3) Demonstrations in Iran justify the invasion of Iraq. I kid you not. According to Al Kamen, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made this flabbergasting claim in an email to Gless Kessler:
"Shiites in particular see Shiites in Iraq having more freedoms than they do. Bush's tough policies have helped give rise to the reformists and I think we're witnessing that today."
Of course in real life, we know that Bush's invasion of Iraq strengthened hardliners in Iran, gave them the ability to "influence all the region's security dilemmas" and left the regime closer to nuclear breakout ability. As former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nick Burns (a guy who spent the waining days of his career keeping Iran policy out of the clutches of guys like Fleischer) put it at last Thursday's CNAS conference, it was in all likelihood Obama's strategy of engagement, not the invasion of Iraq, that "effectively has put Ahmadinejad on [the] defensive prior to this election because of our ability now to open up the vista for the possibility of negotiations."
4) Only the toppling of the Islamic Republic can resolve the crisis between Iran and the West. No surprise that John Bolton should use Iran's unrest to once again argue that the only solution is regime change....Not anything new per-se, but the current climate in Iran makes Bolton's arguments especially tin-eared.
5) Ahmadinejad won fair and square. Really Marty Paretz? Really?
"My impression is that the incumbent's margin of victory was too big to have been fraudulent and the loser's numbers also too big. Tyrannies don't play around with the numbers like this...Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity."
I'm speechless, but if you want good rebuttals, I'd suggest checking out these posts by Gary Sick and Juan Cole - two experts eminently more reliable than Paretz - which show why Paretz's arguments are in all likelihood baseless. (You wonder why Paretz didn't feel like reading consulting Sick or Cole's blogs before he posted? Their analyses were available hours before his) Sullivan said it best - only a neocon would "desire an Ahamadinejad victory," but he forgets to add that only a neocon argue a point that so cynically justified his ideological perspective, in the face of sweeping evidence to the contrary.
www.huffingtonpost.com
