Is Roger Cohen a liberal mugged by reality?
Is New York Times columnist Roger Cohen a liberal mugged by the reality of the Iranian regime's authoritarianism? asks Guernica blogger Jordan Hirsch.
“So long as people are being clubbed on the streets, so long as hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have been thrown into jail just for what they think,” Cohen argued with characteristically vivid rhetoric, the U.S. faces a “moral imperative” to postpone engagement. “I don’t think it can be business as usual, absolutely not.”
Despite his indignation, however, Cohen claimed that he still believed in engagement. In his mind, the “moral imperative” of honoring “millions defrauded” in Iran requires that President Obama's outreach “await a decent interval.” Yet what does a “decent interval” entail? Is diplomacy with the Ayatollah only ethically repugnant for, say, the next six months? Will we, by then, have conveniently forgotten about the Green Wave? Will it no longer be too distasteful to resume “business as usual?”
At the core of this swirling confusion of politics and morality, many conservatives contended, is a classic tale of “liberals mugged by reality”—naïve optimists rendered crestfallen by the revelation of the true nature of the Ayatollah's rule. Indeed, the stark contrast between Cohen’s writing prior to the election and his commentary in its wake lends credence to this notion...
It appears that Cohen’s case is not one of a “liberal mugged by reality,” but one of inherently conflicting aspirations for the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Two competing fantasies dance across his post-June 12th writing on Iran. One continues to be enthralled by Obama's “heady, history-making” wish for rapprochement—comparable, Cohen argues, “to the China breakthrough of 1972.” The other marvels at the “limitless potential” of the three million Iranians who gathered to protest the election results, and glorifies the dissident movement.
The conflict between these two inclinations—both in Cohen’s mind, and in the Obama Administration’s policy—is unlikely to resolve itself soon. But it does reveal that Cohen, along with others, remain hesitant to embrace Obama’s “game of realpolitik” fully.
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During Obama’s run last year, I became somewhat of a pariah when I suggested to my fellow Jewish friends that Obama was an incredible lightweight and all puffery. What got their goat was my “outrageous” claim that he would be dangerous in office because of his incredible global naivety, and his fascist domestic policies.
Well… boogety, boogety! Look what we have!
Roger Cohen isn’t a liberal mugged by reality, he is simply silly. In essence, there are different ideologies, and if you have the wrong one, you are simply blind. This is how people earn money on the stock markets - those that have the right ideas earn the money, those that have the wrong ones lose it. Same thing all over, applies to opinion columnists too. In effect, it is a good thing that some opinion columnists are plain silly - this way we can easier see which ones earn money, so to speak, and which ones don’t. So while I am full of pity for him, I don’t like Roger Cohen to change. A wrong prognosticator is much more valuable than a wimp like Peggy Noonan, who is utterly useless.
And as for Obama, it is of course much better, if for all his lighteweightness and puffery he simply fails in 2012, than suffer him bumbling along for another 4 years.
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Marshall Butow
08/08/09 02:37 AM
I suspect that as the Obama administration continues with the rhetorical flourishes which rendered him impervious to mainstream media criticism meets the reality of a world far more complicated than his fundamentalist followers have thus far envisioned a larger and larger percentage of his support both among voters and the media will begin to erode. One sees signs of this happening in small and larger ways. A New York magazine article (one which I have not read) is entitled “The selling and selling and selling of Obama” This was a magazine solidly behind the President. Further many personal friends of mine who were solid supporters are far more skeptical of his abilities to manage based on his performance. The extremely naive idea that altering the basic behavior of the mullahcracy through engagement, now reveals itself as an idea at best ill conceived. One hopes that the President himself comes to a change of heart and change of policy before the possibility for real change in Iran is forestalled for another generation. The momentum suggests that straightforward pressure from the Administration would result in the collapse of a regime which terrorizes its own populace and exports terrorism to the rest of the world.