Today I learned from pundit David Ignatius that something might be going on in Iran

Who ever had more "inside" dope than the big dope, Big Dick?

by Ken

This morning, against my better judgment, I decided to take a look at David Ignatius's Washington Post column, "For Iran's Spies, A Putsch." It was the fleetingest of impulses: that perhaps something is going on in Iran which I should know something about, and it should be possible to get some idea even from a pile of standard-issue Village hack punditry.

Wrong.

There appear to be some actual facts. In July, the minister and four deputies in Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security were relieved of their posts, presumably at the instigation of President Ahmadinejad, trying to consolidate his power in the face of difficulties with the country's still-supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

I'm prepared to accept all of this as fact, including the hypothesized tension between the president and the supreme leader. It's certainly not hard to believe that both Ahmadinejad's self-promoting stridency and his heavy-handed handling of the presidential election and its aftermath have created problems for Ayatollah Khamenei that he and his allies didn't need and don't appreciate, even if they did choose to stand behind his "reelection."

But the rest is all speculation and theorizing and claims and likenings and especially epithets. The decommissioned minister, for example, is "a ferocious cleric named Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei who is nicknamed 'the viper' by some Iranians." Once this has been poked around by enough "analysts," the removal of Mohseni-Ejei and the four deputies has blown up into a full-fledged "internal coup." And for sure, what less than a coup could bring down a ferocious viper?

Well, how about a Stalinist purge? That could bring down anybody. And sure enough, Ignatius has "one U.S. analyst" who "likened" the five apparent firings (I say "apparent" because it occurs to me that we don't actually know how and why each of the five departed gentlemen was separated from his job) to a Stalinist purge. "In the process," Ignatius adds, "Ahmadinejad made some potentially dangerous enemies."

Now I hate to be a party pooper, but in figuring out how much credence to give any particular pundit's punditry, one thing we have to do is apply our common sense. And a Stalinist purge in which none of the five purgees suffers any known consequences other than the occupational doesn't resemble any Stalinist purge I've ever heard of. In fact, as Ignatius himself informs us, "No sooner had Mohseni-Ejei been fired at the intelligence ministry than he resurfaced as the country's prosecutor general." Already this is looking like one sorry-ass Stalinist purge. And a Stalinist purge that created "potentially dangerous enemies"? I don't think so. Pretty much the whole point of Stalinist purges was to eliminate potentially dangerous enemies.

Ah, but you see, "as is usually the case with Iran, the situation is more complicated," and we are treated to a whole series of machinations by parties from various Iranian factions, all reported with about as close to no real-world documentation as you can get (which these days in the Washington Post appears to be pretty darned close). We get one morsel from "one Iranian political figure" (by way of "a Western intermediary") and another from "a second prominent Iranian politician, who is close to Khamenei."

Now, the reality is that any real information coming out of Iran might be "sourced" exactly this way, and I'm certainly not in any position to say that any of Ignatius's hypothesized facts and speculations are wrong. They just don't sound very credible, and it seems all to likely that their intent is simply to arouse American fears and to fortify resolve to take a tough line against those Stalinist Islamofascists. We are already warned -- not by Ignatius directly, of course, but by one of his Iranian "sources" (the one received through the "Western intermediary") that "the Obama administration may have unwittingly encouraged the regime's power grab" with two letters sent to Iran, which "may have emboldened Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to think they had a free hand on June 12."

Again, I can't say this isn't so. I just have the feeling that I know less about what's happening in Iran after reading Ignatius than I knew before. And I can't help feeling that what this column is really about is yet another burst of puffed-up Village Insider-itis -- a pundit either trying to make himself feel important or, more dangerously, trying to push an agenda based bits and pieces of "inside knowledge" that may or may not bear any relationship to reality.

I don't know much about Ignatius's particular agenda. Glancing at the comments appended to his column, I see that a lot of folks out there with computer access seem to think he's a shill for the Israeli regime, but then, the tone of their indictments suggests that these are people who are writing from the confines of their straitjackets after refusing to take their medications for a long period. In the end, I don't much care what Ignatius's agenda is. All I can get from his column is that something, possibly political and possibly involving President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamanei, may be going on in Iran. Possibly. (But be warned: "On this issue, as with so many others, the adminsitration is nearing decision time.")

I might add that this is why I stay out of discussions of what we should be doing in Afghanistan. People I respect have widely divergent views of what we might hope to accomplish and how we might accomplish it. I respect the historical-continuity argument, pointing out just how difficult it is for outsiders to impose their will on Afghanistan, but the subject is just too complex for my limited understanding, which even so I suspect may be deeper than that of many partisans who have no hesitation in advancing their dead-certain views. As against the historical-futility argument, I think about the desirability of simply leaving the country to the Taliban. That worked out pretty well last time, didn't it? I just wish I knew who to listen to.

Still, I've built up a long list of connected "insiders" not to listen to. Shouldn't we have learned that lesson, if no others, from the carnival of catastrophe that was the Bush regime?

Nobody anywhere has ever had more "inside information" than Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney, and I'm unaware that among all that pile of unintelligence as much as a single fact ever crept out. If you were a foreigner peddling disinformation, or for that matter a domestic disinformant, "Big Dick" might as well have had a "FOOL ME" sign plastered across his big butt. Everybody on the planet, except the thugs, loons, and patsies of the American Right, knew that Cheney was a low-rent wackjob who had concocted a loony sci-fi-type fantasy universe in his sclerotic brain, and that his belief in his fantasy universe was so powerful that he would believe any bit of "intelligence," no matter how preposterous, that conformed to his lunacy and would dismiss absolutely any source, no matter how credible, that didn't.

Does the name of Ahmed Chalabi, first president of the united liberated Iraq, ring a bell?

#