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.

Hopetasm

Curiously, people like Ezra Klein, who are deeply concerned about the brutality of "the régime" of President (and future President-presumptive) Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, evince no sign of knowing, or being interested in knowing, what Iran was like when Mir Hussein Moussavi was prime minister in the eighties. In a phrase: worse! This is not to say that Moussavi might not legitimately have changed, nor to engage in an exercise of comparative, relativistic (im)morality. But, as we used to say in comparative cultural lesbionics seminars back at leafy Oberlin, perhaps we could complicate our understanding . . . uh, problematize our prior assumptions? When push comes to pummel, Moussavi's reformist rhetoric seems to be pretty thin gruel; he talks of returning to the teachings of Khomeni. Well, American liberals are awfully fond of "take back" narratives, aren't they? Moussavi's reformist campaign and image, not to mention his fervent support among university students and highly educated urbanites certainly bear a distinct resemblance to another epochal reformer who is even as we speak working diligently and assiduously to rationalize the policies of his predecessor. Change you can believe in.

I, Rationality

Mohamed ElBaradei has a gut feeling that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. It just . . . makes sense. After all, countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, which didn't have nukes, got "pulverized," whereas countries like Pakistan and North Korea, which had nukes, didn't. Iran would be totally irrational if it didn't seek an atom death machine. We cannot trust these moolaws if they do not immediately begin weaponizing uranium! Their failure to produce nuclear weapons only proves that their eschatology abrogates the fear of death! Madmen! They must, at all costs, be prevented from not pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Good Order

Dainel Larison has been the most consistently interesting commenter on the Iranian Election and its many discontents.

BING!

Which is funnier?! I don't know!

Yeah, well, it would be big of me, too.

The brief insists it is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they are the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.” In arguing that other states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages under the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, the Justice Department cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece.

These are comparisons that understandably rankle many gay people. In a letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, said, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

-NY Times Editorial

Look. Gay pornography routinely dips into the brother bin by getting two dudes who resemble each other to fuck. Video tag: Brotherly Love. Authentic Real-Life Gay Human Person™ Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a turgidly lyrical memoir about how the ancient Greeks proved that gay people really just want to have sex with themselves. He proved it with philosophy. Or something! My brother is not an elfin hipster androgyne ten years my junior, but if he were I'd totally covet that ass.

But, you know, seriously. The Human Rights Campaign is a timorous gang of desexualized, petit bourgeois, liberal ninnies whose very name is a cowardly euphemism. Denying that the growing general visibility of queer sexualities and the expanding legal recognition of same-sex relationships opens the door to the reevaluation of other sexual taboos plays well for the go-slow "allies" in the Donk party, but it is distinctly unrelated to the reality. If it is okay for two men or two women to have sex, why is it not okay for two related men or two related women? Why shouldn't uncles and nieces or aunts and nephews or cousins be permitted to marry or have sexual relations, especially non-procreative sexual relations? Why is it necessary to forcibly preclude polyandry and polygyny? I knew three gay men who lived in perfect happiness together for over two years--just as long as a lot of first marriages, and certainly longer than most gay couples ever make it.

The truth is that while the moralizing of the slippery-slope social conservatives is reactionary, silly, and hysterical, their point--that the growing permissibility of "alternate sexualities" does indeed force us to consider that many of our sexual prohibitions are just as arbitrary as those that, for instance, "define marriage as between one man and one woman"--is a good one.

Yes and No

Bibi has long refused to say he supports a Palestinian state, principally because he doesn't support a Palestinian state. Barack Obama insists that Bibi say he supports a Palestinian state, so he comes out and says he supports a Palestinian state that has none of the powers and characteristics (self-defense, control of its own borders, control of its own airspace, control of its own foreign policy, control of its own immigration policy, etc. etc.) of a modern nation-state. The Palestinians are said to "reject" the offer. What was offered?

Throwing the Spread

Two things seem plain about Iran's Presidential election. The first is that there was substantial fraud in the casting, counting, and recording of votes in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent and preferred candidate of the clerical elite who control much of the real apparatus of government. The second is that, despite the fraud, he nevertheless represented the preference of the majority, albeit a slimmer-than-claimed majority, of Iranians, while support for the more moderate and reformist opposition was concentrated in and perhaps limited to Tehran. To make a perfectly crude judgment based on the limited information as yet available, it appears that Mr. Ahmadinejad's lead early in the contest was simply not big enough for the comfort of the conservative establishment, and that the fraud didn't ultimately give him a victory so much as it attempted to give him a more commanding one.

Our living experience with voter fraud in American Presidential elections, whether Jack Kennedy in Illinois or George Bush in Florida, has been limited to very close elections in which the result of the contest was directly affected by the various voting hijinks involved, where the winner was determined by votes not cast but counted or votes not counted but cast. The Iranian situation is something else entirely, and it's worth contemplating the hypothetical: what if it were conclusively shown that Ahmadinejad both legitimately won the election and cheated his way to a greater margin of victory? What course of action, following such discovery, would represent the greater thwarting of the popular will? Would removing him from office not disenfranchise a legitimate majority? Would maintaining him in office not represent an intolerable violation of the rule of law and a rejection of the principle that elections must be not only free, but fair? Isn't the principle of fairness in democracy after all more complex than merely respecting the whims and preferences of the majority regardless the marginal affects of plots, subterfuges, hacks and cheats? Or is that not true? Is any election which can reasonably be said to represent the will of a majority (or even substantial plurality?) a fair election?

These questions are mostly rhetorical and in any case moot. I do feel for those Iranians who had hoped to steer their country toward a more cosmopolitan and tolerant society--their social vision obviously has my sympathy. I abhor the superstition, crass populism, and the false nostalgia of conservativism, including that of the tenacious Mr. Ahmadinejad. But their elections have helped to demonstrate just how fraught are the claims of democracy and its proponents, who reflexively stake out a position that democratic governments are not only procedurally superior, but more importantly are the only truly moral systems of government.

UPDATE: Here is some relevant polling info and the pollsters opining in the WaPo.