More specifically, I was struck by the following:
> > On 10/23/07, andie nachgeborenen
> > <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > So, I take, Yoshie, that your answer is that
> > instead
> > > of imposing bourgeois wealth and liberties on the
> > > unwilling masses in typical imperialist fashion,
> > we
> > > can let the clerics impose Sharia law, stuff the
> > women
> > > into chadors, authorize honor killings of raped
> > women
> > > who disgrace their male relatives, beat
> > clean-shaven
> > > men, hang the queers and stone the adulterers, and
> > > build a bomb.
The striking thing, to me, is the syntactic frame: "instead of imposing... we can let...."
This raises a lot of questions. Who are the "we" intended? The honorable members of lbo-talk? But of course that "we" can neither impose nor allow anything. We can only decide what we think is true or false about the Islamic Republic, and what we think is useful or useless, constructive or pernicious, interesting or tedious, to say about it.
The language of allowing and imposing, however, suggests -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- that the "we" Andie has in mind is that mighty granfalloon the United States. (This way of speaking about the nation always reminds me of the way Yankees fans, even the ones who are not George Steinbrenner, talk about the team.)
If this is in fact what Andie has in mind, then it would in fact seem that a choice is being offered between, on the one hand, some kind of "imposition" by "us" -- and what can that mean, in the world of international politics, except an imposition by force? -- of a different political and social order on Iran; and on the other hand, a kind of complicity (because we have "let" it happen) in the things done by the existing government that we don't approve of.
Surely these aren't the only two choices? But anyway, Yoshie's comment on this passage of Andie's:
> > If you posted what you wrote to
> > www.freerepublic.com or
> > www.littlegreenfootballs.com, it wouldn't be out of
> > place there -- far
> > from it, it would no doubt receive many cheers from
> > right-wingers who
> > have too much time on their hands.
> >
Now Andie seems to have taken this as a comment on Andie's politics generally -- as if Yoshie were saying that his entire oeuvre would be at home on LGF or FR. But this seems to me a misreading of her observation. "What you wrote" in context is most reasonably taken as a reference to the passage she quoted -- the "impose" vs. "let" choice as Andie articulated it.
And if so, unfortunately, I think she has a point. No doubt Andie is, as he says, a committed anti-interventionist. But whether fired by indignation and rhetorical zeal, or just because aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, he has let slip an expression which certainly appears to put the question of intervention very much on the table -- and frame the question, moreover, in a way rather more favorable to it than not.