> So, I am not impressed by Prof. Dabashi's piece. A roughly equal
> number of blows delivered to Bollinger and Ahmadinejad won't cut it
> for me. It's brave in that it risks his job by criticizing his boss.
> It's coward in that he attacks Ahmedinajad at a time when the country
> that man leads is being threatened by the biggest economic and
> military power in human history.
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With respect, Julio, I think you and others are making too much out of
Dabashi's criticisms of Ahmadinejad, and are in danger of losing sight of
the forest for the trees.
When someone speaks out strongly against the manufacture of consent for an attack on Iran - as Dabashi clearly did - that should be applauded, not condemned. You or I might have written the article differently, but that Dabashi attacked Ahamdinejad in making the case against Bollinger and the Bush administration is strictly incidental. You're exaggerating the degree to which US conservatives seeking a pretext to attack Iran will seize on the repression of gays and women rather than oil, Israel and WMD's - even, as you put it, at the margins.
By the same token, Yoshie's admiration for the Iranian leader is also peripheral to the main issue. When she writes in opposition to US intervention, but in support of the Ahmadinejad regime, it would be equally mistaken to focus on the latter while losing sight of her overriding objective. (My impression is that criticism of Yoshie on these lists has been mostly defensive in nature, in response to her claims that Western leftists act, in effect, as running dogs of US imperialism.)
In any case and to illustrate further, I'd gladly link arms with both Dabashi and Yoshie in a demonstration around the slogan "No US Attack On Iran", and wouldn't be bothered if Dabashi sported a button saying "No to Bush, no to the clerical regime" while Yoshie carried a sign "Solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran". If either made unity conditional on an acceptance of their particular view of the regime, that would be a different matter. But during the Vietnam war, vocal supporters of the NLF ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win") were for the most part able to unite with anti-Communist liberals around the overarching theme of US withdrawal, and the political character of the NLF and the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam generally remained subordinate to that goal.
That should be the starting point also with regards to Iran. It's to be expected that people will have conflicting views about the character of a particular regime within the context of their opposition to US imperialism. These disputes about the regime are not crucial outside their countries of origin. They only become important within anti-intervention movements abroad when these differences are unnecessarily exaggerated, resulting in mischievous bickering and division. These divisions are of more benefit to the forces promoting war than any ideological support for intervention the latter are wrongly presumed to derive from within the antiwar camp.
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