Are Republicans deluded, liars or both? Today’s example is Ari Fleischer, who says that George Bush deserves credit for the reformist surge in Iran. On one level these kinds of claims are untestable, but what we know about human nature argues strongly against Ari’s position.
Both Bush and Ahmadinejad were deeply unpopular in their own countries. They depended upon one another; whenever Bush needed to goose his numbers he would trot out a Middle East nasty, often Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad, in turn, depended on a United States threat to distract attention from the economic woes that he helped inflict on Iran. Ahmadinejad was probably better served by the scare tactics, since the threat was real. Bush really did want to attack Iran.
Once Obama got in, Iranians could feel somewhat freer to discount the red, white and blue menace and go with anyone but Ahmadinejad, which is what they apparently tried to do. If Bush can be credited with any role in the reformist upsurge, it is a only in a negative sense. He turned the pressure up so high that it was easy for Obama to relieve it by a few words and gestures. The people of Iran felt free to vote their domestic interests because the foreign threat receded. Ahmadinejad couldn’t sell fear, and without it he had nothing left.
That’s a large part of what happened here in the past few years. If any emotion put the Republicans in position to win (with a helping heap of questionable Ohio ballots) it was fear-a waning fear but one that was still strong. By 2008 that fear level couldn’t be sustained, and the other distractions Republicans commonly employ (e.g., fear of the “other”, whether that other be black, brown, gay, or Muslim) lost their effectiveness in light of the looming economic crisis.
So some of the same forces that beat the Republicans in 2008 created conditions in Iran that forced Khamenei to steal an election that his chosen candidate might easily have won had Bush still been in office.
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