Joshua Muravchik: Neocon Corner

Confessing error is never easy, especially when under attack. We neoconservatives were proven right about every issue on which we took up cudgels against liberals and paleocons for 25 years, so when we finally were wrong on Iraq, we got pilloried. The particulars of our errors—whether it was the whole idea of invading Iraq or just aspects of its execution—will be sorted out for a long time, but one cardinal mistake was undoubtedly our infatuation with Ahmad Chalabi.

I met him around the time of the first Gulf war, and I gave him a copy of my recently-published book, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny. When I saw him next, maybe five years later, he said: “I read your book, but I don’t think your government has.” I was of course flattered and amused. And I was enchanted by this articulate man from that other-planet of Baathist Iraq who professed the very same democratic beliefs central to my worldview.

I wrote an article in Commentary advocating military aid to Chalabi’s insurgency, although I also said: “Those Iraqis who say they want to fight for democracy may not, in the end, prove to be true democrats, but there can be no real test of that proposition unless and until they come to power.”

Well, Chalabi has not come to power, but he has been close enough to it that the results are already clear—and he flunks with flying colors. Never mind all the controversy over bogus WMD reports from Iraqi sources that Chalabi may or may not have had much to do with. Let us just consider Chalabi’s acts since his return to Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

By all accounts it was Chalabi who put together the pan-Shiite slate that won Iraq’s first post-war election. This got the country’s aborning democracy off to a troubled beginning, emphasizing sectarian divisions that nearly led to a civil war.

When Chalabi’s own electoral standing proved next to nil, he forged an alliance with the most retrograde of the Shiite factions, led by Muqtada al-Sadr who was second only to al-Qaeda in Iraq for thuggery, internecine bloodshed, and efforts to defeat the democratic project.

Chalabi was also accused by U.S. officials in 2004 of passing American secrets to Iran. No clear evidence was made public, and since he was neither American nor in America, no charges were brought.

This week, Iraq held elections that will determine the composition of the Iraqi government as U.S. forces withdraw, meaning that the entire project of implanting democracy in that country rides on the outcome, including on perceptions that the process is fair and legitimate.

But an enormous shadow has been cast over that by the so-called De-Baathification Commission, controlled by Chalabi. It disqualified hundreds of candidates before the election and may even bar others after the fact. Never mind trying to figure out from here who truly was or was not a Baathist, or at what level. What is transparently clear is that no democracy can place the power to disqualify candidates in the hands of other candidates, and Chalabi and his underlings on the De-Baathification Commission were themselves running in this election. This is a travesty.

Last week, Chalabi took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to complain about U.S. pressures to reverse the disqualifications. “Recent attempts to interfere in Iraq’s constitutionally mandated elections are counterproductive and shortsighted,” he wrote. “All we ask is the opportunity to move forward on our own as we see fit.” Surely this deserves the Nobel Prize for chutzpah. This man who worked more than anyone to get the U.S. to spend thousands of lives to oust the Iraqi government so that he, himself, might bid for power, now indignantly tells us to butt out?

But there is worse. In an effort to change the subject from his election shenanigans, Chalabi floats the idea of “a regional alliance among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran that would be of benefit to the entire Middle East and a strong bastion against Islamic extremism.”

Say what? I heard Iran’s reactionary Majlis speaker, Ali Larijani, make a roughly similar proposal at a forum in Dubai once. An alliance of this kind is designed to push the United States from the region and pave the way for Iranian and/or Islamist hegemony. Who knows about the espionage charges, but the games Chalabi is playing are a threat both to Iraq’s prospects for democracy, as well as to America’s interests in the region.

A summit last week between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provided a useful measure of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy success, and there is very little of it to be found.

Obama’s bedrock idea was that most of America’s woes abroad were self-inflicted. We had been arrogant, deaf, and belligerent—doubly so under the presidency of George W. Bush—and had alienated the world at large. Obama, a man of rare charm and oratorical gifts, a man with roots in Africa and Asia, as well as Europe, and a political thinker who had spent his entire career as a critic of the United States, was perfectly suited to set all this right. He made a point at the outset of his term of apologizing far and wide for past U.S. behavior and of proffering an outstretched hand to all, especially those governments with which America had been at odds. He even mothballed America’s policy, consistent since the Carter years, of promoting human rights and democracy, apparently believing that our advocacy appeared supercilious and stood in the way of comity with the rulers of many states.

The chief prizes of Obama’s new game were Iran and Syria. He hoped to deflect Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons by conspicuous displays of respect and friendly intentions and by stuffing the pot of his offers to negotiate with every sweetener his team could think of. At the same time, he worked to warm things with Syria, sending a stream of high level envoys to Damascus. He also appointed a new ambassador to replace the one that had been withdrawn after the 2005 assassination, generally attributed to the Assad regime, of Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri, for whom there is still no justice.

So set was Obama on this good-will-to-dictators approach that he refused to offer any verbal support to Iran’s Green Movement in the first week or so of anti-regime protests. Indeed he did the opposite, talking down the opposition and insisting on his undiminished eagerness to negotiate with Tehran’s incumbent authorities. Eventually shamed out of this stance, his administration has since given niggardly encouragement to the Iranian protesters.

On the Syrian front, Obama’s overtures were repaid only by Damascus’s continued funneling of missiles and other arms to Hezbollah in violation of the UN resolution that ended its brief 2006 war with Israel. The country also, according to the Iraqi government, continues to channel terrorists into Iraq. And Syria has regained the grip on Lebanon that it had been forced to relinquish under international pressure following the Hariri assassination.

In the face of these devastating rebuffs, an Obama administration spokesmen took pains to make clear that their courtship of Syria was not motivated by wimpishness, but rather by the hard-headed goal of winning that country away from its alliance with Iran, thus weakening the latter. At a joint news conference with Ahmadinejad following their summit, Assad, not usually known for his humor, ridiculed this strategy. “In our meeting today, we meant to sign a separation agreement between Syria and Iran, but apparently some mistranslation or misunderstanding occurred, and we signed an agreement waiving visa requirements instead,” said the Syrian, announcing an arrangement that cements a closer relationship between the two regimes.

Revealing the reasons for his choice to move closer to Tehran (even with its regime on shaky ground) rather than yield to American blandishments, Assad pointed to what the Soviets used to call the “correlation of forces.” In apparent reference to the Americans and Israelis, he chortled: “The forces on the other side have met with failure. At each juncture and with each development we can see these forces moving from failure to failure. We hope that someday we will be able to celebrate their big failure...Such a day will surely come.”

Meanwhile elsewhere, the government of Afghanistan ignores our demands for clean elections. That of Iraq resists pressure not to disqualify candidates. Turkey edges further toward Islamism. Venezuela funds and arranges training for anti-government guerrillas in Colombia. China tightens the reins on its citizens and rebuffs countless appeals to support sanctions on Iran. The Palestinian Authority refuses to return to negotiations with Israel. The governments of Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela collude with Cuba to eviscerate hard-won democratic norms in the hemisphere. NATO allies renege on plans to muster more troops for Afghanistan to make up for 10,000 that Obama cut from General Stanley McChrystal’s request. And so on.

In short, a sense of American retreat is in the air, and other governments are reacting accordingly. It is far from clear that Obama would wish to reverse this. But if he did, it would require something other than more apologies for the actions of his predecessors.

“The back-to-back snowstorms in the capital were an inconvenient meteorological phenomenon for Al Gore,” cracks The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. The largest snowfall in DC’s recorded history unleashed a blizzard of ridicule of “global warming.” Milbank points out that the storms do not in fact disprove the various dire forecasts. Some theorists of climate change have said that a general trend of warming would be punctuated by extreme weather events, so the likes of what we have experienced this winter may not contradict that. But, as Milbank points out, climate alarmists have themselves leaned so heavily on anecdote—a glacier losing mass here, a species altering its habits there—that they have left themselves open to refutation in kind—in this case, millions upon millions of white, flaky anecdotes piling up beyond endurance all over Washington.

These crystalline messengers were not the only thing chilling climate alarmists this winter. There were also new revelations of errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored body whose 2007 report was widely heralded as the capstone on the global-warming debate. Now an embarrassed IPCC conceded that some of the sources on which it relied were amateurish and others were from the world of advocacy rather than scholarship. It also confessed to “typos,” notably in its assertion that the glaciers of the Himalayas were melting so fast that they might disappear entirely by 2035, a mere 25 years from now. The year should have read 2350, a not-so-mere 340 years from now, far enough into the future for many other things to intervene. And even this forecast for 2350 turned out to have been borrowed from an earlier UN study, which got it from an admittedly non-scholarly source.

This comedy of errors points to the question of why any entity that is sponsored by the UN should be taken seriously. This is the same UN whose Conference on Trade and Development taught poor nations that to escape poverty they needed to cut themselves off from any trade with or investment from rich nations. (As a result of widespread adoption of this topsy turvy advice, the developing world lost an entire generation to stagnation.) It is the same UN whose Human Rights Council categorically refuses to utter a word of reproach aimed at China or Saudi Arabia or Syria or Libya or any of the world’s most tyrannical regimes. The same UN whose oil-for-food program enabled Saddam Hussein to build new castles, stockpile weapons, and buy influence while hungry Iraqis received only food long past its expiration date. The same UN that invited Bosnian Muslims to take refuge in the “safe haven” of Srebrenica, then disarmed them, and abandoned them to their Serbian predators. The same UN whose peacekeepers in Africa exacted payment in the token of sexual favors from the women and children they were sent to protect. This is the UN on which we will rely for the last word on the fate of the Earth?

These two apotheoses of alarmism—Al Gore and the IPPC—jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize. Gore also won two Academy Awards for An Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 film designed, says its director, Davis Guggenheim, to bring “everyone [to] the edge of their seats, gripped by his haunting message.”

The very title of Gore’s film leads us to the deepest issue here. The chief newspaper of the Soviet state was also called, Pravda (“Truth”). But those who truly seek truth know that they can never be certain they have found it. Gore, in contrast, exemplified the conceit of the alarmists that “the science is settled.” Science, however, is less a body of knowledge than a way of knowing, and one of its principles is that conclusions are always provisional, awaiting further reinforcement, refinement, or contradiction. If it’s settled, it’s not science.

Subjects that can be explored through controlled laboratory experiments tend to lend themselves to more robust conclusions. Other subjects may also be investigated in a scientific spirit, but conclusions usually must be more tentative.

Climate science, which entails the intersection of several areas of inquiries that must be explored outside a laboratory, is unlikely to yield much certainty. If Gore were more devoted to truth, he would have titled his film, A Troubling Hypothesis. This might have won no awards from Oslo or Hollywood. But it would have left him much less susceptible to the ridicule of the heavens.

Last Thursday (February 11), the anniversary of 1979’s Islamic Revolution, the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime succeeded in keeping control of central Tehran, thwarting the hopes of the Green Movement to turn the day into another display of public protest.

The authorities relied on three tactics. First, they mobilized hundreds of thousands of their own people, busing them in from around the country, to fill the city center. These included members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia, and other security personnel. In addition, thousands of civilian marchers took part in the official commemoration. There is no way to know how many of these marchers were genuine regime-supporters and how many were government employees or individuals otherwise beholden to the authorities, participating under duress. But they occupied the strategic terrain.

Second, the regime arrested many oppositionists in the weeks leading up to February 11. No one knows how many since the arrests are not announced and families are not notified. Some prisoners have been executed and more executions have been threatened. Once someone is hauled in there is no telling when, if ever, he or she will be released. The mothers of those who are believed to have been arrested stage continuous vigils outside of Evin prison, seeking information about their loved ones. These vigils have become the most poignant ongoing manifestation of popular opposition and the focus of widespread sympathy. But in the days before February 11, the mothers, too, were arrested, according to reports on Iranian Web sites.

On February 11, security forces rushed to beat and/or arrest those who did demonstrate. Sending a message that no one is safe from thuggish abuse, the son of presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi was among those beaten. He displayed nasty bruises on his body and reported that he was also threatened with rape. More shocking, Zahra Rahnavard, the 64-year old wife of the likely true winner of the presidential race, Mir Hossein Moussavi, was assaulted with fists and batons. (Rahnavard, who pushed her husband toward a more reformist stance during the campaign, now may be the most popular leader in Iran, according to the Green Movement’s polls.)

The third tactic employed against the opposition was to disrupt its communications by technological means. On the eve of February 11, the government banned Gmail, the e-mail server used by many of the movement’s adherents. It interfered with cell-phone service and Internet access and intensified jamming VOA, BBC, Radio Farda, and other foreign broadcasters. (Astoundingly, apparently still in pursuit of rapprochement with Iran’s bloody rulers, Obama’s National Security Council asked U.S. government broadcasters to play down this jamming or not report it at all.)

Although these tactics worked, the Greens don’t count the day as a clear defeat. Protests were successfully mounted in a handful of other cities and even in pockets of Tehran, where, for the most part, protesters repaired to the rooftops to shout “Allahu akbar.” Their next target date is Chaharshanbe Suri on March 16th, the eve of the last Wednesday of the year on the Iranian calendar. This ancient Persian holiday, also known as the festival of fire, is traditionally observed with nighttime bonfires and feasts. This year, the festivities will be infused with political symbols and slogans, and this will be much harder to suppress because these will not be centralized but dispersed in neighborhoods and parks all over the city and the country.

While the Green Movement devises new tactics of its own to cope with the repressions, the question we Americans and others outside Iran must ask is: Can we do anything? The answer is yes. True, we are helpless to prevent the arrests and beatings or the mobilization of the regime’s automatons, but we have it within our power to counteract its technological warfare against the Green Movement. We can put up a communications satellite dedicated to the needs of the Greens to facilitate Internet and other electronic communications despite government interference. Contrary to the NSC’s knee-jerk appeasement, we should protest loudly any jamming of our broadcasts—and we should find ways to retaliate. And we can launch TV Farda, a complement to Radio Farda, the Farsi surrogate broadcast service operated by Radio Free Europe. Currently, VOA TV’s Farsi broadcasts reach millions but are constrained because VOA speaks for the U.S. government. In contrast, a “surrogate” service like Radio Farda or TV Marti (to Cuba) speaks for the indigenous people who are excluded from power. A surrogate Farsi TV station would give the Greens a powerful weapon with which to counteract the regime’s vicious machinations.

This Thursday may reveal, or even determine, the shape of our world for years to come. February 11 is the anniversary of the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Forbidden to stage protests since the ones that rocked the country following June’s stolen election, the opposition Green Movement has turned instead to co-opting public events, when official protocol encourages Iranians to take to the streets.

The most recent of such co-opted occasions were the anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in November; the mourning for Ayatollah Montazeri, following his death in December; and the observance of the Shiite holiday of Ashura a week after that. Each time the opposition displayed impressive strength.

Protest leaders have announced that February 11 will be the next occasion for the people to display their discontent. But the regime, too, has made known its intent to mobilize supporters, hoping to bolster its legitimacy.

The momentum of confrontation has been growing. Security officials have issued increasingly draconian threats against any protests. They hanged two men—alleged to be monarchists—and pronounced death sentences on nine others without revealing their names. Thus, the families of the 4,000 or so imprisoned protesters are left to wonder whether their children have been marked for execution. And some hard-line clerics have issued calls for many more executions. There is a bloody precedent for this: In the 1980s, apparently on orders of that pious man, Ayatollah Khomeini, authorities dispatched several thousand prisoners, mostly adherents of the “People’s Mujahideen of Iran,” who had not previously received death sentences.

The Green Movement has not backed down, relying on low-intensity tactics to demonstrate its unflagging spirit. For example, every Iranian, whichever side he or she is on, now cannot help but have a wallet full of anti-regime graffiti. How so? Because the movement’s slogans have been scrawled on most of the nation’s currency. In December, the regime tried to stifle this by announcing that all defaced bills would become worthless and demanded they be exchanged for unblemished notes. But the authorities did not have time to produce enough new currency to replace all that bore opposition messages. Enforcing its decree would have meant wiping out the cash of millions, creating new dissidents and inviting new protests. So, humiliatingly, the authorities backed down.

Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize winner who has always been a moderate and cautious dissenter, has just added her voice to those calling on the people to defy the threats and take to the streets on Thursday.  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, whose Radio Farda has numerous sources inside Iran, reported outbreaks of strikes this week in several industries. And public opinion polls conducted on behalf of the Green Movement (through a methodology that aims for rigor despite the constrained circumstances created by political repression) registered an increasingly radical opposition to the regime on the part of a growing majority of Iranians.

If on Thursday few protesters appear or make their sentiments known, then we will know that repression is working, at least for now, and the people have been cowed. But if large numbers turn out for the Green—rivaling or exceeding the numbers the authorities can produce, despite the fact that the former group face dire consequence while the latter are offered emoluments and transportation—then the movement’s momentum will continue to mount, and the deadly fissures that have been apparent within the regime will widen, perhaps fatally. If confrontations on Thursday claim even more lives, then this process is likely to be accelerated, with increasing numbers of clerics swinging against the authorities. By Friday morning we will have a clearer idea how much time is left for this sad, bizarre chapter in human history called the Islamic Republic.