Ahmadinejad: “there’s an innocence about his eyes”, didn’t you know?
President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech paid tribute to the world’s dissident democrats, and eloquently articulated the rationale for democratic peace theory.
But he also raised eyebrows, not least in Europe, by insisting on the existence of evil in the world.
Indignant at The New Yorker’s soft-edged profiles of Ahmadinejad(“there’s an innocence about his eyes”), Mugabe, Chávez, and Qaddafi, The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier has a must-read on the “silly sanitizations” of contemporary political culture that consistently subvert the notion of evil or hateful regimes.
He suggests that it is because of a misplaced sense of reasonableness that “we have elected to deny democratization a prominent place in our Iran policy.” Engaging Tehran is deemed the responsible thing to do, Wieseltier complains. But, he asks:
What if one holds that the only reliable way to guarantee that Iran will not threaten its region with weapons of mass destruction is the establishment of a legitimate and decent and rational government in Tehran that will not make such a threat? If this is what one believes, and there are plentiful grounds for such a view, then it is the suppression of indignation, the refusal to side—to engage!—in strong and sophisticated ways with the democracy movement, that is impractical.
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