On Oct 9, 2007, at 1:33 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> That's a slightly different argument. Yoshie is attacking
> misperceptions of
> Iran that are marshalled to provide a vaguely liberal patina to the
> ongoing
> imperialist assault on Iran - the detailed analyses that Yoshie
> provides,
> with extensive evidence, actually provide us with some excellent
> ammunition
> against the liberal apologists.
No they don't actually. They're so one-sided and apologetic that they're not credible. Ervand Abrahamian, certainly no supporter of war on Iran, will acknowledge that Bush and Ahmadinejad have a lot in common, saying that our neocons are the equivalent of their "principled conservatives." Yoshie dismisses that. Abrahamian has a whole chapter about the paranoid style in Iranian politics (a title that makes it clear that he's not unaware of the same in American politics). Would Yoshie ever acknowledge that? Would she ever go on at any length, as Abrahamian has, about how Khomeini had thousands of leftists jailed, tortured, and killed?
Iran is a complicated place - full of ethnic and religious variety (that nonetheless allows only Shiite men to hold office), a weird mix of theocracy and democracy, with lots of tensions between fundamentalists and liberal modernists. Writers like Abrahamian, Dabashi. amd Moghadam treat all that complexity fairly and fully. Yoshie doesn't.
Doug