A few months ago, before Nicholas Kristof’s appearance in the Tufts University Hillel’s “Moral Voices” lecture series, a Tufts student asked him to define his own “guiding moral doctrine.” The New York Times columnist was able to articulate only this in response: “I don’t think I have any sort of, you know, particularly unusual or even sophisticated moral doctrine.” Kristof proves this, abundantly, in his column today: “Cheney’s Long-Lost Twin.”
Kristof ponders: “Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?” The suggestion that Cheney and Ahmadinejad are “jingoistic twins” is fatuous, absurd on its face, whatever you may think of the Vice President. But the real damage that rhetoric of this kind does is to obscure the evil that Ahmadinejad represents. Suppose that the very worst accusations—cronyism, power-grabbing, even the subversion of the Constitution—leveled against Cheney by his fieriest critics were true. It’s hard to see how they would rank alongside the actions of which Ahmadinejad makes no secret: plans for genocide, a millenarian nuclearization program, proud sponsorship of Hizballah, interference in Iraq, scoffing at the IAEA. (David Billet exposes more of Kristof’s fatuities here.)
Kristof contends that, as “61 percent [of Iranians] oppose the current Iranian system of government,” America should not bomb Iran, “the most pro-American Muslim country in the region.” But the props of his argument actually suggest a conclusion opposite from the one he draws: removing Ahmadinejad from power would be a welcome intervention for brutalized Iranians. Leaving the threat of a nuclear Islamic republic aside for a moment, one would think that Kristof, so concerned about the genocide in Sudan, would be in favor of removing Iran’s “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” president, and the regime that is the biggest sponsor of terror in the state system.
In a sorry irony, Kristof cites, as source of this wisdom, Gary Sick of Columbia University, perhaps the last man whose advice our country should heed. Sick oversaw Iranian affairs on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council. Together with Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sick presided over the worst blunder in American postwar foreign policy: our inaction in the face of the fall of the Shah, and his replacement by revolutionary Islamists. As Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote in “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” “the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.”
And this is Kristof’s sage?
COMMENTARY research assistant Daniel Halper collaborated on this post.
