Some semi-random thoughts on events that occurred since
Friday.
1. I thought about posting something about Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's most recent fit of Holocaust denial, but Juan Cole said
everything I would have said with just the right tone of outrage. For what it's worth, I see this latest bit of bile as a sign of
desperation on Ahmadinejad's part. The government faced renewed protests last week and seems to be somewhat
at a loss for how to deal with its manifest unpopularity. As I noted during the initial round of
demonstrations that followed the elections in June, Iran's leaders are increasingly
out of touch with the broader population, and especially its younger
elements. The clerics are a bunch
of old men, and Ahmadinejad himself hardly in the bloom of youth at 53. By contrast, seventy percent of Iran's
population is under 30 and was born after the 1980 revolution. Spouting foolish and hateful nonsense
about the Holocaust isn't going to buy him much support at home or abroad, and I
think it's a sign of waning legitimacy for the clerical regime as
presently constituted. I just hope
we don't do something stupid that allows him to rally nationalist feeling.
2. A reader wrote in and pointed out that I had incorrectly
referred to "Czechoslovakia" in my post last week on Obama's missile defense
decision. My bad; I obviously
should have said "Czech Republic."
3. Why is Benjamin Netanyahu stiffing Obama and Mitchell,
and why are they letting him? My
answer to that question is in Sunday's Washington
Post.
4. Matt Yglesias had a nice comment over the weekend about one
of my pet peeves: the infamous "Munich analogy." His obvious but still very important point is that making
Adolf Hitler's behavior your standard guide to foreign policy is foolish,
because Hitlers are (fortunately) quite rare and you'll do a lot of stupid
things when dealing with the overwhelming percentage of governments that aren't
Nazi Germany and who aren't led by a genocidal monster.
I would only add a corollary comment:
another reason Britain and France had trouble dealing with Hitler is that they
were overcommitted in other areas (such as the Far East), and were also loathe
to get too close to Stalin's Russia. The lesson (which those who constantly warn of another "Munich" never
mention), is that you can get your country in just as much trouble by
exaggerating threats and losing sight of strategic priorities as you can by
failing to respond vigorously enough when a real challenge arises. For more on how Munich has been misused
in policy debates, check out the late Ernest May's "Lessons" of the Past: the Use and Misuse of History in American
Foreign Policy (1973), and Christopher Layne's article "Security Studies and the Use of
History: Neville Chamberlain's Grand
Strategy Re-Visited." in the July 2008 issue of Security Studies.
BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images
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