Remember the days when Americans came from Mars and Europeans came from Venus? That was the gist of Robert Kagan’s book by the catchy title, Of Paradise and Power. It might be too early to tell, but it looks as though these days they are playing role reversal. Here’s Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on Iran:

“I know from the time of the GDR (East Germany) how important it was that people around the world made sure that the people stuck in (Stasi prisons) Bautzen and Hohenschoenhausen … were not forgotten,” Merkel told parliament.

“Iran must know, particularly in the age of modern communications, that we will do everything in our power to ensure that these people (arrested in Iran during the recent turmoil) are not forgotten about,” she said.

So, what used to be referred to as “surrender monkeys” from Europe dare compare Iran to Communist-era East Germany — one of the vilest regimes beyond the Iron Curtain. I promise you, it is not a compliment. So much for staying out of Iran’s internal affairs and not “meddling.”

And the martial, battle prone Martians? Well, you know… they are not meddling. Their hand is stretched. And unclenched. And all the rest of it.

It’s a puzzling moment in history, when the leader of the free world cannot call a spade a spade, and needs the usually shy Europeans to stand up and remind us of the moral imperative to call tyranny for what it is. We live in that moment now.

It looks as though Ahmadinejad’s grip on power is not that strong. As Amir Taheri writes in today’s New York Post,

Four years ago, he won as a populist candidate who owed no debt of gratitude to “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei (who had tacitly endorsed another candidate). His prestige was further enhanced when, in a second round of voting, he crushed former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a grandee of the Khomeinist nomenklatura. Ahmadinejad could claim that he was his own man, relying on no establishment cabals.

The June 12 election changed all that. Whatever the truth of allegations about massive fraud, the fact is that many Iranians, perhaps a majority, believe that Ahmadinejad didn’t win. To many, his re-election seems merely the result of plotting by a power clique centered on Khamenei.

He and his protector may still come up on top. But their failure to have quashed the opposition, three weeks after the elections, suggests that they now stand on shaky ground.

Supporting the opposition has been depicted as “meddling” and that may well be accurate. But keeping our hands stretched to the regime is also starting to look the same — given that the “business as usual” posture adopted by engagers ends up strengthening the tyrants. Perhaps this is a time to stand aloof then — and simply say, how can we engage someone who has no power to deliver anything?

If the opposition comes out on top, how embarrassing would it be for the West to be found engaging the losing tyrants? Holding off talks indefinitely seems the least the West can do at this time.

Fatah accuses Hamas of plotting to kill Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen. Hamas retorts that Fatah is perpetrating a massacre in the West Bank (of its supporters, presumably) and threatens to round up Fatah people in Gaza (evidently, they have not rounded up everyone yet).

This bickering between the two Palestinian entities is not news. What would be news is for world leaders to stop presuming it will stop or become irrelevant if Israel were to freeze settlements. Again and again, Western leaders raise the settlement issue as an impediment to peace — see German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest.

In effect, this insistence is only going to hinder, not favor peace. With Israel’s best friends intent on ganging up against prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu over settlements, Israel’s adversaries are not going to do Israel any favors. Why should the Palestinians make any concession, fulfill any obligation, or take any step forward on the road to reality, given that U.S. and European leaders are busy doing their bidding against Israel?

Fareed Zakaria enters the fray to explain why Iran’s Velvet Revolution is not about to happen. He makes some good points about why Iran 2009 is not Prague 1989 — the regime has money and guns and the religious establishment is not aligned behind the demonstrators. He also makes some less good points — that alleged U.S. support for armed groups fighting the regime, or U.S. rhetoric about a possible military strike, or U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war always rallied people around the regime.

These are more questionable points — Russian weapons did more for Saddam Hussein and against Iran during the 1980-1988 war, yet one rarely reads of anti-Russian sentiment in Iran, whether among the population or inside the regime. It is lamentable that intelligent people spend so much energy excusing away the rampant anti-Americanism so central to the regime’s ideology as if it were always the fruit of American mistakes alone. It is also lamentable that he uses this argument — and his understandable skepticism about the revolution’s likely success — to applaud the timid U.S. approach to the Green Wave.

Nevertheless, Zakaria is right to warn about facile historical comparisons. There is a riot going on, all over Iran. The regime has lost any resemblance or pretense of legitimacy. It has shown its true face for the whole world to see, and it can probably survive only through force and repression — more of the same tactics it has relied upon so far to internally repress and contain dissent. But all these conditions — including the populace’s dissatisfaction and civil unrest — are not enough to parlay the riots into regime change.

Revolutions don’t only happen because people are angry. They require a charismatic leadership that can articulate a compelling ideological alternative to the existing order; they need to recruit a critical mass among the dominant elites toward their cause; they rely on a well organized political machine that can mobilize people in a coordinated fashion and thus capitalize on the awesome power masses assembled in protest can yield. And yes, before they can evolve into revolutions, uprisings require enough momentum to paralyze the will of the repressive state apparatus to employ deadly force against opposition leaders.

Iran today has angry confrontational masses. Their courage and their disdain for the tyrannical regime could swell into a mass movement. But there is still neither a compelling ideology nor a charismatic leadership embodying its demands and willing to carry it into battle. Crucially, it is also not clear where the two most important constituencies in the country stand today on the question of revolution. Both the Bazaar and the clerics were vital elements of Iran’s past revolutions — their decision to side with or against change could carry the day. They have not fully declared where they stand — and it is not clear how influential they remain in today’s Iran, given that much power has been taken from them by the gradual takeover by the Revolutionary Guards. Their stance might ultimately matter less than it did 30 years ago, but it is still important. A general strike by the bazaar, a more strident, vocal, and open expression of dissent from clerics against the Supreme Leader may indicate that something is changing.

Regardless, it is hard to understand, faced with recent events, how one can applaud the resolve to continue engaging the existing regime. What happened is not just a stain on its hands. It is a testimony of its ugly nature. Can we trust a regime acting this way to be a reliable partner on a nuclear deal? Can we trust it to deliver on commitments? Or to be seeking reasonable goals? Or not to act in defiance of the world? Or to be concerned about and deterred by considerations of its economic well being and international image?

Iran’s behavior is not just something that makes a deal on the nuclear issue just a bit more complicated or unpalatable for photo-op seekers. It is a wake-up call about the futility of seeking a deal with the mullah’s regime. And catalyzing the nascent yet incoherent revolution remains the only alternative left for Western powers wishing to avoid military action.

The Iranian regime — Zakaria is right — will of course accuse us of meddling. But we now know it does not speak for its people.

Meeting in Corfu on the sidelines of an OSCE gathering and a EU-Russia ministerial summit, EU ministers have threatened Iran with a “strong response” if Iran continues to harass EU diplomatic staff. Brace yourself  for a really “strongly worded” letter. Iran must be trembling in fear.

Tree huggers and friends of the whales are busy offering sound advice to the president: “Too bad there were people killed in the streets. But eventually you must re-engage Iran.”

Now it’s Michael Axworthy’s turn. Axworthy is former head of the Iran Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, author of the book, Iran Empire of the Mind, and now head of the Iranian studies program at Exeter University. Writing in the Independent, he advocates engagement and says:

The next steps — as they would have been with a government led by Mousavi — will be to develop existing contacts over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to test the Iranians’ readiness to discuss the nuclear problem realistically in face-to-face talks with senior US representatives. Such moves would in themselves be a challenge to the Iranian leadership: a challenge to enter the real world (at least in this respect) or face the consequences.

Axworthy is not blind to the brutality of the regime, he is not trying to excuse the fraud, and he is certainly not dismissing the challenge Iran poses to diplomacy. Nevertheless, he seems to assume that we still do not have a full assessment of Iran’s readiness to discuss the nuclear problem; or that we do not know Iran’s real posture in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The problem with this assessment is not that it is naive or apologetic about evil. It is the assumption that there is a deal to be had on those issues with this regime — meaning we can find common ground with them. If anything should have been learned in the last two weeks, it is precisely the opposite. Axworthy may be right that the military option is not realistic; but that does not make negotiation “still the only real option.” There’s political isolation and help for the opposition to consider. It’s a path we never tried, and after what we’ve seen in Iran over the past two weeks, it’s high time we gave those a shot.

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin noted that “The president has rescinded his invitation for hot dogs with Iranian diplomats after days of criticism from the blogosphere, members of Congress, and conservatives. Once again the Left has been marched up the hill to defend the inexcusable (How rude to disinvite someone with whom we may have to “engage”! How petty!) only to abandon the position when commonsense or political necessity intervene.”

I have the feeling it is even worse than that. Consider the following: A few hours before news reports announced the decision to rescind the invitation, it was being reported that State was conceding that no Iranian diplomat had confirmed attendance. As AFP reports, “U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Wednesday he does not believe that one single Iranian diplomat has accepted invitations to July 4 events at US embassies worldwide.”

The Reuters alert linked to above refers to this detail as well. It’s a bit like Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, who, rather than uninviting his Iranian counterpart at the G8 summit in L’Aquila, set a deadline for Tuesday and then took note of a lack of reply by the Iranians to conclude they are not coming. Ditto for the U.S. — the invitation was rescinded — but only after the Iranians had said they weren’t coming anyway.

The EU Parliament President, Hans-Gert Pottering, is ready to head an EU delegation to Tehran to mediate: “The aim of this delegation would be to meet with Iranian authorities, as well as with members of peaceful opposition groups,” Pottering said today. He added that “We are willing to offer our support and mediation to bring about a peaceful solution.” Meanwhile, eye witness reports from Tehran indicate that the Police are assailing unarmed protestors with axes. Good luck mediating, Mr Pottering!

Clearly, Europe’s mindset at its best.

Roger Cohen, on March 1, 2009:

The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared to the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states.

Roger Cohen, on June 24, 2009:

Numbers have ceased to mean anything here. All the evidence is that percentages were simply allotted to each candidate and the votes cast backward-engineered from there. The Interior Ministry took 10 days to divulge results for all provinces. Such engineering takes time.

Roger Cohen on March 1, 2009:

Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting [the criteria of a totalitarian state]. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.

Roger Cohen on June 24, 2009:

All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a theocracy inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.

Roger Cohen on March 1, 2009:

For all the morality police inspecting whether women are wearing boots outside their pants (the latest no-no on the dress front) and the regime zealots of the Basiji militia, the air you breathe in Iran is not suffocating. Its streets at dusk hum with life - not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear - but the vibrancy of a changing, highly-educated society.

Roger Cohen on June 24, 2009:

Iran’s international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad’s first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan’s murder and the regime’s truncheon-wielding goons at work.

Roger Cohen on March 1, 2009:

The compromises being painfully fought out between Islam and democracy in Tehran are of seminal importance. They belie the notion of a fanatical power; they explain Jewish life.

Roger Cohen, on June 24, 2009:

The hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.

That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months.

Roger Cohen, March 1, 2009:

The equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.

I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one - the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.

Roger Cohen, on June 24, 2009:

Over the past week, i[Iran] has looked more like a flag-bearing police state.

Fine writing, in Cohen’s latest column. Still, the switch was fast and seamless: from apologist to sworn enemy, in less than three months. How does one explain this? Instead of name-calling, let’s venture into the publishable:

A liberal mugged by reality?

Someone, whose “‘one-dimensional lenses” used to read Iran last spring have now been cracked by the “disastrous chain of results” his naivete could not foresee?

Someone whose equation of Iran with subtlety, sophistication, and malleability was “simplistic”?

Someone who tossed out Iran caricatures in his columns?

A caricature himself?

Or just Roger Cohen, of the New York Times?

Prompted by the expulsion of two British diplomats from Tehran, Her Majesty’s government today announced it is retaliating by expelling two Iranian diplomats. Wow. Watch European Chancelleries spring into action as they match their strong and courageous rhetoric against Iran’s crackdown of its civilian population with an avalanche of sanctions. Alright, maybe not.

The fact is, the UK should not have waited for the Iranians to kick its diplomats. And all 27 members of the European Union should have coordinated at least a first, symbolic step against repression in Iran by recalling their ambassadors for consultation. But even that was too much to ask. Instead, we are waiting for Iran to concoct dark conspiracies and respond by expelling hapless middle ranking Western diplomats.

As always, our moral outrage at the images that come from a distant corner of the world is shallow and short-lived. Whether the Iranians demonstrating in the streets come out on top is a different story — they’ll have only themselves to thank if they succeed. For the cradle of democracy and human rights is too busy planning for summer or too pusillanimous to come to their rescue.

Writing in the New Yorker on Iran’s current predicament, Laura Secor notes that

of the two sides in this confrontation only one has an army of special forces, known as white shirts, willing to extract a price for defiance in blood. There is something vertiginous now about the display of all that courage under the lengthening shadow of Tiananmen Square, in a nation whose government has long appeared to view China’s as a model. President Obama has so far struck the right notes by upholding the human and civil rights of the protesters without interfering in Iran’s internal politics. But a bigger showdown is coming. If the Islamic Republic dares to mow down those ebullient crowds, it will write itself a villainous chapter in history and offend the conscience of the world.

Two points are worth noting.

First: the conscience of the world — it’s been offended before, and it gets over the offense, usually. I would not assume the regime is wholly concerned with its global approval ratings right now. Had they been, they would not have taken the trouble to rig the election results in such an “in your face” way.

Second: the bigger showdown. Whether this is the Prague Spring or the Velvet Revolution remains to be seen. I am inclined to agree with Secor — a regime that so blatantly disregarded popular will is not going to retreat. The real question is: will the army of special forces balk at the violence as their hands get soaked in the blood of their compatriots? In Tienanmen they clearly had no compunction. Across Eastern Europe they did. But violence there will be — what we’ve seen is nothing compared to what a paranoid regime is prepared to do to ensure having its way.

Pondering the possible link between Guantanamo and President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Christopher Hitchens wrote that,

Any person with the smallest pretense to cultural literacy knows that there is no such place or thing as “the Muslim world,” or, rather, that it consists of many places and many things. (It is precisely the aim of the jihadists to bring it all under one rulership preparatory to making Islam the world’s only religion.) But Obama said nothing about the schism between Sunni and Shiites, or about the argument over Sufism, or about Ahmadi and Ismaili forms of worship and practice. All this was conceded to the umma: the highly ideological notion that a person is first and foremost defined by their adherence to a religion and that all concepts of citizenship and rights take second place to this theocratic diktat. Nothing could be more reactionary.

President Obama does not consider himself illiterate on Islam. To the contrary. As he said in Cairo, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” So why is he feigning ignorance?

The reason is simple - and Hitchens highlights it. Whether in the Cairo speech or in his public musings about the Islamic Republic of Iran, the president has decided to speak directly to radicals, bypassing both regimes and liberal dissidents - as long as they forgo violence. That is why he has not just embraced their rhetoric (the “Muslim world”) but also indulged in their grievances - Mossadegh and the rest of it.

That is the same strategy the British government adopted in the UK prior to the horrific London bombings on July 7, 2005 - and some would say afterwards as well.

It did not work very well, Mr. President. Perhaps a review course on Islam might come in handy at this point.

According to today’s Ha’aretz, President Obama’s visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp,

was widely interpreted as a direct continuation of the “reconciliation” address he delivered in Cairo just 24 hours before, a kind of counterweight to his “salaam alaykum” speech intended to pacify Israel and its supporters in America, and refute the claim that the president had compared the suffering of the Holocaust to that of the Palestinians.

The Buchenwald visit is also widely seen as an attempt to convince the Arab and Muslim worlds that reconciliation between them and the West obligates them to recognize that Nazi persecution, and the Holocaust in particular, figure centrally in the West’s moral constellation.

Let us assume this is accurate. This understanding of balance presents three problems with respect to Obama’s Cairo speech - especially its passages on Palestinian refugees which immediately and causally followed his comments about the Holocaust. The first problem is that the Arab and Muslim worlds need not be convinced “that Nazi persecution and the Holocaust in particular figure centrally in the West’s moral constellation.” They know that very well. Ask Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The problem is not that they fail to see its centrality in Western thinking. The problem is that they object to it and vociferously and often insultingly ask the West to dispense with its memory. Those who accuse the West of supporting Israel out of guilt for the Holocaust do not ignore the centrality of that event in Western thinking. They wish to remove it from that central role. To remind the Arab and Muslim world therefore that America supports Israel because of the Holocaust — this seems to be the operational assumption of the balancing act — is not going to do the trick. It will just strengthen in the mind of people like Ahmadinejad or the Hamas leadership the idea that promoting more of Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry and the Walt and Mearsheimer The Israel Lobby is the right response.

The second problem is that this balancing act seems to suggest that Israel exists because of the Holocaust. Again, there is no disagreement here with Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who’s been saying this all along. That’s why he recommends that Israelis be relocated to Germany and Austria — let the Europeans compensate the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants with their own land.

The third problem is that the balancing act seems to suggest the following: you can count on us to cry over the unmarked graves of dead Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In exchange for that favor, we’ll put living Jews in harm’s way for the sake of a photo-op at the Rose Garden, and hopefully a Nobel peace prize (even if co-shared).

Israel does not need that balancing act. Let’s hope the President really meant both his words and the symbolism of his visit for their own sake, and not for some short term political gain with part of his domestic constituency.

President Obama is on his way to Normandy’s beaches. Writing about the meaning of D-Day in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Herbert London wisely notes that,

The world offers challenges each year since freedom is tested in each generation by new pharaohs. We need the guardians of liberty to remind us how precarious that freedom is. We need to rise to the occasion the way young American soldiers did on June 6, 1944. They are a constant reminder that liberty requires vigilance and courage if it is to survive.

President Obama’s speech in Cairo - the seat of Pharaohs of old and not so old - falls well short of that moral clarity, much like previous speeches he’s delivered. Let’s just hope tomorrow at Omaha beach he remembers what his chief job is - to lead the free world against tyrants, not lecture it in front of an audience of tyrants.

Noah Pollak has correctly pointed out the risks of linking efforts to stop Iran from going nuclear with progress on the Palestinian-Israeli track. One of the risks is that the timelines for the two phenomena are different and play to the disadvantage of U.S. goals:

This of course gives rise to a predictable set of questions, such as: what if Israeli-Palestinian peace will take many years to accomplish, but the Iranian nuclear bomb will only take a year or two to accomplish? Obama essentially proposes that America will race the Iranians - our peace process versus their nuclear program. Does anyone wonder who will win?

Clearly, the answer is Iran. One cannot blame Netanyahu for failing to impress on President Obama that this linkage is silly. But the bottom line is that anyone who believes that Israel will gain regional support against Iran only once it concedes on the Palestinian issue is a fool. Gulf states are not going to line up behind Israel against Iran as a favor to the Jewish state once Palestinians have their own. Since when have Arab regimes been so altruistic? History points in a different direction. Both in 1991 and in 2003 Arab countries endorsed, actively participated in, or acquiesced to a U.S. war against an aggressive Arab neighbor. Both times, peace processors in the West and radicals in the East suggested a similar linkage — first solve Palestine, then we can all unite against the common enemy. And both times — niceties such as the Madrid conference and the Roadmap aside — those Arab governments who felt threatened enough let the war-dance begin without waiting for deliverance for the Palestinians.

Their track record of helping the Palestinians does not lend strength to the linkage thesis, anyway. Even at the level of financial aid, the gap between pledged money and given money is evidence that Arab leaders rarely put their money where their mouths are, when it comes to the Palestinians.

The hard and simple truth is that pro-American regional powers — especially Egypt and the Gulf States — see Iran’s ambitions of regional hegemony as a direct threat.

It is unlikely they will put the cause Palestine over their own survival.

Israel’s head of opposition, Tzipi Livni, issued a stark warning to the Israeli government about the future of Israel. According to a Ha’aretz report,

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Thursday warned that time was running out on achieving a peace deal with the Palestinians, saying “we mustn’t delay the inevitable with useless diplomatic moves.” “Time is not working in favor of those who want to retain Israel’s Jewish identity, and time is not in favor of moderate powers in the region,” Livni declared at a conference of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies in Herzliya.

We do not hold a crystal ball, and therefore we are unable to tell whether Livni’s prediction is right. There is however a minor glitch in Livni’s argument. If time is running out, how does she reconcile her warning with this piece of news? Last week, Israel’s High Court of Justice asked the government to explain why six outposts slated for evacuation five years ago were still standing in the West Bank. Until March, Tzipi Livni was Foreign Minister (and had been for three years). Before that, she was Justice Minister, and before that she held several other posts  since early 2001. So the government’s failure to evacuate those outposts was also her own.

If time is running out for those who wish to retain Israel’s Jewish identity, and doing so demands that Israel abandons settlements in the West Bank, where was her sense of urgency during the eight years she spent as a cabinet minister, four of which she spent as a senior minister? Why did she not feel this urgency while in the cabinet? Should she not have resigned, if the matter was so urgent and her colleagues were stonewalling? Should she not have bolted the coalition, abandoned her party to establish a new one, or left politics in disgust, given that for five years, while she was a minister (and the current Prime minister sat in opposition), not even these six minuscule outposts could be evacuated?

Or has she discovered this sense of urgency only now that she lost her seat?

David Hazony blogged earlier about Gideon Levy’s take on Ramat Aviv residents exhibiting dangerous prejudice against ultra-Orthodox Jews who were trying to move into their neighborhood. I share his reflexive habit of disagreeing with Levy and I agree with the need to make an exception for this latest column — except that Levy tends do be wrong even when he’s right.

Consider his description of the Ramat Aviv community: “the entry of a handful of ultra-Orthodox Jews to this lovely, modest and tranquil neighborhood has provoked an unlovely wave of racism, tearing the thin veil of openness and liberality from this seemingly left-wing community.” (emphasis added)

What’s the problem with the above characterization, you might say? The qualifier “seemingly.” For Levy, a left-wing community that turns ugly on the Haredim is clearly one that has betrayed its political calling, or one that held the banner of the Left with hypocrisy. The problem is that when it comes to the Left, prejudice is almost invariably an inherent element of its ideology — and it is bound to emerge, sooner or later, when the much heralded leftist tolerance is tested by even the mildest form of dissent. There is nothing uncharacteristic, therefore, about these self-proclaimed progressives turning intolerant. After all, anti-Semitism in Western Europe today is overwhelmingly the province of the Left. No surprise then, that their Israeli counterparts turns out to be just the same.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned recently against a military attack against Iran’s nuclear program. Gates brings three arguments to the table against a strike:

1. it would only delay Iran’s program;

2. Iran’s resolve to rebuild its program and acquire weapons would be strengthened by the attack;

3. Iran’s hatred for those who attacked its program would only increase.

Earlier this week, former IAEA director Hans Blix added the weight of his opinion to this view:

“The consequences of an attack on Iran would very likely be a nuclear-armed Iran,” Blix said. “There would be a delay, but nuclear weapons that are hypothetical today would be certain in a few years time. Secondly, an attack would probably have horrible consequences on the supply of oil coming through the Persian Gulf; it would impact the world economy.”

One could add to the above that Iran’s nuclear program would be forced even deeper underground, a claim occasionally voiced by Blix’s successor, Mohammad ElBaradei.

Now, far be it from us to wish to contradict such well informed officials and international civil servants. Still, it’s hard to see why Iran getting nuclear weapons in, say, three or five years’ time is worse than Iran getting them in six months’ time. It’s also hard to see how Iran’s current resolve to acquire nuclear weapons is somehow weak enough to be broken by polite diplomacy; so far, at least, this approach has not worked. And it is hard to imagine that Iran’s hatred for Israel or the U.S. could get worse — or how hatred at the present levels is so inconsequential that one can dismiss it, with or without nuclear weapons. Blix’s distinction between weapons being “hypothetical today” and “certain in a few years time” is also unconvincing. For not stopping them today means that weapons will be more certain sooner than if an attack were to occur. Stopping them through military action might also fail to work in the end — but if the international community chooses inaction based on this false choice, it will get a nuclear Iran for sure. When, it is hard to tell without the relevant intelligence — but inaction basically means that our policy rests on the hope the Iranians will either never overcome the technological hurdles or will give up on their quest out of their own volition.

The only serious point raised by Blix and others is that an attack could have an impact on the supply of oil — then again, there were three major wars in the Persian Gulf between 1980 and 2003. They disrupted the supply, alright. But we survived, and the price of oil, after initial shocks, returned to manageable levels. Conversely, massive price hikes, such as the ones between 2006 and 2008, had much less to do with war, and more with factors mostly exogenous to the Persian Gulf. But if Iran became a nuclear weapons state, one can be sure that its long reach and penchant for destabilizing neighbors and dominating the region will guarantee that oil prices remain very high for a very long time to come.

So overall, the price of not attacking is very bad. And the price of attacking might be, at worst, just as bad.

Whether a military strike can retard Iran’s program and to what extent, we should leave to others to determine. What impact that could have on the regime’s survival, nobody seems to know — or give thought to.

But those who oppose a strike better come up with more convincing arguments. So far, all this sounds like a pretext for doing nothing, which is basically what the international community has done since Iran’s program was exposed seven years ago.

Today, Iran’s regime has executed Delara Darabi, a young woman wrongly convicted of a murder she did not commit when she was just seventeen. The relevant international conventions prohibit the death penalty for people who were underage when they committed the crime for which they are being punished. In killing Darabi, Iran keeps its record as the country with the highest number of child executions in the world in sterling condition — and in clear contravention of its obligations under international law.

Now, “realists” will argue that though a terrible thing, there are tyrants everywhere and we must realize we can’t impose democracy and human rights all over the place. It’s an attitude that one could come to terms with and understand — sort of — if it came from people who did not get so offended by water-boarding and other such practices. But this convenient contradiction should not be allowed to overshadow a central tenet of what a U.S. president recently called “the false choice between our security and our ideals.”

If our ideals entail the defense of human rights — indeed, if we believe rights to be “human” and therefore, inherent attributes of the human condition — we should not be as sanctimonious about their defense at home as abroad. If on the other hand, all this brutal execution will get from Western leaders is a letter of condemnation, then we should admit that the choice is not so false, and the rights of an innocent child can never stand in the way of our nation’s supreme interests.

. . . is on a hunger strike. Mr. President, will you let her starve to death for the sake of engagement?

Are you fat — I mean, horizontally challenged and metabolically slow? Then you are guilty! Guilty of causing global warming, of course — at least according to a recently released study, which, among other things, blames fat people for the terrible fate awaiting polar bears: “Dr Phil Edwards, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Moving about in a heavy body is like driving in a gas guzzler.”

According to the report,

Each fat person is said to be responsible for emitting a tonne more of climate-warming carbon dioxide per year than a thin one. It means an extra BILLION TONNES of CO2 a year is created, according to World Health Organisation estimates of overweight people.

That the World Health Organization had estimates of overweight people is reasonable, but that they would calculate their average per capita CO2 emission a year is a little over the top. Naturally, it’s only a short step to designating evil:

The scientists say providing extra grub for them to guzzle adds to carbon emissions that heat up the world, melting polar ice caps, raising sea levels and killing rain forests.

The environmental impact of fat humans is made even worse because they are more likely to travel by car - another major cause of carbon emissions.

So, to recap, if you are fat and walk about, you’ll produce more CO2. If you stop walking and drive, that’s even worse. Policy prescription: fat people should neither walk nor drive. How about flying?

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining in the story: the problem doesn’t lie with all exceedingly overweight people — mostly the overweight in Western countries. That’s because “researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine say wealthy nations like the US and Britain are getting fatter by the decade.”

As usual, the Western way of life is responsible for all the evils in the world.

We should all apologize and go on a diet.

When the game of Chatrang arrived in Sassanid Persia from India, it quickly developed into what became present-day chess. Not only did the Persian exclamations “Shah!” and “Shah Mat” (”check!” and “check mate!”) enter the chess lexicon but, most important, the game became part and parcel of the education of nobility at the Persian court. Chess is deeply ingrained in Iranian culture — certainly also in how Iran plays diplomacy with the world.

Indeed, it should come as no surprise that Roxanna Saberi has become the latest pawn in Iran’s chess game. As Noah Pollak noted, she is “Iran’s latest hostage” in a game with many precedents. Saberi represents a perfect opportunity for the regime to push President Obama in a corner. She is an American citizen — former Miss North Dakota, no less! She is a journalist and a woman.

Imprisoning her forces the U.S. to take a stand for all it believes in — human rights, freedom of the press, protecting U.S. citizens abroad, due process, fair trial, etc. — and by so doing, risk spoiling current efforts of rapprochement and engagement with Iran. If the U.S. were to do that — Iran just counseled against it — it might give Iran a pretext to rebuke U.S. diplomatic efforts and up the ante. If it decides to forgo principle in the name of diplomatic expediency, the U.S. will emerge weakened and exposed to the charge of hypocrisy for having sacrificed Saberi to the diplomatic interests of the state.

One has to give it to the Iranians — they are masters at the game. Their opponent, so far, seems a bit of a novice, to say the least.

Being in Rome, presumably on holiday, and probably having a deadline for a blog entry, Bradley Burston translated the understandable inspiration anyone could feel looking at Michelangelo’s Moses into a trite piece about the West Bank occupation and why it is bad for Israel. The piece is trite because it says nothing new, except that Burston is in Rome. Still, it is worth a mention because of its conclusion: “If the last 40 years are any indication, the Palestinians will be able [to] survive the occupation. A healthy state of Israel will not. ”

Hm… let’s see. Whether the occupation is good, bad, a necessary evil, or something else, I shall leave to others — including Contentions’s feisty readership. Still, I fail to see, judging by the record of 40-something years of occupation, how Burston can conclusively state the above.

The Palestinians have never been so far from a state as today — all rhetoric and renewed American engagement notwithstanding. They have lost their charismatic leader and failed to replace him with someone who could unify the tribal, clannish, and fragmented patchwork of Palestinian constituencies. They lost any pretense of unity between the West Bank and Gaza — now split between two competing governments. They also lost their centrality in Arab politics, and most importantly they lost the ability — which the late Yasser Arafat had — to blackmail Arab leaders. Their society is torn between a Palestinian nationalist agenda that cannot reconcile itself with the reality of Israel and an Islamist agenda that cannot reconcile itself with the reality of Israel (and with a uniquely Palestinian nationalist agenda). Their struggle has been overtaken by Iran and has turned off erstwhile friends and allies. Their economy is one of subsistence — their people have been turned into paupers and parasites, while their leaders either get rich or divert funds to weapons smuggling. They may not be terminally ill as a people, true, but the picture of the Palestinian polity is not exactly one of health, for sure.

What about Israel?

Compare Israel, 2009 with Israel, 1967:

• A much freer and feistier press.

• A much more diverse society.

• Thousands of NGO’s have sprung out to lobby the political elites, to pressure them, and to expose their flaws and shortcomings.

• Israel’s judiciary is as pugnacious as anyone concerned about democracy, human rights, and rule of law could dream — even more so, sometimes.

• Israel’s military remains subordinate to civilian authority — no authoritarian temptation despite the occupation and ongoing conflict.

Israel can survive another forty years of occupation — and do so in a healthy fashion. Israelis — even when in Rome — by and large understand this: that withdrawing from the territories for the sake of some insupportable moral posture, or to make a journalist feel better about himself while on holiday, is not going to guarantee the country’s survival. And there is no point in being “healthy” when the prescribed medicine could end up killing the patient.

Jennifer, you rightfully takes issue with the new negotiating position the Obama administration and its European allies will take on Iran, namely dropping the demand that Iran suspend enrichment. What is remarkable about the way the Times reports the story, is that it attributes the insistence on enrichment suspension to the Bush administration:

That would be a sharp break from the approach taken by the Bush administration, which had demanded that Iran halt its enrichment activities, at least briefly to initiate negotiations.

This is not a Bush administration demand — it is the demand of five successive Security Council Resolutions approved between July 2006 and September 2008, in which not the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, but the UN Security Council, unanimously, asked Iran to suspend enrichment or face sanctions. And let’s recall why Iran was deferred to the Security Council in the first place. It was declared to be in non-compliance with its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations by Mohammed El Baradei’s IAEA in late 2005; and it decided to bring an end to enrichment suspension, which it had agreed to as a result of negotiations with the EU-3 in 2004.

The EU-3 had asked Iran to suspend enrichment. Iran briefly complied. It then retracted its decision. It was soundly criticized and condemned for doing so. It was deferred to the Security Council, which requested immediate suspension. So how is this exactly a Bush administration demand? The truth is that the U.S. and its allies, having supported two successive incentive proposals (June 2006 and 2008) to Iran that Iran rejected, are now willing to renege on UN Security Council Resolutions — not on Bush’s past foreign policy.

Responding to a reader’s comment, Max Boot has just raised a fundamental question — and exposed a profound misunderstanding — about Iran’s involvement in Afghanistan. Max says that “I’m not sure whether I’m an expert on Afghanistan, but I know enough to realize that Iran doesn’t view the Taliban as a threat — certainly not as an existential threat (like Nazi Germany was to both the U.S. and U.S.S.R) that could drive Iran into America’s arms.” He then goes on to note that while the Iranians were helping the Northern Alliance in the 1990’s and certainly disliked the anti-Shi’a flavor of the Taliban, they are now supplying aid to those very same Taliban that we suppose to be their mortal enemies. Clearly, we are missing something here.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Max’s reader is actually correct — and that Iran does not see the Taliban’s prevailing in the Afghan conflict as a desirable outcome. That would be a common interest between Iran and the West. But would that be enough to justify cooperation? We are not just talking about Iran refraining from being unhelpful. Some have even raised the possibility of NATO supply routes going through Iran — though Iran has already ruled out the scenario.

After all, one could also say that countries like Turkey, Syria, and Iraq have a common interest in ensuring that the Tigris and Euphrates do not dry up. Or that countries like Algeria and Morocco have a shared interest in ensuring that Mediterranean fish do not become extinct. Venezuela and Colombia surely share similar concerns about hurricanes, and so do naturally the U.S. and Cuba. But such basic common interests are not enough to forge alliances or even to overcome ancient enmities. Whereas our basic desire to see the Taliban defeated may be shared by Tehran — and that is still a big if — Iran also desires to see America and its allies bogged down in Afghanistan for a long time. Iran does not wish to see America’s success there any more than it hoped for America’s success in Iraq. Iran wants to be the power-broker in both places and it has played the same game here and there — first, they’re arsonists, and then, only after we beg them and offer a fair price — only then, they’re firemen. They’ll be sure to make us pay the water, the fire trucks, and all the rest of the equipment, very dearly.

The fact is that Iran has not stepped forward and enunciated a vision for Afghanistan that converges with, or complements NATO’s and America’s vision for the country. There is no record of Iran indicating — beyond the drug issue — an area where there may be a strategic convergence. And stopping the drug trade, frankly, is not enough to build an alliance on. Beyond that, Iran’s interests are diametrically opposed to ours. Why then is so much mileage given to this silly idea?