Reading Roger Cohen in the New York Times is an edifying experience because it teaches how to make a persuasive argument for foreign policy without even realizing what that argument is. In his latest attempt to arrogate to himself wisdom and prescience on all matters Persian, the unembarrassable columnist suggests that not only are Iranians "weary" of cataclysmic events in their own country and suspicious of the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that what they really need instead of revolution is a shepherding reformist similar to Ayatollah Sistani, the primus inter pares of Iraq's Shiite clerisy:
It is time for Iran to look West to the holy Shiite cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala, places from which Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion — without direct executive authority — that Montazeri favored for Iran.
How, exactly, a nation of dissidents and students who every week risk murder or imprisonment to chant "Death to Khamenei" or "Death to Russia" is tired of "tumult," Cohen does not deign to say. But the real gem in this observation is the implication that Sistani's easily exercised moral authority and suasion was itself the result of some kind of Baathist perestroika. Weary of tumult, indeed!
He allows no chance that the current Iranian convulsion was seeded or accelerated by the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an action that Cohen previously supported and then turned against with the same manic-depressive vehemence he has exhibited in his Iran analysis. Having formerly held that Khamenei was rationale and capable of being "engaged" by the West on a host of questions including the nuclear, now our man in Tehran depicts the theocracy as only slightly less brutish and intractable as the American neoconservatives campaigning for its elimination. But had Cohen had things his way, any Iranian glance westward would offer no solace or instruction for how to proceed with a Shiite thaw. Prior to 2003, Sistani was under house arrest and his mosque was closed for worship. Any liberal political opinions he then entertained, such as his exhortation for women to vote or his belief in a separation of mosque and state, were kept to himself for fear of imprisonment or death at the hands of a regime that truly did earn the title totalitarian. There is no reason to believe that these circumstances would be any different now without the liberating effects of revolution.
Just in time for the New Year, might Roger Cohen be the Patient Zero pundit of a dawning pandemic--a pro-war-turned-anti-war-turned-unintentional pro-war theorist? If not, then what he does seem to advocate without any irony or sense of self-amusement is a new law of geopolitical spacetime reserved for the New York Times opinion page, one in which major historical occurrences are only as spontaneous as a columnist's need for them to be and logical consistency is another name for hawkish conspiracy.
For a more significant and impressive about-face on Iran in light of recent events, see Ray Takeyh's commentary in the Washington Post. A twilight of policy intellectuals surely commences when the man who was previously the Obama administration's most forceful voice for engagement ends up sounding like a seder conversation from Andrew Sullivan's darkest nightmare:
Even if the regime accommodates international concerns about its nuclear program, the United States must stand firm in its support for human rights and economic pressure against the Revolutionary Guards and other organs of repression. And Tehran's clerical rulers should know that in no uncertain terms. Reagan had no compunction about denouncing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" while concluding arms control treaties with the Kremlin. The Islamic Republic, like the Soviet Union, is a transient phenomenon. America's embrace of individual sovereignty will place it on the right side of history as the fortunes of history inevitably change.
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