September 24, 2004

Risking It All on a "Moderate" Iran

The next time George Miller at London Calling writes something this good, he needs to send me an email so I don't miss it for two days.

I have a friend who persists in telling me that Iran is a “moderate” State. I usually guffaw and refer him to Michael Leeden’s columns in the National Review. But my friend considers Leeden to be a "neo-con" and that label allows for no further discussion. ... The main argument my friend uses to justify his contention that Iran is "moderate" is that there are millions of "moderate" people in Iran. So I have a confused friend, not a bad one. My friend confuses the Iranian people with the Iranian regime.

My friend may be right to say the Iranian people are moderate. And the Iranian people may yet overthrow the clerics and prevent the Iranian regime from unleashing a catastrophe on themselves and on that region and the world. But we can no more count on this outcome, than Britain could take comfort from the fact that there were an awful lot of good and decent people living in Germany in 1939.