Why is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad so eager to speak at American universities and, it turns out, to host dinner parties for leading American journalists and academics? He knows that what most disarms the West is the illusion that tyrants and dictators are really reasonable fellows, to whom the proper response is dialogue and diplomatic persuasion.
The Iranian regime particularly needs to convey that impression now, because their whole strategy is to drag out negotiations and diplomacy with the West long enough to give them time to acquire nuclear weapons.
In short, they know they can have free reign to achieve their goals through force only if we agree to limit ourselves to achieving our goals through persuasion and diplomacy.
And of course, the left-leaning media falls for this sort of thing uncritically. See, for example, an account of the dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, who describes her overall impression: "The overwhelming sense I had from the dinner was of opportunities being squandered to improve US-Iranian relations."
Conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt has the best response to this: "What I cannot understand is how any American can accept an invitation to dine on Iran's tab even as that regime ships weapons and advisors into Iraq to kill more of the nation's finest. It is beyond moral confusion—it is moral collapse."
Is the Tide Turning Against Iran?
Ahmadinejad's charm offensive may be working on academia and the mainstream media, but overall my sense is that his visit to America drew more attention to Iran's crimes—particularly its responsibility for the killing of US troops in Iraq—and has served to help mobilize the right against Iran.
Charles Krauthammer describes two factors that are helping to turn the tide of events against Iran. The first is France's reversal of its policy of appeasement toward Iran:
On the largest possible stage—the UN General Assembly—President Nicolas Sarkozy put Iran on notice. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had said that France could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Sarkozy said that France cannot. He declared Iran's nuclear ambitions "an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world."… "Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace," he warned. "They lead to war."
The second factor is the effort of congressional Republicans to focus more attention on the Iranian threat.
The mood in Congress also has significantly shifted.
Just this week, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for very strong sanctions on Iran and urging the administration to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist entity. A similar measure passed the Senate Wednesday by 76-22, declaring that it is "a critical national interest of the United States" to prevent Iran from using Shiite militias inside Iraq to subvert the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.
A few months ago, the question was: Will the Democratic Congress force a withdrawal from Iraq? Today the question in Congress is: What can be done to achieve success in Iraq—most specifically, by countering Iran, which is intent on seeing us fail?
Only 403 Days to the Election!
It may be only 403 days until the 2008 presidential election, but things are falling into place very early in this contest. John Podhoretz looks at the races for each party's nomination and concludes—correctly, I think—that both parties already have a runaway front-runner who will be almost impossible to beat, so that we can expect the general election match-up to be Hillary Clinton versus Rudy Giuliani.
The Saffron Revolution
Things are looking bad for the so-called "Saffron Revolution" in Burma—the series of protests led by saffron-robed Buddhist monks against the ruling military junta.
In every such rebellion, the key swing vote is the men with guns: between the dictators and the demonstrators are thousands of men in the police and the military, the ones who are supposed to carry out the order to suppress anti-regime demonstrations. If they balk at using brutality (as in Eastern Europe), the regime falls. If they don't (as at Tiananmen Square in China) then the regime can buy a few more years in power.
In Burma, it looks like the men with guns are following their orders, executing a large-scale crackdown on the demonstrators.
Pakistan Up for Grabs
Meanwhile, Pakistan also continues to waver between military dictatorship and liberal, civilian rule—with a third possibility, a takeover by radical Islamists, waiting in the wings.
The New York Times has the latest updates. Pakistani courts have ordered that arrested opposition politicians must be released—but they have also voted to allow Musharraf to seek another presidential term without first resigning from the military, a setback for the principle of civilian rule.
The Lessons of the Forbes 400
The problem with intellectuals (or at least with today's intellectuals) is that they are interested in ideas—as opposed to being interested in the facts on which ideas are supposed to be based. This is a key root cause of the long-standing anti-capitalist prejudice among intellectuals in academia and the mainstream media.
Over at RealClearPolitics, John Tamny offers a nice corrective. He uses the recently released Forbes 400 list to explore the actual facts about the dynamism of capitalism and the actual source of fortunes of America's wealthiest people.
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