Red Satrap, Blue Satrap

Without belaboring the comparison, I note a further similarity between Mir Hussein Moussavi, much-beloved in America at the moment, and His Regnant Majesty, Barack Obama, which is this: that his appeal has very little to do with any discontinuity with the policies of the past. Moussavi is not as stylistically conservative as Ahmedinejad, just as Obama was not as stylistically conservative as George W. Bush. Regarding the substance of their views, however, there is less distinction. Just as Obama has largely ratified Bush-era policies, especially in the realm of foreign policy, despite cloaking it all in a mystifying gauze of renovated sentiment, good-will, and forensics-team oratory, so too does Moussavi hew largely to the standard Iranian line on Iran's rightful place in the region, their right to pursue a nuclear energy program, etc. etc. To the green-hued groupies of the Andrew Sullivan set, what's appealing about Moussavi is the same as what's appealing about Obama--he appears to be one of us, not some hidebound hick who's grown too big for his britches.

Of course, Ahmedinejad denies, sort of, the Holocaust, in which sacrosanct direction every Muslim must genuflect lest he become the newest of our new-new Hitlers. This is surely in poor taste, as the Holocaust surely did happen, although we note that Mahmoud's hedged, Mel Gibsonian chatter about the depredations of the Third Reich is easily matched in nuttiness by certain prominent Jews. I sometimes wonder what would happen to Sino-American relations were the Chinese to impose similar demands on American politicians regarding the behavior of Imperial Japan in Manchuria, proclaiming that merely regretting Japanese visits to war-dead shrines and circumlocutions regarding past atrocities are wholly insufficient, and requiring that each American president proclaim the unique and unparalleled barbarity of the Japanese occupation and all its attendant evils. Or what if every newly elected Russian president came to the United States to lay a ceremonial wreath and utter memorial banalities at the head of the Trail of Tears.

Well, I'm digressing. What the Western interlocutors for the Iranian opposition propose in their merry-go-rounds of self-reassurance is that what the Iranian nation and people really want for themselves is at root the same thing that we in the titular West really want for them, and of them, which is to say compliance and complicity in our own hare-brained regional schemes. Underlying it is the still-simmering frustration at the Iraqis for failing to do what we gave them the opportunity to do, even if we were a bit . . . clumsy in the execution. Viewed dispassionately, Iran's elections represented a domestic struggle between a relatively more liberal and moderately less nationalistic urban class and the less affluent, less educated, more traditional population outside of Iran's cities, Tehran in particular. This tension, the dispassionate observer might note, remains one of the principle sources of internal political tension even in most of the world's advanced democracies, despite the fact that the ruling élite, regardless of their stylistic predilections, share certain assumptions and a certain consensus about how to run the country and how the country ought to interact with the rest of the world.