I kept saying it was stupid to oppose Ahmadinejad...

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I never actually approved of President Ahmadinejad, but I kept screaming to people and pleading with people to realize, Ahmadinejad is the least of our worries in Iran. It may be hard to believe, but, as offensive and odious as Ahmadinejad is, undermining him was just stupid, stupid, stupid.

Here I am, shaking my head in dismay, as a mere political foe of dear Israel, which was sufficiently bothersome, is aligned now to be replaced by a frothing-mad, backward-looking theocratic regime.

Ahmadinejad was relatively rational if you take into account that, when I call him such, I am juxtaposing him directly with the most horribly conservative powers in the Iranian government. He was a controllable problem child. Ahmadinejad could have been negotiated with, and he could have been brought around to reason, compared to the theocratic regime.

And I said this, over and over, but the people told me, "Oh, you must hate Israel! You are siding with the terrorist, Ahmadinejad! You are so horrible!" And yet, while Ahmadinejad might have civilian, secular ideas about the use of nuclear power, the most radically conservative elements of the theocratic regime might actually become a global menace given half of a chance.

The West did do everything it could to undermine Ahmadinejad. Sure, Ahmadinejad was not the most wise or eloquent of leaders. I never truly liked the man. In fact, I was rather fond of his political opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. And yet we have thrown away one of the rare men in Iran who might have had the ability and the gumption to control the conservatives in that country.

I worry now for poor Israel and much of that part of the world.

Ahmadinejad was the primary force driving Iran's nuclear program. I would have far preferred a radical Islamic nonnuclear Iran to a nuclear armed Iran under Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is as much a sock puppet of those in real power as Obama is in the US.

This is an internal dispute between Dinnerjacket and the Mullahs. It's been going on for some time. He staged a sit-out a month or two back over his inability to pick his own staff. I don't think it has anything to do with our opinions or policies.

I don't see how an argument between nutjobs establishes that one is better or worse.

Don't you madmen realize what we have now done? Ahmadinejad doesn't even have any authority over Iran's military, you ret*d morons! He is purely a civilian ruler. The Supreme Leader runs the military and has since the beginning!

Damn it, if it's not one kind of ignorance, it's another. It's either the kind of ignorance where the Muslims are a helpless, oppressed people, in some people's minds, or it is the kind of ignorance where the Muslims are all evil, in other people's minds. Can't anyone even contemplate that the Muslim cultures in that region are as diverse and gray as any culture here in the West? But no! Even self-styled egalitarians--perhaps especially so--seem to believe that all Muslims are just carbon copies of one Muslim.

If the fools here in the West would just open their eyes, they would see that Ahmadinejad is nothing more exciting than a corrupted and selfish ruler, and he is a natural and inevitable product of his culture. But even a corrupted and noisome man like Ahmadinejad is not the same thing as a psychotic, religiously driven terrorist!

Ahmadinejad might or might not have had nuclear ambitions beyond the civilian uses he claims. Even if he had plans for a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, though, he would have been far easier to deal with than the clerics who are now trying to unseat him.

And now we could very well find ourselves faced with nuclear-armed, paranoid, insane fundamentalists. The fools in my part of the world have therefore created yet another monster in their stupid, selfish, misguided arrogance. They created a terrible monster when they unseated the Shah...yet, just as the nation of Iran is developing the barest potential of returning to a normal course of development, more madness is now being thrown into the ring!

The world is incorrigible. The West could have treated Ahmadinejad as the corrupted and nasty man he was without obsessing over paranoid fantasies!

The relationship between Iran, the Arab states, the United States and Israel is vastly more complicated than a simple, binary, "he's our friend/he's our enemy."

Outside of formal matters (such as consular assistance) provided by Pakistan, the regieme in Tehran communicates with the United States through its Ambassador to the UN. Observers in October paid keen attention to high level communication between the Ambassador and Congressional leadership and Ministerial level meetings. American and Iranian interests with respect to Afghanistan (and to a lesser extent Iraq) would have provided a significant opportunity to lead to normalization.

Then in January 2002, Bush threw it all away. Whatever the factual justification that may have existed for lumping Iran together with Iraq and North Korea, there is no denying that the "Axis of Evil" speech served to slam the door on any possibility of bringing Iran into a more pragmatic realpolitik.

For all of its many failings, Iran's cultural distinctiveness from its neighbours provides an opportunity for her interlocutors to engage in the region. (And just might incline Iran to work with her neighbours, rather than seeking to undermine them).

Well, maybe with Ahmadinejad no longer there to serve as a whipping boy, people elsewhere in the world might behave more rationally about Iran in general.

Damn it! I just hope that Mousavi's people have the presence of mind to keep a cool head through this. If they can just stay cool and organized, they can build up inertia. It's he who weathers the storm best who rules the world when the floodwaters recede.

I just hope more good than evil comes of this change. I don't trust major upsets.

Obvious troll is obvious.

"President of iran" has on it's face a very different job description than "president of the united states of america".

armanidinnerjacket is just a face. he doesn't make policy.

The biggest challenge in refuting statements like this is that they are not entirely lacking in justification. This causes the people who are trying to explain the important nuances of the subject to seem as if they are trying to refute an obvious truth.

The reality is that it should be obvious to most people that the Shiite authorities don't especially trust secular government, and they don't like to cede power to it. Therefore, it would be easy to portray them as an all-powerful theocratic regime. Not quite perfectly accurate.

In fact, the feuding and power-grappling between secular and religious authorities in Iran goes back a long way, and the course of the history of this relationship does not always follow rational lines...

...Wait, that's an important point, actually: we have to understand that much of the behavior that has manifested over the course of Iran's history is substantially irrational and contrary to logic. The reason why is simple: the people involved have been living, breathing human beings. They make mistakes, and they do things that they later regret. We have to deal with deeply ingrained "moral codes" that are deeply rooted in someone's spirituality but also rather divorced from real-world concerns. In fact, the biggest fallacy people make in trying to understand the actions of people who lived a long time ago is try to treat them as chess pieces that all act according to some strategist that is standing over them, and this leads to people believing some pretty crazy, daft things about our ancestors....

...Getting back to the point, secular ideas of government are especially poisonous among people who tend to associate secular government with the Shah.

Now, let me throw you an example of how extreme people's mindsets can actually get. Think about how conservatives in the US get alarmed at the idea of "socialism" or "communism" coming to American shores. Even the parts of our economy that we have no choice but to put partly under the control of the government are rigged-up in such a way that we can preserve the fiction that they are truly "private enterprise." It makes about as much sense as the British keeping up the political fiction that they are ruled by a monarchy. Why? Because what they call "republicanism" is damaged goods.

By the same token, "monarchist" seems to be pretty much a slur that means "all that is evil and against God." And the fact is that the theocratic government in Iran is, although not necessarily univerally loved, seen as a sort of a hedge against this invisible, intangible evil. Therefore, you are not going to get a situation in which Iran's theocratic government is suddenly overthrown in a single blow.

It's a juvenile and stupid pipe dream. Get over it.

What can happen, though, is for the theocratic regime to gradually invest increasing levels of trust in the secular government, their "sock puppet," and give that government a chance to prove to them, based on real-life, concrete results. They need to see secular government feeding the children and repairing those who are broken or wounded.

And the thing is, Ahmadinejad was an olive branch that the theocratic regime had extended, where they might allow a man who is worldly to have more influence and more power than they would usually feel comfortable allowing such a man to have. It wasn't a perfect or total handover, but it was an attempt to reach out.

But, if Ahmadinejad were to go out in a major political upheaval, it could destroy that tiny, fragile tendril. And the way I see it, our best hope right now is that Mir-Hossein Mousavi's people can remain calm and weather this storm. If Mousavi's people can prove that they can keep people coordinated and under control in a time of political crisis, that will speak volumes to the Mullahs. But, if they start becoming violent or fall into chaos, that door will be closed and sealed. So Mousavi's people are doing the right thing. They are saying to remain calm and civil, no matter what happens, even if it seems almost certain that they are losing. It's the only way.

So...build bunker sooner rather than later, yes?

A conservative take on the issue: Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs By Jed Babbin
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 09834.html

Daily beast: Ahmadinejad's Days Are Numbered by Reza Aslan
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... nejad.html



A liberal solution: Talking to Ahmadinejad By Jason Rezaian
http://www.slate.com/id/2268086/