First, the blast at the Khomeini Shrine:
9:40 AM ET -- State media claims 2 injured at Khomeini shrine explosion.
NBC's Ann Curry tweets: "Iran state tv claims explosion at tomb of revered Ayatollah Khomeini. Would incite anger against protesters. Is it true? ... Remember Iran govt is the only source of this explosion report. NO independent confirmation and misinformation is dangerous."
A reader, speculating that the government set the bomb, writes, "The mullahs did something similar in August 1978 in Iran - they set a cinema in Abadan ablaze and blamed the Shah. That was the turning point of that revolution as the people bagan to see the Shah as ruthless."
....
9:24 AM ET -- CNN: "Blast" at mausoleum. CNN, citing state-run media, is reporting a "blast" at a mausoleum.
Update: CNN reporting that the explosion was at the Imam Khomeini Mausoleum "about 20 minutes outside of the city."
And, more recently:
10:19 AM ET -- Timing of reported blast. Many are reporting a message on Twitter claiming that the alleged suicide bombing at a shrine in southern Tehran was reported by state media before it actually occurred. There is no confirmed evidence of this. I'll update if I see any.
....
10:04 AM ET -- Shrine bombing attributed to suicide bomber. "More on that explosion at the shrine: 'A suicide bomber was killed at the northern wing of Imam Khomeini's shrine. Two people were injured,' Fars news agency said, according to Reuters. Khamenei talked about the threat of terrorism in his speech yesterday. 'Street demonstrations are a target for terrorist plots. Who would be responsible if something happened?' he said."
And a second incident:
10:40 AM ET -- Ahmadinejad building set on fire. Reuters, via reader Larry:
"Supporters of Iran's defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi on Saturday set on fire a building in southern Tehran used by backers of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a witness said. The witness also said police shot into the air to disperse rival supporters in Tehran's south Karegar street."
Had this happened a week ago, this would probably be the end of it. But with days on end of mass demonstrations bringing out hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more protesters, there is not just an enormous mass movement for change, there is also a tremendous loss of legitimacy for the regime--a loss of the legitimacy that today's use of force may very well only deepen and accelerate.
Indeed, leading up to today, one of the emergent themes has been widening of cracks in the regime and its perceived legitimacy. For example:
7:41 PM ET -- Cracks in the foundation. The well regarded analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies offers his view on Iran's ruling conservatives, who he argues are "more divided than ever."
At the same time, while the Supreme Leader did firmly back Ahmadinejad and the legitimacy of the election in his Friday prayer, and he cannot put this genie back in the bottle. Khamenei has always had uncertain credentials as a religious scholar and he now has uncertain credibility as a leader. Everyone in Iran, the Middle East, and the world now has reason to question the legitimacy of every element of Iran's leadership and the Iranian revolution. The Iranian leadership now has to realize that it is more divided than was ever apparent before and that Iran's people and the world know it. It has to see just how much anger there is at the Mullah's level of social repression and the failures in the Iranian economy. The leadership can only quickly ease the social repression side of this equation. It would take years of effort to make a major difference in economic development. As a result, even apparent success by the current leadership will to some extent be lasting failure. This may not have a Berlin Wall kind of ending, but Iran is not China. The lasting impact is much more likely to be similar to the decades long impact of the repression of the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
It also is impossible to rule out some form of Mousavi victory, both now and over the months to come. Whatever happens, if Ahmadinejad stays without a truly legitimate election, the result will fester, not go away. Every embarrassing new piece of excessive rhetoric, every new threat to Iran's neighbors, every new problem in the economy, and every new act of social repression will be a reminder of the fact that Iran's leadership has questionable legitimacy at best.
As today's scattered events filter in and people try to make sense of it, it also makes sense to reflect on America's response.
First of all, I can't help but note this rare example, proving that Peegy Noonan is actually capable of the sort of mature behavior she is so often falsely associated with:
12:24 PM ET -- Peggy Noonan bashes Republicans' Iran rhetoric. A pretty surprising column:
America so often gets Iran wrong. We didn't know when the shah was going to fall, didn't foresee the massive wave that would topple him, didn't know the 1979 revolution would move violently against American citizens, didn't know how to handle the hostage-taking. Last week we didn't know a mass rebellion was coming, and this week we don't know who will emerge the full or partial victor. So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment. ...
John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn't know whose side America is on. "In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral," said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it's neutral? This was Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else's delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.
Nost substantively, however, I think, is the question of how deeply grounded is Obama's good sense. Not being warmongerish is certainly a good start. Knowing that overt expressions of outright support would only serve to undermine the Iranian people's demands is good common sense--something utterly lacking in the GOP. But as has happened before with Obama, there's a telling detail in how he expresses himself that betrays a lack of the sort of deep progressive framing that we would so desperately want to see coming from him:
11:56 AM ET -- Are U.S. officials being too quiet? I wanted to reexamine this question in light of some new comments today. First, from Spencer Ackerman:
Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said he has a hard time taking a strong stance one way or the other about the Berman-Pence Iran resolution currently being debated on the House floor. But it's wading awfully close into a "political act" for his taste "The text is not objectionable," Ghaemi told me. "But it will be seen as a political act" by the Iranian regime.
Second, via Andrew, comments by Amir Fakhravar, who has been "jailed and tortured in Iran for advocating democracy and speaking out against the Iranian government" and remains in touch with reformers:
"Right now, (Obama) could say, 'America stands for freedom and democracy, and as a United States president, I want to stand behind all of the freedom fighters in the world that are fighting peacefully to have democracy and freedom,'" Fakhravar said. "That's the American Dream. I don't know why he didn't say that. He said, 'this is none of our business.'"
The contrary argument, of course, is that if Obama or Congress speak out more aggressively, it will endanger the reformists in Iran and give ammunition to Khamenei and his allies.
Khamenei's speech today pushed me to reexamine this line of thinking. He didn't need an incendiary line from Obama to stir up anti-U.S. sentiments -- he just made one up. "It was said on behalf of the U.S. President that he was waiting for a day that people came out to streets," he claimed.
This analysis is flawed, I think, since the same could be said about US GOP hardliners--they, too, lie like dogs about Obama, but there's still an enormous advantage that flows from his judiciousness. In Iran, they can say whatever they want, but they don't have the videotape of Obama saying stuff like John McCain does, and that's a very, very good thing.
My problem is something else entirely. It's Obama's statement that 'this is none of our business' -- which he did, indeed say. And this clashes fundamentally with what George Lakoff argued before 9/11, in a paper I've discussed on several occasions, "The Mind and The World: Changing the Very Idea of American Foreign Policy" (PDF). As I wrote two weeks in "Why Not A Progressive Foreign Policy? Part 2: The Whole Enchilada":
In the paper, Lakoff starts off by observing that since the end of the Cold War, a broad range of international issues have emerged that don't don't fit into the traditional "foreign policy" framework, and could appear to be nothing more than a laundry list of unrelated issues--things like global warming, women's rights, global public health, etc. However, he goes on to argue that there is a very natural framework that encompases them all: the framework of moral norms. These are all issues that involve how a community of nations ought to conduct itself. Furthermore, Lakoff argues, the moral norms framework produces a better global neighborhood or environment than the traditional self-interest framework that foreign policy has traditionally used, the same way that an ordinary neighborhood is a better place to live when the people there treat each other according to a shared set of norms, rather than only looking out for their own self-interest.
The idea of operating within a framework of moral norms was present throughout Obama's Cairo speech, and indeed has long been a part of America's foreign policy outlook, though it has rarely been clearly articulated as such. Individual norms have been invoked often enough, but all too often there's been an ulterior motive, which only serves to build suspicion. But when a wide range of normative statements are made, as Obama did in his Cairo speech, there is a clear implication that something very different is afoot. Whether or not that comes to pass depends on many different things, not the least of which is developing a more broadly shared understanding of just what that means.
The "moral norms" framework stands in opposition to the "national interests" framework, and the very of what's "our business" and what's "none of our business" is central to the "national interests" framework. So when Obama says that what's happening in Iran is "none of our business" he is betraying the very essence of what he said in Cairo--or at least what he appeared to be saying.
And that is what I have a problem with.
What should he have said? That's a lot trickier question to try to answer. But I can give an example that can point us in the right direction. He could have said something like this:
"What's happening in Iran right now is deeply troubling to us as Americans, because we deeply believe in the values our country was founded on, and we do not believe that those values are ours alone. When we see the people of Iran marching in the street for their rights to be ruled as a democracy under the rule of law, not the rule of men, we see living proof that our values are their values as well, and we are compelled to recognize our shared values.
"Yet, we also know that self-determination is also a shared value, and for that reason we cannot take actions that can be seen as violating the Iranian people's right to self-determination. We have made that mistake in the past, and both America and the Iranian people have paid dearly for those past mistakes. This is why we must limit ourselves in what we say and do--we must do so in order to truly support the Iranian people today."
This is not necessarily the ideal thing Obama could say. But it does clearly get us out of the "self-interest" framework and place us squarely in the "moral norms" framework, which is where we need to be operating from 24/7. If you're a progressive, that's what it means to be an American.
|
