Nothing like a good old-fashioned inter-liberal argument on foreign policy. I have a lot of respect for George Packer, Hilzoy and Eric Martin, so I’m not going to get in the middle of their dispute. But this argument George makes is problematic, to say the least:

A number of writers seem to know exactly what the Iranians in the streets want from us, and what they want is for us to stay out of it. I wonder how many Iranians these writers have talked to. But even if you don’t have Iranian contacts, you can still try to imagine your way into the situation of the protesters. Every day you have to summon the courage to go out into the streets (where the death toll is now reportedly at thirty-two), and your awareness of international opinion is steadily diminishing as Internet and phone access is choked off. A part of your mind is alert to the danger of being labeled an American agent, always a factor in the regime’s propaganda; but given the enormous risks you’re already running, a much larger part of your mind is afraid that the world is going to lose interest or write you off, that the regime is going to stop feeling any international pressure to behave with restraint, and that when the guns start mowing protesters down in earnest, no one will be watching. When the stakes are this high, being the object of too much foreign concern is not likely to be your number one fear.

I’ll presume I’m in this cohort, even though George doesn’t say so, because he criticized me in an earlier post. And here I’d say that it’s a fair criticism that all of us in the United States don’t sufficiently understand the Iranian opposition. While I’ve yet to read anyone who’s written that he or she knows “exactly” what the opposition wants, until now, I’ve also not read anyone who asked us to “imagine” what an Iranian protester is thinking. I’m not entirely sure what George is saying here because he’s not clear, but it reads like he’s saying that a hypothetical protester is more concerned about a lack of American support than about being labeled an agent of the Americans.

Let’s leave imagination out of it, shall we? Concede that no one in the United States truly understands what the opposition wants, and no one in the United States truly understands all the intricacies or the internal disputes and everything that makes a movement the multiplicity of voices it really is. But what we’re able to see is that the opposition wants the outside world not to respect the results of the election and not to treat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad like his victory is legitimate. There is some affirmative evidence that the opposition doesn’t want the United States to throw its rhetorical support behind the movement, but most of the evidence for the proposition comes from noticing, from the #iranelection hashtag and other opposition outlets, how few calls there have been from Iranians for the United States. to back Mir Hussein Moussavi and the protesters. (Indeed, it’s conspicuous that the excellent reporting of Laura Secor, George’s wife and colleague, doesn’t turn up evidence of such a proposition.) If I’ve gone too far by suggesting that I know definitively what the opposition wants, I’m wrong to do that, and I apologize for it. But there is at least a pattern from which we can draw some tentative conclusions — conclusions which, to be sure, ought to change with the weight of additional evidence, but tentative conclusions nevertheless.

To respond to one thing George does direct at me, I’m curious why he thinks arguments I’ve made for non-intervention are “problematic in a more fundamental way” for not speaking up “for the ‘universal values’ that Obama defended” on Monday, since pretty much everything I’ve reported and argued has been about the need for President Obama to side for precisely such universal values. Substantively, George and I aren’t as far apart on the issue as it may seem.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.