The Myth of the American Mullah

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Keller, a prominent supporter of the Iraq War who once lauded former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz as “The Sunshine Warrior,” is incapable of accepting the arguments of the “hard-liners” – the American ones, that is – in good faith.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By James Kirchick | December 14th 2013

Enough moral equivalence! American opponents of a nuclear deal with Iran have nothing in common with the misogynistic, homophobic clerics of Tehran

If last month’s interim nuclear agreement with Iran ultimately fails, former New York Times editor and columnist Bill Keller will know who to blame: American “hard-liners.”

"Iran's Hardliners, and Ours," is the title of a post on Keller's blog from earlier this week. We all know about Iranian hardliners: bearded clerics who call for stoning adulterers, Basij militiamen fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad’s murder machine in Syria, the crowds who chant “Death to America” at every Friday prayers. But who are America’s hardliners? “When John Bolton, the most enthusiastic armchair warrior of the George W. Bush brigade, and Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of Iran’s brutal Basij paramilitary, are both unhappy, you’ve probably done something right,” Keller assures his right-thinking Times readers. “One reason for cheer is that the interim agreement has brought together the hard-liners, theirs and ours, in reciprocal dismay.”

The former UN Ambassador’s moustache may not be as intimidating as the Ayatollah Khameini’s beard, but his ideas are no less extreme.

Keller’s entire piece consists of comparisons likening those in America and Iran who are both skeptical of last month’s deal, replete with references to D.C.’s notorious “hawks” and their “neocon bunkers of Washington.” Keller, a prominent supporter of the Iraq War who once lauded former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz as “The Sunshine Warrior,” is incapable of accepting the arguments of the “hard-liners” – the American ones, that is – in good faith. It can’t be that their opposition to the deal is grounded in the suspicion—hardly irrational given Iran’s behavior over the past 15 years—that Tehran is attempting to obfuscate and delay on the path to obtaining a nuclear weapon. No, it must be that they want a war.

For Keller and a growing chorus of writers in the progressive-realist axis of foreign policy commentary, critics of the nuclear deal in America and Iran are mirror images of one another. “Just as the president of the United States is dealing with hardliners on his own side, [Iranian President Hassan] Rohani is dealing with hardliners in Iran who are uncomfortable with what could be an agreement with the United States,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told NPR last month. Writing in the American Prospect, Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress approvingly cites Rohani’s condemnation of “warmongering pressure groups” in the United States. “Basically, Rohani’s message to Obama was, ‘You try to handle your hard-liners, I’ll try to handle mine, and let’s see if we can get something done.’”

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