The Media Moves on Mousavi

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Just three days ago, I wrote a piece calling for a little more healthy skepticism from the media on Mir Hussein Mousavi, the face of the opposition movement in Iran. Why was he refusing to answer questions about the massacres that occurred under his leadership in the 1980s? Didn’t he have a long history with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? Wasn’t there a chance — a very good chance — that he might not be the type of progressive, liberal change people were associating him with?

 I seemed to hold these doubts alone. Andrew Sullivan, the prolific blogger for the Atlantic had colored his blog green in solidarity. Ana Marie Cox, the national correspondent for Air America, changed her Twitter icon (a kitten) to look like it had fallen in a bowl of lime Jell-O. Michael Goldfarb, at the conservative Weekly Standard, seemed to have drunk of the green Kool-Aid. 

“I wrote all this about Mousavi before the election,” said Goldfarb on Monday when I sent him a link to my post. “But that doesn’t seem like much the point now — there’s some unity going on. It’s a good thing. These events have a way of transforming people.” 

But pro-bloggers (and Twitterers) aside, policy experts, world leaders and the main stream media are asking questions about the kind of leader Mousavi would be and the long-term effect he might have on Iran. 

On Wednesday night, The New York Times published a piece outlining Mousavi’s past and personality and  questioning his commitment to reform:

[Moussavi] is far from being a liberal in the Western sense, and it is not yet clear how far he will be willing to go in defending the broad democratic hopes he has come to embody.

Mr. Moussavi, 67, is an insider who has moved toward opposition, and his motives for doing so remain murky.

Just a few hours before, President Barack Obama, expressed caution in trusting Mousavi on CNBC :

The difference between Ahmedinejad and Moussavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised. Either way we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has cause some problems in the neighborhood, and is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Even Hamid Dabshi, author of “Iran: A People Interrupted” and a big name in Mid-East studies, offered his doubts on Mousavi — a surprising condemnation from a professor who, in recent years, has directed most of his invective at dissidents in the Iranian diaspora than at Iran’s Islamic government:

Moussavi himself has quite a number of nasty skeletons in his closet, from his years as the prime minister during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), with his brutal suppression of dissident movements, ideological purging of the universities, and so on. He and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, are indeed emerging as widely popular among a significant constituency. But that does not mean that this social unrest is just about him.

Three days ago, or even a week ago, saying such things meant you were secretly in support of Ahmedinejad.  But now that association no longer holds. While Obama was rebuked for his lukewarm statements, there seems to be plenty of anti-regime dissidents finding comfort in his tempered opinion (and still others find conspiracy theory, but that’s for another post).

For now, however, western media will, and should, remain behind Mousavi — if only as the face of the opposition — but there is the growing realization that he is perhaps not representative of broad-based liberal reform in Iran.

Update: This morning the online news magazine Slate has a story discussing– and questioning — Mousavi’s role as leader of the opposition written by Daniel Byman the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. It’s worth a look, and not just because it furthers my point.