This is not the first time that Zakaria has prettified and extenuated the Iranian regime. In an unforgettable Newsweek column published just a few weeks before Ahmadinejad stole the June 2009 presidential election and provoked the rebellion, Zakaria asserted that “everything you know about Iran is wrong.” He knew better. He knew that “the regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program.” This was ludicrous then, and it is more ludicrous now. Zakaria knew also that “Iran isn’t a dictatorship.” Appearances deceive. Iran is “an oligarchy, with considerable debate and dissent within the elites.” How nice for the elites. See you in Davos.
The Khameini-Ahmedinejad “oligarchy” represses and imprisons and rapes and tortures and murders its own citizens. It also promotes theocracy and terrorism in its region and beyond. All this is pretty plain. Why is Zakaria so fearful that American foreign policy will respond to such a government with stringency and loathing? Perhaps he believes that President Obama’s policy of respect and accommodation will solve the nuclear problem and bring a measure of decency to the rulers of Iran, but there is no empirical basis for such a belief. It is a much greater fantasy than the “fantasy” that Zakaria deplores, which is no fantasy at all. Real realism consists of the recognition that nuclear peace and social peace in Iran will be reliably achieved only with the advent of democracy, and that since June 12, 2009, the advent of Iranian democracy is not an idle wish. Morally and strategically — this is one of those perplexities in which they go serendipitously together — President Obama’s refusal to strongly support the Iranian resistance against the Iranian tyranny is not prudent, it is perverse. But when democracy comes to Iran, Fareed Zakaria will plummily assure us that this was his dream all along.
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