Michael Slackman has an interesting article in the NYT this morning (via PJ), detailing supposed dissension inside the Iranian regime. Daniel Drezner thinks this may be wishful thinking. I think it may be more than that. The problem is Slackman (as per the accepted method of his paper, despite their editorial denials) uses anonymous sources. This is particuarly troublesome with regards to Iran, a country known to have intelligence agents everywhere from Hong Kong to (especially) Los Angeles. Many of them talk to the press in different ways and from different “perspectives.” It’s impossible to know whom Slackman was really talking to, probably for the reporter hiimself as well. And what their agendas might be. What could just easily be going on here is that the mullahs want us to think there is dissension in their ranks when there is not. Or there might be some, but not as much as they wants us to think… or…. Does the New York Times know? Do you?
UPDATE: Much more real information here. (Apropos, isn’t it interesting that the WaPo and the NYT are suddenly flogging basically the same view on something that they cannot really know about?)
ìDo you?î
No, I can only guess. Itís very likely that a significant number of Iranís elites prefers not to give the middle finger to the West. They want to live the good life and not die for Allah. But do these individuals possess the power to stop the extremist crazies? Beats me. We are living in a dangerous era. Thatís not going to change anytime in the near future. Americans often expect a crisis to be solved virtually overnight. After all, World Wars 1 & 2 and even our Civil War ended after a relatively short period of time. That unfotunately is not going to happen in our fight to the death against Islamic nihilism. Our grandchildren may very well be dealing with this challenge long after we are placed into our graves. We are in this for the long haul.
There is good reason to belive that there are fissures within the Iranian political system. Israeli intelligence suggests that economic sanctions levied at Iran will have a far greater effect on the country’s political elite than similar measures did on Iraq. There is an undercurrent of discontent in Iran, something that further hardship, perceived to stem from the policies of the regime, can easily erupt into open dissent. We all know that US dollars will serve to encourage such events.
As discussed here – even actions short of economic sanctions can serve to this purpose.
“… detailing supposed dissension inside the Iranian regime …”
There is always some kind of dissension witin such a regime, if history is any guide. The trouble is being able to understand the degree and scope of the dissension before hindsight make it irrelevant. History seems to indicate that outsiders don’t have a very good track record there, either.
So yes, if enough pressure is applied, the Iranian regime will crack. Where and how to best apply that pressure to create maximum good results and minimum unintended consequences is an almost complete unknown. I doubt anyone outside Iran has more than an educated guess, even the esteemed Ledeen. Educated guesses are notoriously unreliable convincers of fence sitters, too.
Of course, if I understand Ledeen correctly, his view seems to be that we should apply a lot of pressure and opportunistically watch for the cracks to appear–then target more pressure. After all, Reagan knew the Soviet Union economy would implode in an arms races with the West. But he didn’t predict that exact nature of the implosion, or the exact series of events that would occur to bring about the implosion.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether there is dissension or not. The dissension will not go anywhere unless pushed. And the pressures that will create dissension are the same pressures that will percolate existing dissension into something useful to us. We’d like to know about dissension as a metric for how we are doing at a given moment, but it shouldn’t dictate the long-term policy.
The real question is whether we should accept anything that NYTimes publishes as fact. Just this last Sunday they put ther foot in it again. Let’s face it, the Onion is probably a better source of news. As far as the NYTime’s sources go, its probably a staffer at the DNC. Isn’t that what it usually is?
The NY Times motto should read: “all the news we want you to be aware of.”
It took them more than two weeks before they reported the story about the Jewish man who was kidnapped in Paris and tortured by a gang of mostly Mulsim thugs.
They don’t seem to have learned anything from the time they refused to report on the Holocaust in the early 40′s.
The story about Iran reads like an “I wish this were the case,” and not a legitimate news account.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… I think not. The Times will shamelessly select sources to push the official line.
So let’s consider the alternatives:
The regime is fracturing under pressure. Good, war may be averted.
This is total disinformation to buy the regime time. Well, there’s the rub. This is the outcome the Bush administration needs to overcome.