NEO-CONS ATTACK IRANIAN ELECTIONS, BASH OBAMA FOR WILLING TO TALK WITH IRANIANS

Charles Krauthammer writes in today's The Washington Post:

"That's the problem with Obama's transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn't mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

"A CIA rent-a-mob in a coup 56 years ago does not balance the hostage-takings, throat-slittings, terror bombings and wanton slaughters perpetrated for 30 years by a thug regime in Tehran (and its surrogates) that our own State Department calls the world's "most active state sponsor of terrorism.""

So it seems that together with Elliott Abrams in today's The New York Times the strategy of neo-cons like Abrams and Krauthammer is to bash both Obama and Iran. The one thing these guys could not stand is a genuine dialogue with Teheran securing peace between the U.S. and Iran, a development that both Abrams and Krauthammer and fellow American neo-cons would be against. Their whole game plan of demonizing Iranians and Iran would be halted and any opening for Israel to bomb Iranian cities would be eliminated.

Abrams tries to diminish the importance of today's Iranian elections. He calls them not democratic, not offering any real choice, doomed to fail.

Writes Abrams:

"Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defeat would probably be welcomed abroad as a sign that Iran is moving away from his policies, but Iran’s policies aren’t his — they are dictated by Ayatollah Khamenei and his supporters in the Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitary. In fact, a victory by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, is more likely to change Western policy toward Iran than to change Iran’s own conduct. If the delusion that a new president would surely mean new opportunities to negotiate away Iran’s nuclear program strikes Western leaders, solidarity might give way to pre-emptive concessions."

Both Abrams and Krauthammer resent that Obama has admitted U.S. complicity in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. For them, it calls into question American exceptionalism, the doctrine that the U.S. can do no wrong.

Writes Krauthammer:

"Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one's own country."

From the above paragraph, the reader is left wondering in what psychological state Krauthammer finds himself. He accuses Obama of "disturbing ambivalence towards one's own country," as if overture to Iran and acceptance of Iran's elections as fair and democratic indicate ambivalence towards being an American. Someone help this poor guy with counselling.