>>That's true of a lot of the left's reaction to the Iranian revolution
>>in 1979 (both the Iranian and Western left) - Val Moghadam's 1987
>>article in New Left Review goes into this in detail. The point with
>>Hezbollah, though, is that they're not Khomeini, and they're not
>>about to take over the Lebanese state. At least according to people
>>who live in Lebanon.
But no one really knows what their aims are, right? The danger here for the left it seems to me--besides the always-present dangers of practicing statecraft--is precisely in repeating the runup to the Iranian revolution, where the theocrats are seen as "one of us"* or a neutral actor in the revolutionary consortium but things turn out much differently when the revolution obtains power.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>The fact of the matter is that sometimes people vote Islamists into
>power through elections or bring them into power through revolution.
>
>In principle, we have to accept other peoples' choices even when those
>aren't choices we make for ourselves,
This is a dodge, Yoshie, and your inclusion of "in principle" indicates both that you know it and the circumstances under which you accept others' choices, that is, if those governments' objectives were the same as yours. Which is to say, if the government is anti-imperialist, not much else seems to matter. I'll also note--and here I'm thinking less of you, Yoshie, than of more sectarian factions of the left--that religious/authoritarian governments and forces so favored by first-world leftists seem to always be in the periphery, in countries with brown, black, and yellow populations.
*Here's what Nasrallah said in a recent interview:
>The socialist movement, which has been away from international
>struggle, now for a considerable time, at last began to become a
>moral support for us once again. The most concrete example of this
>has been Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela. What most of the
>Muslim states could not do has been done by Chavez by the withdrawal
>of their ambassador to Israel. He furthermore communicated to us his
>support for our resistance. This has been an immense source of moral
>for us
Notice that the socialists' solidarity is appreciated only when it is supporting Hezbollah and that Nasrallah in no way hints that it will reciprocated.