Perstroika

This Krauthammer 40,000 column is so utterly and extraordinarily insane that it achieves a sort of majesty. Like the highest attainments of lyric poetry, it totally resists paraphrasis, and I urge you to read it all. Bref: Mir Hussein Moussavi could be Yeltsin . . . must be Yeltsin, once cast in the endless psychodrama that is the American version of world history as a bewildered Russian drunk with an occasional mean streak, now cast by Krauthammer as if he were the figure around which Russian popular protest coalesced to bring down the Soviet Union. Which, needless to say, is not what happened. Yeltsin did manage to beat back Communist recidivists, but then got himself mired in a two-year bitch-fugue with the Russian parliament, eventually calling in the tanks to shell the legislature into submission. Then he sold off the entire Russian economy to six former KGB agents and four members of the old politburo, drank himself silly, resigned, and effectively went into hiding. Vladimir Putin, the tiger-killing god-emperor of the steppe took over, and now notably occupies one of the prime spots in Krauthammer's personal gallery of villains.

The Krauthammerian takeaway: the most desirable outcome for Iran would be a momentary pseudodemocratic caesura followed by the rise to power of a truly brilliant and capable strongman who will with acumen, aplomb, and efficiency consolidate Iran's position as the preeminent regional power and a decidedly recalcitrant, revanchist player on the world stage. (To be fair: this seems to me as good an outcome as any, but by the prevailing Washington Post logic would represent absolute defeat and failure.) Seriously:

Unless Mousavi rises to it, or another rises in his place, Iran's democratic uprising will end not as Russia 1991, but as China 1989.

Now, twenty years later, Russia is "defying" . . . someone or other in Georgia, wagging its dick at the Ukraine, flipping off the EU, and in general causing nothing but trouble for the satellites and allies of the American hegemon. China, meanwhile, is bankrolling the West, producing cheap goods, and keeping US symphonies afloat by booking them to play goodwill tours in East Asia. If Iran's "Green Revolution" represents their own Tienanmen, then we might consider ourselves lucky . . . as might the Iranians, who in a mere generation could be the powerhouse economy of the near Orient.