Liberal Talk Radio

Good Tom Friedman column today. He’s right to say that there’s no need for our relationship with Iran to be as confrontational as it is. The more we keep antagonizing them, the harder we make the situation. This goes back at least as far as 1953, when the CIA overthrew their democratically elected president because British Petroleum asked us to (and, well, he might have be possibly been a Commie pinko or at least trending that way so better safe than sorry, eh?).

Read Friedman’s piece together with Laura Secor’s dizzying foray into Iranian politics in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. She concludes that there’s a perhaps unresolvable tension between democracy and theocracy, which one Professor neatly sums up this way:

“Either [Ayatollah] Khamenei is infallible, or he’s not. If he’s not, then he is an ordinary person like Bush or Blair, answerable to the Parliament and the people. If he is, then we should throw away all this nonsense about Western values and liberal democracy.”

So while Friedman makes good point that Iran is much more liberal than Saudi Arabia, that liberalism is coming at the expense of internal stability. And, in my opinion, the harder we push on it, the more it’s likely to fall in the wrong direction.