What I find interesting about this Max Boot column in Commentary is not that he is gleeful that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been declared the winner of the election. Nor am I interested that he thinks it makes it more likely that Obama will give Netanyahu permission to launch air strikes against Iran. What interests me is that Boot shows no concern for the people of Iran who went and voted and saw their vote discarded. The people who are being beaten like dogs tonight by Ansar-e Hezbollah’s thugs at Iran’s universities and on Iran’s city streets. The people who are tweeting to the world about their desire for regime change. All over the world, tomorrow, people will be wearing green in solidarity with these democrats who want to throw off the oppression of their theocratic regime. In twenty cities, all over Iran, they will take to streets in a few hours to demand their rights and to scream ‘death to dictators.’ They will probably be beaten, arrested, perhaps even killed. They began with a simple desire to see their votes counted accurately. Now they want true freedom.
But Max Boot doesn’t care about them. He blithely assumes that Ahmadinejad will succeed in his coup d’etat, and he’s damn happy about it because he thinks it will give Israel the right to bomb these democrats.
Imagine if Max Boot had decided it was a bad thing for Poland to earn their freedom from Soviet domination because it would make it harder to sustain our immense defense budgets. That’s the kind of cynical callousness Mr. Boot is displaying this evening when he says this:
Even the Obama administration will be hard put to enter into serious negotiations with Ahmadinejad, especially when his scant credibility has been undermined by these utterly fraudulent elections and the resulting street protests.
That doesn’t mean that Obama won’t try–but he will have a lot less patience with Ahmadinejad than he would have had with Mousavi. And that in turn means there is a greater probability that eventually Obama may do something serious to stop the Iranian nuclear program–whether by embargoing Iranian refined-petroleum imports or by tacitly giving the go-ahead to Israel to attack its nuclear installations.
So in an odd sort of way a win for Ahmadinejad is also a win for those of us who are seriously alarmed about Iranian capabilities and intentions. With crazy Mahmoud in office–and his patron, Ayatollah Khameini, looming in the background–it will be harder for Iranian apologists to deny the reality of this terrorist regime.
In a few hours, when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iranians take to the streets to fight for democracy and liberal reforms and better relations with the West, Max Boot will be cheering on the Ayatollah’s thugs who will greet them with truncheons and bullets and prison and torture.
That’s who Max Boot is. That is what Commentary has become.