A reader writes:
Your post includes patronizing acknowledgement that some conservatives agree with you on some principles, but you significantly omitted the prospect that free elections in Iraq had a bearing on the events currently unfolding in Iran. The invasion of Iraq was unproductive in many ways, but it did accomplish that one important feat. Moreover, assuming free elections in Iraq did contribute to the desire for fair elections in Iran, be assured it was not an unintended consequence.
Further, you said in “Now: Gerson” that “Fred Hiatt's team at the WaPo publishes yet another column making exactly the same exhausted neocon point about jumping into the Iranian revolution. It's doctrine so they repeat it endlessly.” I do not view the article you referenced as advocating an extreme position. “Obama could, instead, have harshly criticized the regime thugs on motorbikes for breaking the heads of women and youth during protests, and he could have led the world in condemning Internet censorship and the arrest of dissidents. Instead of critiquing Iran's political processes, he could have spoken for human rights with firmness and clarity.” I found that suggestion to be well reasoned, and your caricaturization of the author as an absurd ideologue as either disingenuous, or an indication that you are anything but “of no party or clique.”
But Obama did make such comments - more eloquently than Gerson. What Gerson is trying to do is to imply that Obama has given a Chicken Kiev type speech, a la GHW Bush. But he didn't; and it's simply another exhausted, intellectually dead noecon meme from the past to say he did. But notice too the ideological blinders. In retrospect, didn't George H.W Bush handle the collapse of the Soviet Union rather deftly? Compared, at least, with the bungling, indecency and lawlessness of his son and his son's apparatchik, Gerson?