Sunday, June 21, 2009

The Triple Oxymoron

As Amir Taheri has put it, the opposition candidate who lost the rigged election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is just "a balloon that a section of the Iranian middle class inflated to show its anger not only at Ahmadinejad but also at the entire Khomeinist regime."
They want "regime change." They do not want an amelioration, but an end, to the morality laws, the thugs who enforce them, the secret prisons, the international brinkmanship, the terror networks, and the rest of the regime's infrastructure of power.

They explicitly want an end to the "Islamic Republic of Iran," which, as Taheri and others have long been explaining, is a triple oxymoron (it isn't Islamic in any orthodox sense, it isn't a Republic in any political sense, and it does not recognize Iran as a nation).
President Reagan, who extracted more concessions from Soviet tyrants than all previous presidents combined, did not do so by making nice to them.