David Ignatius pretends to care about Iranians

We are watching the first innings of what will be a long game in Iran. President Obama has recognized that with his gradually escalating rhetoric. Yesterday, he was using powerful language to describe the “timeless dignity” of the protesters and the “heartbreaking” images of Neda. He suggested that the mullahs cannot win a war of repression against their own people. “In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests,” he said.

via David Ignatius – In the Confrontation in Iran, the Best Bet Is Neda’s Side – washingtonpost.com.

(Image from wordsareimportant.com)

That’s humanitarian, David Ignatius. You may remember him for his work as shameless establishment sycophant when he opposed retroactive investigations into CIA crimes. He’s the guy who called anyone demanding government accountability “liberal score-settlers.” I’m glad to see he finally wants justice for someone, even if it’s not Americans. 

David is just all torn up over the images of Neda Agha Soltan, a martyred woman whose death has become a useful tool for chickenhawks that have been looking for an excuse to meddle in Iranian affairs. Of course, if Neda had been renditioned by the CIA and held in a black site where she was repeatedly tortured, not only would David not care about her, but he would probably advocate that her torturers received retroactive immunity for their crimes. He would say torturing Neda was for the good of America, and without offering any proof, he would say torturing Neda was making Americans safer, just as he said when he was a guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose. 

David didn’t care about the hundreds of thousands of Nedas that died during the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. “My own gut tells me that this is a war worth fighting,” he explained in his Washington Post column. His gut now says to exploit the death of a woman he never met for purposes of intervening in the affairs of an autonomous nation. 

Nor did he care about the tens of thousands of Nedas that died in Afghanistan where David claims the “United States seems to be doing most things right,” and his proof of this is that “there are occasional roadside bombings and suicide attacks in the province, but some people have to stop and think a moment to remember the last one.” It’s a shame David’s gut doesn’t feel sympathy for the Nedas blasted to smithereens by roadside bombs.

Neda’s death gives David a reason to muse about what kinds of policies he thinks America should implement within sovereign nations. He did the same thing back in 2007 in an article titled In Pakistan, Echoes of Iran. 

The Iran analogy was made forcefully two weeks ago by Gary Sick, a Columbia professor who helped oversee Iran policy for the Carter administration during the time of the revolution. “There was no Plan B,” Sick wrote in an online posting. He sees the same dynamic at work in Pakistan. “We have bet the farm on one man — in this case Pervez Musharraf — and we have no fall-back position, no alternative strategy in the event that does not work.”

So ask yourself: What Iran policy would have made sense, in hindsight, given the ruinous consequences of the Iranian revolution? Should the United States have encouraged the shah to crack down harder against protesters and ride out the storm, as some hard-liners urged at the time? Or should it have moved more quickly to encourage a change of regime, after it became obvious the shah couldn’t or wouldn’t reform?

Yes, David. Perhaps the United States should have encouraged the shah to kill hundreds of thousands of protesters instead of the measly thousands of deaths he actually oversaw. How many Nedas would have died during David’s fantasy? Maybe that would be a good thing because then he could have exploited those deaths along with Neda’s to promote his own ideas for “democracy” in Iran.