Guards for both the failures and the massacres of the past months.  He said that the Tehran police “did not even kill a single person, and did not lose a single person and confronted the issue with the least amount of individual and financial losses.”

Which will certainly surprise the families of demonstrators and police, who lost scores of loved ones following the electoral fraud of last June.

In many ways he was the opposite of his legend.  Yes, he had a temper.  But he was a softy in many ways.  He got Europeanized at NATO, where he was Supreme Allied Commander.  He was a buddy of some German Social Democrats, he somehow learned a great deal about France, and was amazingly well informed about the Italians.  Maybe he got some of that from (General Vernon) Walters, who was Ambassador at Large.

My real title was Ambassador at Small (aka Special Advisor to the Secretary of State), and the best way to describe it is to tell you about my first day on the job in 1981, in a little office down the hall from Haig, just past Bud McFarlane and just before Harvey Sicherman, the chief speechwriter and confidant.  They assigned me to a career secretary who had worked with Phillip Habib.  She was supposed to keep me in line, I think, and mostly she won.  Anyway, that first day I was called into Haig’s enormous office and he emoted for about ten minutes.  Mostly it had to do with the Soviets, of course, and he was furious at various West European socialists for causing trouble with regard to Central America, Africa, and arms control issues.

Let’s say he had a rich vocabulary.  When he finally took a breath he lit a cigarette (most everybody smoked on the 7th floor of State) and growled “you know these people. Do something!”

Back in my cubbyhole I asked my keeper what “do something!” meant, and she said it usually meant writing a memo to him laying out the something I proposed to do.  Then he approved it–or not–and then I did it.

Right.  So I wrote a memo, she put it in the proper format, and sent it back down the hall.  A few hours later his secretary called to say a) I had better get down there pronto, and b) he was really angry.  A little heads-up.

In fact he was purple, pacing around with a cigarette in one hand (remember he’d just had a quadruple or quintuple bypass) and my memo in the other.

“WHAT” he snarled, “THE FOWL FILTH IS THIS?”

I confessed that it was my memo, sir.

“Number one,” he was now tearing it up, “DON’T WRITE MEMOS!!!.”  The little pieces were now in the burn bag.  “I didn’t bring you here to have you WRITE FOWLISH FILTHY MEMOS!”

Roger that.

And then probably the greatest orders anyone ever received:  “When I tell you to do something, just go do it.  If I don’t like it, you’ll hear from me.  And if you don’t hear from me, keep doing it.”

Best boss I ever had.  I only heard from him once, when one of our ambassadors called me in to the embassy to say that Haig wanted me to call him on a secure line, and the poor man added that he’d never ever heard language like that, ever.

All that business about Haig-the-war-monger was disinformation, by the way, carefully cultivated (as it had been with Nixon, from whom Haig probably learned it).  My main problems with him came when he listened too attentively to the likes of Schmidt.  I tried to resign when I thought he was insufficiently tough with the Soviets over Poland, and he asked me to stay.  For two reasons.  First, nobody else was giving him that kind of criticism, and he wanted to hear it.  And second, “don’t be in such a hurry;  I’ll be gone in a few months.”

And he was.

Secretary of State Clinton is quite right to say that Iran is now a military dictatorship.  A note on Twitter last week put it succinctly and accurately:

[The Revolutionary Guards, [aka “Sepah”] & its Commander in chief have taken over & have no intention of letting go. [Next year’s regular Army] budget is not even quarter of Sepah’s budget.

- Basij is totally integrated in Sepah now.
- From National police to Central command, all Sepahi & Basijis.
- The Ministry of Intelligence is run by Sepah Intelligence.
- [State broadcasting] & most print media are run by Sepah.
- Most judges are Sepahis.
- 3/4 of Gov is Sepahi.

It is a de facto military dictatorship.

The supremacy of the Revolutionary Guards and their instruments of mass brutality were shown on the Tehran streets last Thursday, the anniversary of the seizure of power by the followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.  According to eyewitness , both online and in newspapers like Le Monde, there were huge numbers of security forces in major squares, and along the streets leading to them.  Some Green demonstrators—“many of us,” according to Le Monde’s source–even found themselves funneled into Azadi Square along with regime supporters.  So, for those who like to keep score, it was hard to get an honest count.  We do know that the Guards, police, and Basij beat up hundreds of Greens with considerable savagery.  Their victims included the wife of Green leader Meir Hossein Mousavi, the other top Green figure, Mehdi Karroubi (who was struck in the face with a tear gas canister and may lose an eye) and his son, Ali (who was beaten and tortured in a mosque after being seized).

We also know that the regime falsified the size of the crowd that came to cheer President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Official pictures purported to show a monster turnout in Azadi Square, but overhead photography from Google Earth shows that only a quarter of the space was full, and YouTube videos on the spot show lots of empty space.  Kids had room to kick a soccer ball around, and plenty of the faithful lay down on the grass and took a nap while the president delivered his usual diatribe.

I believe that the Iranian regime has assembled the largest armed force in history to protect it from the Iranian people’s righteous indignation on Thursday the 11^th.  There will be hundreds of thousands of police, revolutionary guards, Basij, and people bused in from the countryside to Tehran.

Additionally, the regime is shutting down communications, especially in Tehran.  Iranian Tweeters say internet is largely gone, and cell phones are not working.  None of this is new, and in the past the dissidents have managed to beat the censors; it will be interesting to see if the mullahs’ trusted advisers (mostly Chinese) are more effective this time.  They certainly have failed in China, and the Iranian authorities have demonstrated an almost supernatural ability to screw up their own plans.

A case in point:  the political center of the city is Azadi Square, and workers have been stringing loudspeakers (and probably cameras) all over the  square and the approach routes, in order to drown out the chants of the demonstrators.  So today they tested the system by broadcasting the national anthem.  Except it was the shah’s anthem, not the Islamic Republic’s.

Was it sabotage, or that incredible knack of ruining even a simple dry run?  Who knows?  Whatever it was, it reinforces the regime’s popular image of a bunch of thugs who can only kill, maim and torture, but not build anything of value.

The regime is very nervous, as well it should be.  They don’t trust anyone outside a very small circle of fanatical loyalists.  The broadcasters at radio/tv headquarters scheduled to cover the festivities were all replaced on Tuesday.  Activists, intellectuals, and relatives of opposition leaders have been thrown in jail.  These measures have been in effect for some time now — Reporters Sans Frontières claims 400 journalists have left the country since June 2009 and 2000 journalists are jobless — but have not cowed the dissidents.  We’ll soon see if that has changed.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail.  They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move.  They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

The two leaders of the Green Movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, expect to be arrested either Wednesday or Friday, and indeed they have been daring Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to do it.  They believe that if they are arrested, the country will rise up against the regime.