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March 02, 2009Roger Cohen and Iran
Let me preface this commentary by first stating that I am a fan of Roger Cohen's work in the New York Times. I look forward to his columns every week, and as any avid reader of RealClearWorld could attest, we link to his pieces quite regularly.
One of the reasons I enjoy Mr. Cohen's work is that he strikes me as a journalist first, and a pundit at a distant second. He writes, reports and travels with a passion, and his reporting often offers a personal perspective on the issues plaguing various corners of the globe.
Last week, Cohen created quite a stir in his weekly column when he argued that the Jewish population of Iran was in fact free to practice their faith, and treated as coequal citizens by the Iranian government. Through these anecdotal efforts - stories of content Iranian Jews, "tranquilly" working away in their "dusty little" Persian shops - Cohen, apparently, hoped to add some nuance to the debate over Iran's repressive regime. It wasn't Cohen's point, so much as his example, however, that caused the reaction earned him by the likes of Jeffrey Goldberg and Rafael Medoff. These critics, along with several others, lashed out at Cohen in the ensuing week.
Coming this week to his own defense, Cohen has once again taken to the op-ed pages of the New York Times in order to address his critics:
The indignation stems from my recent column on Iranian Jews, which said that the 25,000-strong community worships in relative tranquility; that Persian Jews have fared better than Arab Jews; that hostility toward Jews in Iran has on occasion led to trumped-up charges against them; and that those enamored of the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran regard any compromise with it as a rerun of Munich 1938.This last point found confirmation in outraged correspondence from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany. I was based in Berlin for three years; Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust inhabited me. Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state.
Munich allowed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries.
I share Cohen's disdain for repeated attempts to correlate every nasty government in the world with Nazi Germany. It makes it difficult to analyze the situation in a sensible, contemporary fashion, and as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, it belittles the very real genocide and barbarism conducted by some of the world's most wicked men.
However, in his efforts to distance the Islamic Republic from Nazi Germany, he instead makes a critical overreach, and ultimately plays fast and loose with history. It is true that not every totalitarian is Adolf Hitler, but this does not necessarily excuse one from being a totalitarian:
Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.
What totalitarian regimes require, and what they actually achieve, are often two very different things. The "margins of liberty" in Iran are always in jeopardy, as news outlets are routinely subject to arbitrary closure, and women are regularly beaten, shamed and arrested for clothing deemed to be too revealing, or "Un-Islamic."
Whether or not the totalitarians in Tehran have a firm grasp over their society is somewhat moot. It's certainly a moot point to the newspaper closed for interviewing a prominent gay expat. And such Kirkpatrickian distinctions between totalitarianism and authoritarianism mustn't be terribly consoling to the other religious minorities systematically executed and persecuted by this regime since 1979.
As for Iran's expansionist inclinations, well I'm sure Bahrain and the UAE must take comfort in Cohen's words. But why even go back two centuries? Why would the behavior of the Qajaris or the Pahlavis even matter when discussing a regime that assumed power in 1979?
The revolutionary government of Ruhollah Khomeini fought a bloody, eight-year long war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein over the Middle Eastern sphere of influence. In 1982, Hussein withdrew his battered forces from Iran, and cynically offered a truce with Tehran, so that both governments could instead aid the Palestinian cause in Lebanon. This offer was refused. Iran invaded Iraq, and the conflict waged on for nearly six more years.
Anyone who doesn't understand this fact is simply lacking in a solid foundation of that war's history, and is likewise ill-equipped to provide us the readers with a substantive analysis of Iranian military history.
Aside from Iraq, Iran spent much of the 80's and 90's financing various terror groups and asymmetric insurgent organizations to promote upheaval and, ideally, revolution in several of its neighboring Gulf states. What the war of attrition with Saddam Hussein taught the Iranians was that they lacked the military capabilities to engage an Arab world armed to the teeth by the west, so the next best thing would have to be the exportation of terrorism and the purchasing of influence in various capitals.
After all, why fight with Baghdad when you can simply buy it?
Cohen's rebuttal only gets more bizarre:
The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared with the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned the Majlis, or parliament, down.
A "genuine contest"? Well, if one considers the political exclusion of thousands to be legitimate, then I suppose that might be the case. Khatami will be allowed to run because he is a widely respected figure in Iran. Ahmadinejad has the ideological favor of Iran's Principlist religious hardliners. Khatami - once a beacon of hope and reform in Iran - has already pledged his loyalty to the existing political system in Iran. Any prospective candidate who does otherwise would likely be disqualified, arrested, or worse.
Cohen goes on, offering more anecdotal comparisons - happy Iranian teenagers surfing the web, satellite televisions, and so on. Never once, however, does he truly address the systemic disconnect in Iran between those hopeful young Iranians and the government they suffer under.
And this is partly the problem. In his attempt to apply some nuance to the issue, Cohen instead offers us some plainly obvious and predictable facts: Iranians are nice people. Many Iranians are happy. Iran is a wonderful country, rich in history. All of these things are certainly true, but none of this qualifies as nuanced analysis. We get on-the-ground accounts of happy teenagers, happy store clerks and happy Iranian Jews, but very little substantive expansion on why Iran's current government - rather than the one it had two centuries ago - poses a geopolitcal dilemma for the Obama administration.
Iran is not Nazi Germany, but it is a problem, and it's on the latter that Cohen misses the opportunity to truly educate his readers.
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