But sometimes I’m proved wrong. Case in point, Jackson Diehl is disappointed in the Iranian Greens:

Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program.

Neoconservatives do recognize that even if the Palestinians had a perfectly representative government, they’d continue fighting against Israel, right? They recognize that there are certain wars, like wars over territory, which are not affected by the political systems of the warring parties, right? Right…?

I continue to believe they’re not complete ideologues, despite frequent evidence to the contrary.

Larison first:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Sullivan writes, “I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East,” and goes on to cite Iran as proof of the instability of the autocratic model when it comes to succession.

He’s missing the point, though. I’m not sure even steely Larison would go so far as to argue that autocratic succession is any kind of ideal. Autocracies by their very nature change leaders amidst a tension that can at any time spill over into war. Indeed, the greatest achievement of democracy has been that power transfers have been institutionalized to the point of violence being a nearly unthinkable outcome.

What Daniel is correctly railing against, however, is the by far most questionable aspect of Democratic Peace theory: namely that democracies do not go to war against each other. Democratic Peace theorists like the claim, with some sleights of hand, that history bears out this claim. But Daniel’s counter-example is a powerful one. Is there much doubt that the Arab Street, if given access to the reins of power, would demand anything but the annihilation of Israel?

Alas, I’ve only slept two hours last night, so a longer post is out of the question. I’ll try to do it tomorrow.

“Mahmoud—now this is true—said that there are no homosexuals in Iran,” roaster and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf said, “and I for one believe him. After all, if a cock-hound like Mammers can’t find a single puckered asshole in all of Persia to slap his balls against, then what’s the use of any of us trying?”

“A cock-hound like Mammers” has already entered my everyday lexicon.

Also speaking at the event were Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Japanese prime minister Yasuo Fukuda, and longtime foreign policy adviser and roast favorite Henry Kissinger, who spent the majority of his speech making sexual overtures to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s bride, model Carla Bruni. Although Bruni was seated in the audience, Kissinger politely offered her a seat on his face so he could get a better look at the only place a French leader has successfully invaded since Lombardy.

French jokes like this are easy, but the je ne sais quoi that the Onion always offers is the context—Kissinger asking Carla Bruni to sit on his face… I love it!

But a surprise visit from Israeli president Shimon Peres may have been the most popular act of the evening.

“On the way here tonight, someone told me that Mahmoud was a Shi’a,” said Peres, placing one hand on Ahmadinejad’s shoulder. “At first I thought they were saying ‘He’s a shit,’ because the two sound so similar. But there’s a big difference: One’s a brown, foul-smelling tube of solid waste—and the other comes out of my asshole.”

Again, heard it before, but the context makes it.

Nothing pithy to add, just wanted to highlight a good piece of work when I see it.

While administration officials maintain that the intelligence estimate does not mean that the United States and its allies should ease the pressure, the practical consequence of the report has been to embolden Iran. It has also made it more likely that China and Russia, two of the countries with perhaps the smallest appetite for sanctions against Iran, will not agree to a new round of tough sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

A de-fanged Cheney means the world goes about its business. The world’s business is not to lie down prostrate, but rather to counterbalance U.S. global dominance.

Yay?

I have long argued that America owes it to itself to explore fully the possibility of normalizing relations with Iran. We do not need to tranquilize ourselves to the danger in order to pursue a more peaceful world. What is required is a specific vision linking assurances for Iran’s security and respect for its identity with an Iranian foreign policy compatible with the existing order in the Middle East. But it must also generate an analysis of the strategy to be pursued should Iran, in the end, choose ideology over reconciliation.

Kissinger’s not been treated kindly by history for his Vietnam policy, and his rumored advice over Iraq to Bush Jr. doesn’t sound like it was too sagacious either. Nevertheless, this op-ed is right on: Iran policy does not end with the NIE. (And the politicization of intelligence has been disastrous for this country.)

Quoth DeLong:

Only the truly shortsighted think that negotiations are “the art of extracting maximum advantage from your adversary.” Negotiations are the art of getting to the best situation possible—which may or may not involve “extracting” anything.

True enough, that was some sloppy phrasing on my part. Negotiations, especially in international relations, are not a zero sum game. There may or may not be any “extraction” involved because it’s not as if my adversary gaining something results in me losing the exact same amount. With that said, if there exists a situation where two sides are irrationally committed to irreconcilable goals, negotiations do start tending towards a zero sum arrangement.

I, for one, don’t have much faith in the rationality of Ahmadinejad.² He may not be the madman caricature that the right has made of him, but he’s a nasty populist demagogue, and demagogues will behave in the interest of keeping themselves in power, not necessarily in the interests of their country.

Since I’m not a proponent of regime change as policy, I recognize that we will have to negotiate with this unsavory man. Best, then, to do it from a position of relative strength. Sanctions and pressure have led to increasingly dire conditions in Iran, which have in turn caused Ahmadinejad’s party to lose ground in the most recent Iranian elections. Why stop now?

“The best situation possible” is economics talk, pareto optimality if memory serves. It’s a crucial concept to keep in mind while thinking about likely and desirable outcomes of any negotiation. But it’s what you keep in the back of your mind as you tussle for maximum advantage. It’s not something you bust out when faced with a tough, adversarial negotiating partner across the table.

Having read the WaPo page, I have to say I disagree with Drum’s and DeLong’s strident readings of it. Here’s what the page actually says:

President Bush yesterday vowed to continue pushing for international sanctions. But Democrats and some Republicans are arguing that now is the time for the Bush administration to begin a broad dialogue with Iran—and drop a precondition that the regime first suspend uranium enrichment. It’s an odd time to recommend such a concession: The latest European Union talks with Iran last week were a disaster, in which a new hard-line envoy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad withdrew the previous, inadequate Iranian compromise proposals. Were the Bush administration to abandon its insistence on a suspension of enrichment, Mr. Ahmadinejad would declare victory over the relative moderates in Iran who have recently criticized his uncompromising stance.

While one hopes that American strikes are off the table, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to further ratchet up the pressure on Iran. The NIE doesn’t exactly transform Ahmadinejad into an interlocuteur valable. Negotiations are the art of extracting maximum advantage from your adversary without using actual physical force. One gets the sense that people are forgetting this amid the euphoria.

In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003?

Or why should we believe anyone? Pynchon’s proverbs for paranoids, #3:

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

(I know I’m abusing Pynchon here.)

I guess Cheney finally lost his turf battle on this one. … I wonder who pushed back? Who’s got the juice?

Indeed, this is the most important part of today’s revelations: not that the intelligence community has undercut the Bush Administration’s rationale for war with Iran, but rather that Cheney’s lost a doozie of an administrative battle in having these documents released to the public. I don’t place hope in war being averted due to a lack of a proper slam dunk casus beli. It’s certainly not stopped this administration before. Only a properly de-fanged Cheney will keep us out of trouble for the next year.