Appeasement and Vali Nasr's Shi'ite book

Hugh Hewitt has a good retort to the nonsense that the WaPo's answer to the NYT's Bob Herbert, Eugene Robinson, spouts about how we must lose the GWOT by attacking our friends in the region, namely the Iraqi govt and the Paki government, re Hewitt:

Apparently the policy of the Appeasement Democrats is to attack out friends and ignore our enemies. Thus in Mr. Robinson's world, we should withdraw support for the newly elected Iraqi government and turn on President Musharraff because, in the former case, the government in Baghdad is alleged to have ties to extremists and in the latter because the Pakistan ISI did indeed support Islamists before 9/11.

Vali Nasr kept me up last nite after the sad football game that saw FSU beat Miami with an excellent talk on C-Span about his new book, based on the Foreign Affairs article about the rise of Shi'ism and how the US must confront this new phenomenon which is largely a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Read the Foreign Affairs piece linked and get a drift of Nasr's extensive thinking about the new rising hegemony of Iran in the region.

I bring him up because during his extemporaneous remarks on C-Span, Nasr compares the grandiose chest-thumping of the undemocratic dictatorship Iran with the militarists in Japan in the '30s. Both Japan and Iran are countries of drastic dichotomies, as Ruth Benedict's book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword on Japan could be written, mutatis mutandis, about Iran. The Rose and the Peacock Throne.

Nasr also illuminated how and why the Iraqi government Shi'ites might be distrustful of the US and not want Moqtada Al-Sadr to disband his militia. Shi'ites consider themselves betrayed by the British in 1920 when they abstained from elections under the mandate, giving the minority Sunnis preponderant weight in the new [Sunni] monarchy. Gertrude Bell goes into this in her memoirs.

But the big betrayal was in 1991 when GHWB called on Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam after the Gulf War, which resulted in perhaps 300,000 slaughtered by Saddam, according to Nasr, and another 100,000 refugees into Iran.

Then recently, the Sunnis were being promoted by American Pro-Consul Khalilizad, who although of Afghan extraction and thus roughly a Farsi speaker [he also speaks Arabic], remains distrusted by the Shi'ite PM, if I understand Nasr's analysis, because the new govt believes the US will always give the nod, at the end of the day, to its Sunni allies of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.

Nasr told the audience that GWB told a friend---Nasr teaches at the Naval Academy---that he was informed that "the Shias are all liars..." Nasr does not say it, but Bush is tight with the two King Abdullahs, both of whom are constantly inveighing against the "Shia crescent" forming across the region with Hezbo Lebanon, Syria, Shi'ite Iraq and Iran---all forming closer ties as the shake-out of Saddam's departure continues.

But Nasr was pressed by a questioner about his comparison of Iran with pre-war Japan and volunteered that Iran's recent bumptious behavior also paralleled Wilhelmine Germany and China in the fifties/sixties in its self-conscious assertiveness.

I want to blog more about Nasr's thinking and the paranoia of the Sunni American allies mirrored by the Shi'ite fear of the Gulf powers and Egypt.

But Nasr's remarks should keep thoughtful observers from regarding the Bush team's talk of "appeasement" from being wholely without merit and mere baseless bluster meant for domestic election purposes. I'll give the last word to Hewitt again:

This is a glimpse of the Democratic foreign policy in waiting, a foreshadowing of the demands of a Democratic Congress for investigations of human rights abuses of the new Iraqi government and for a cut-off of aid to Pakistan. As was the case with foreign policy under Presidents Carter and Clinton, today's Democrats find it much more compelling to attack our friends while turning a blind eye towards our enemies. This approach brought us the Islamic Republic of Iran during Carter's years and a nuclear North Korea and 9/11 under Clinton's watch.

Eugene Robinson longs for the good old days when our leaders did not speak of the dangers of the world. "Peace in our time" did not appear in his column, but it surely is on his mind.