Polanski.

What Ta-Nahesi says.

Of course, that "We live in a country . . ." bit he uses in his second-to-last paragraph is probably a big factor in the international/artistic outcry here. My sense is that the American criminal justice system tends to get into the international press primarily for its death penalty cases (particularly those which seem not just more vengeful than the European norm, but also explicitly unfair), or for its sheer scale, and these would not be factors that would earn it the benefit of the doubt. If you're a tree-hugging fringe leftist - and I write this very much as a tree-hugging fringe leftist, by American standards - and you're told that a famous European filmmaker is facing deportation to the States on thirty-two year old sex charges, nine times out of ten the side of the argument you're going to be reflexively distrustful of is that of the state. For the most part, that may not even be a bad thing! Always, always be suspicious of government overreach! RAH!

And, yes, Polanski's trial seems to've been badly flawed - with prosecution and defense ultimately banding together to get the judge removed.

Still, in this particular case, we're talking about a man who really does seem to have raped a teenage girl. Not in a potentially ambiguous "She was seventeen and consented, but was too young to consent legally!" sense, either; he apparently drugged and sodomized a thirteen year old who'd tried very hard to get away from him. Maybe he never did anything like that again, and maybe he's not a danger to society - I hope both are true - but he's not an innocent victim either; the righteous outrage of some of his defenders strikes me as being a tad misplaced. I mean, Google has so far given me no indication that he discovered contrition later in life.

- - -

That said, the person whose opinion should matter most is that former thirteen year old girl - and now I see from the Polanski Wikipedia page that she filed a motion in February to have the charges against him dismissed so that she could finally get on with her life.

Instead, thanks to this arrest, she's back in a media circus.

Super.

- - -

Of course, none of that would be the case if Polanski had just stayed in the country and received his sentence - but, then, if his lawyers are to be believed, he only left because he believed that the judge in the case was improperly in collusion with the prosecution: an argument for which they now have evidence. Ugliness all around.

I don't know what'll happen if he comes back to the States - I suspect there's a decent chance that the judge currently saddled with the mess would toss it all out and make an end of it. I kinda hope for Ms. Geimer that that's so.

In the meantime, though, let's not forget that this all started when a grown man did something terrible to someone he himself described as a "young girl."

Albeit in this context:

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

It's kind of hard for me to see him as a hero.

Damn.

Good-bye, Senator Kennedy.

Iran today.

Over on Nico Pitney's invaluable Iran feed, people in Tehran characterize what happened as war.

I don't know that I can summon up the faith in the arc of the moral universe becoming manifest in the immediate moment in quite the way Obama is daring us all to do, but, my God, I can almost believe that by courage alone the Iranian people have dragged their country irrevocably across a long, deep historical line. So much hinges on Rafsanjani and the Assembly (and Ayatollah Sistani as well, apparently) - but every day the protests and the bloodshed persist, the more inescapable it becomes that Khamenei is serving his ego, not Islam. At what point does his removal become inevitable? And what will the Revolutionary Guard do if Ayatollah Montazeri gets the top spot, or if Rafsanjani institutes the clerical council he's said to have wanted all along?

God help and keep the people of Iran. They have been so very brave.

The latest from Mousavi.

Up at Andrew Sullivan's increasingly essential blog.

As I am looking at the scene, I see it set for advancing a new political agenda that spreads beyond the objective of installing an unwanted government. As a companion who has seen the beauties of your green wave, I will never allow any one’s life endangered because of my actions. At the same time, I remain undeterred on my demand for annulling the election and demanding people’s rights. Despite my limited abilities, I believe that your motivation and creativity can pursue your legitimate demands in new civil manners.

Be sure that I will always stand with you. What this brother of yours recommends, especially to the dear youth, in terms of finding new solutions is to not allow liars and cheater steal your flag of defense of Islamic state, and foreigners rip the treasures of the Islamic republic which are your inheritance of the blood of your decent fathers. By trust in God, and hope for the future, and leaning on the strength of social movements, claim your rights in the frameworks of the existing constitution, based on principle of non-violence.

In this, we are not confronting the Basij. Basiji is our brother. In this we are not confronting the revolutionary guard. The guard is the keeper of our revolution. We are not confronting the army, the army is the keeper of our borders. These organs are the keepers of our independence, freedom and our Islamic republic. We are confronting deception and lies, we want to reform them, a reform by return to the pure principles of revolution.

We advise the authorities, to calm down the streets. Based on article 27 of the constitution, not only provide space for peaceful protest, but also encourage such gatherings. The state TV should stop badmouthing and taking sides. Before voices turn into shouting, let them be heard in reasonable debates. Let the press criticize, and write the news as they happen. In one word, create a free space for people to express their agreements and disagreements. Let those who want, say “takbeer” and don’t consider it opposition. It is clear that in this case, there won’t be a need for security forces on the streets, and we won’t have to face pictures and hear news that break the heart of anyone who loves the country and the revolution.

"Unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice."

It's a bit late, but let me just take a moment to flag the most wrong-headed Supreme Court decision so far this year. The synopsis of the synopsis goes something like this: John Roberts and four of his less humane friends concluded that allowing a prisoner to pay to have potentially exculpatory DNA evidence tested - not requiring the state to do it, mind you, but allowing the condemned to assume the burden of the costs of utilizing a properly accredited batch of technicians - could jeopardize the integrity of the judicial process. Determining innocence is of less importance than . . . I dunno, ensuring that prosecutors' reputations go unchallenged?

OK, yes, I'm being willfully obtuse. We're not talking about providing DNA-based appeals only to those who can afford them, and it wouldn't just be the innocent that filed appeals. The criminal justice system, already legendarily inefficient, would require a vast infusion of cash and trained professionals or else it'd get choked to a trickle - at least for a few years.

That said, the point - the whole point - of the justice system is to protect the innocent; to argue otherwise, to sacrifice the innocent to preserve the illusion of efficiency, involves either a really bizarre sense of professional exceptionalism or a kind of complacency that approaches derangement.

I wish it weren't par for the course.

More analysis.

The goals behind the coup include the following:

The first goal is to purge first-generation revolutionary leaders (with the exception of Ayatollah Khamenei). The main target here is former president Rafsanjani, a powerful politician who heads two important Constitutional bodies, the Assembly of Experts (AE), and the Expediency Council that arbitrates the differences between the Majles (parliament) and the Guardian Council. Also included in this group are Mr. Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, a mid-ranking cleric, former Speaker of the Majles, and a strong critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad; Mr. Mahdi Karroubi, the second reformist candidate in the election and a disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini; and Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main reformist candidate, and Iran’s Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Why do they want them out of the scene? For two reasons. One is that the coup leaders consider themselves — and rightly so — as the saviors of Iran. They are the ones who fought Iraq for eight years. Secondly, at least part of the IRGC high command wishes Iran to be in a perpetual revolutionary state, but believes that the first-generation of revolutionaries have sold out the ideals of the 1979 Revolution.

In his “victory” speech on Sunday, Mr. Ahmadinejad never once mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic, or even Ayatollah Khamenei, his main supporter. The significance of the intentional omissions should not be missed. Just as Joseph Stalin and Deng Xiaoping kept Vladimir Lenin’s and Mao Zedong’s pictures everywhere, they always acted in the opposite way of what they appeared to be advocating; Iran’s second-generation revolutionaries will keep Ayatollah Khomeini’s pictures everywhere, but will act against his teachings, including his most famous saying,

The scale [for people’s acceptance of a politician] is people’s vote.

The second goal of second-generation revolutionaries is moving the country closer to an “Islamic Government,” and further away from an “Islamic Republic.” This is done by making elections a meaningless process by resortign to any means available, including rigging and manipulation. This move has marginalized reformist and democratic groups in Iran.

The third goal is to start preparations for the eventual successor to Ayatollah Khamenei. He is known to be ill. By accusing Mr. Rafsanjani of corruption, the second-generation revolutionaries wish to eliminate him — the head of the Assembly of Experts appoints the Supreme Leader — as the natural successor of Ayatollah Khamenei, hence paving the way for Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi who is a member of the AE. Everything appeared to have been planned well in advance, but the coup leaders did not expect the people to stand up to them.

This is a pivotal moment in Iran’s history. If the reformists and the Iranian people cannot reverse the outcome of Iran’s rigged elections, Iran will enter a dark period of dictatorship, with no light at the end of the tunnel. The country will be controlled completely by the military/security forces, with an unelected Supreme Leader as its titular head, and no elections (or extremely meaningless ones). This would be a terrible development for the rest of the world as well.

More here - and, yes, the article proposes a degree of behind-the-scenes orchestration of events from a cabal of clerics too right-wing even for Khomeini. I don't know enough to say whether that's the proper way to frame the facts, but it seems pretty clear that Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is the cleric most closely associated with Ahmadinejad and the basij movement, that he's reasonably well situated (or he was last week) to make a grab for the Supreme Leadership in the event of Khamenei's sudden fall, and that he'd be really, really terrible in the job - both for Iran and for its neighbors.

Just something else to worry about.

By the way, part 2.

That Danielle Pletka article I cited this morning? Boom:

Danielle Pletka's article on Iran is the academic equivalent of mad libs. The form is set by the neoconservative agenda, and she mobilizes a narrative that fills in the blanks to serve that agenda. Unwilling if not incapable of producing an article any other way, she is more than content to reverse engineer her position with a strict liner logic. Her final statement is telling. "...Iran neither needs nor wants accommodation with the West," and it is clear to me this would have been her conclusion regardless of what the preceding 800 words had been. At AEI, whether by design or not, "scholarship" serves only one master - ideology, and no matter what may change or may not change in the broader world, it would be naive to expect the conclusions of AEI scholars including Pletka to deviate from neoconservative ideology to which they have attached themselves.

And, yeah, that's harsh - but probably fair. That said, the fact that the thesis is rubbish doesn't mean the hunks of analysis in the middle are worthless; the sense I have is that the relative decline of the power of the clerical establishment in Iran is real.

Still, caveat emptor.

By the way . . .

I find the opening to this piece a bit problematic - it would be one thing if the authors opined that the rallies in Iran were doomed, but . . . well, instead, they're asserting that they've already been crushed by the Revolutionary Guards, and all the stories we're seeing about growing numbers and amazing solidarity are basically illusory. I can't authoritatively say that they're wrong, but I can say that that's an interpretation that's way outside the continuum of opinions I've been reading all day.

Still, the rest of it seems fairly valuable - a sketch of how Ahmadinejad's rise has coincided with the political empowerment of the basij movement and other military and paramilitary factions, and the relative decline of the clout of the clergy (and, implicitly, the ideas behind the state that rose out of `79 revolution). I think there's a lot of truth to it - and I think that when we in the West refer disparagingly to the rule of the mullahs (at least, these days), we're actually giving more secular thugs a degree of political cover they don't really deserve.

Ayatollah Montazeri.

Supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main rival in the disputed presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, massed in competing rallies Tuesday as the country's most senior Islamic cleric threw his weight behind opposition charges that Ahmadinejad's re-election was rigged.

"No one in their right mind can believe" the official results from Friday's contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi's charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers "in the worst way possible."

"A government not respecting people's vote has no religious or political legitimacy," he declared in comments on his official Web site. "I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,' and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

Khamenei, let's recall, isn't a grand ayatollah; he isn't a proper ayatollah at all, really - his religious credentials received an honorary bump when he assumed political power, but he doesn't have the training and the adherents that this man does.

The statement above is a challenge to more than Ahmadinejad's presidency.

There's more here. Even more here.

Daily Show fodder.

On Tuesday, CNBC's Erin Burnett made a broad comparison between the Employee Free Choice Act and what's going on in Iran. Hearing this, one might think, "Surely she said something like, "The Employee Free Choice Act, if passed, will allow would-be union members the opportunity to organize without the sort of brutal crackdowns and authoritarian intimidation associated with Iran's ruling mullahs and crazypants dictators." No. This is not at all what happened!

Instead, Burnett compared the lack of a "secret ballot" in Iran to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to form via signed cards. Yes, on CNBC, "card check" equals creeping Ahmadinejadism. This is the sort of perspective that can only be taken by those at a safe remove from the concerns of both American workers and Iranian reformers. Burnett got attaboys from the sage genius Jim Cramer for her heroic observation. As you'll see, their primary concern with the Iranian election is how it will effect the price of oil.

And people wonder why younger Americans are becoming more open to socialism.

All the footage you can bear is available here!

Killing with kindness?

The House Republicans are apparently pushing a resolution that . . . well, basically, that calls for things that the Iranian protesters don't actually want, and risks tarring them with our big, nasty brush. Over at TAPPED, Adam Serwer's halfheartedly floating the idea that this is might be a backhanded show of support for Ahmadinejad, the stuff of neocons' most passionately held Manichean thought experiments, but let's be fair: I think most of us want to stand up and be counted with the good guys here. [Insignificant green-fonted bloggers can even get away with it!] The U.S. as a nation, though, has to be a lot more careful; Mike Pence may not think our role in Mohammed Mossadegh's downfall is relevant to the current scene, but I guarantee that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would love - love! - to have a pretext for arguing the contrary.

If nothing else, I'd think it should really come down to this: the demonstrators and the political figures associated with them aren't clamoring for dramatic shows of support, and it's their show.

Also worth reading . . .

Laura Secor.

From Sullivan:

This list was being passed around among the resistance in Iran today:

1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader because he doesn't qualify as a fair supreme leader

2. Remove Ahmadinejad from president because he took it forcefully and unlawfully

3. Put Ayatollah Montazeri as supreme leader until a review group for the ghanooneh asasi ( "constitution" ) is set up

4. Recognize Mousavi as the official president

5. A goverment by Mousavi and start a reform of the constitution

6. Free all political prisoners without any ifs ands or buts, right away

7. Call off any secret organization such as "gasht ershad"

For what it's worth.

There's more on Ayatollah Montazeri here, for the curious among us; oddly enough, his religious credentials are actually considerably stronger than Khamenei's - but, of course, he got himself barred from power in the `80s for telling Ayatollah Khomeini that torture and murder were un-Islamic.

Iran, part 2.

I've been feeding my news cravings with the help of Andrew Sullivan, Nico Pitney, and, of course, all the Iranian people who're sharing their experiences on Twitter. [See Ambinder for more on that last approach.]

Amazing, amazing work being done here.

Iran.

Last night, I plonked down this much . . .

Some tweets snagged from the front of Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Hospitals around Tehran are surrounded by security forces who refuse to let those with injuries pass, humanity at its worst

Friend: 17 y/o killed infront of me couldn't get to him in time guards beating us up went to hospital but he stopped moving

I've spent an hour trying to wrench something detached and cerebral from that, and I can't. I just can't. This is like watching a mugging.

. . . and then blogger went down for maintenance.

The mood today, for all the blood that's been shed, is different. Rafsanjani and the Guardian Council may well be going after Khamenei himself, the military has maintained its "neutrality," and Ahmadinejad isn't strutting around Tehran throwing himself parties; the violence and the loss of life are appalling, but the Iranian people are holding onto their dignity - and that's nothing less than amazing.

What worries me about the Green Revolution - or, rather, a potential weakness I haven't seen much addressed - is that, ironically enough, I don't see a Ruhollah Khomeini. Not in terms of the man's politics - one was quite enough! - but in that the movement doesn't seem to have a strategist with obvious goals, and with a clear and easily articulated view of Iranian society's next stage. Moussavi, from what I've been able to piece together, has fairly limited ambitions - possibly as modest as just ensuring a new round of elections - and it's not at all apparent to me that that's what the bulk of the crowds in the streets want. [To be clear, I'm not saying they yearn for a perfect reproduction of American democracy, but even arriving at an Islamic Republic cleansed of parasitical basijis and an unresponsive clerical class would take more than just dropping Ahmadinejad down a couple of pegs.] My concern, basically, is . . . well, a movement that self-organizes over Twitter is in a lot of ways cleaner and stronger and more vibrant than one manipulated from on high, but it has a very, very complicated job when it comes to arriving at an end-game (even when it's winning!). Even if the people in the streets hang on in the face of terrifying force, where do they go from here?

That said, I'm curious about Rafsanjani's master plan; the man may be corrupt, but I gather he has a reputation as a big thinker.

That said, I'm still painfully cognizant of Kristof's axiom: when it comes down to might versus right, the smart money's on the bad guys.

But, man, I hope the Iranians can pull it off.

Grumbling for the sake of grumbling.

Sorry to say that the blogging drought isn't gonna let up anytime soon (though I'm actually enjoying the work that's the proximate cause) - but I did want to break silence long enough to flag one recent bit from Glenn Greenwald. I've been quite happy with Team Obama so far (the collapse of the economic world order notwithstanding), but his Justice Department is tarnishing itself pretty badly with this crap.

Let there be sunlight, by God!

And on that note I go back to the mines.

Potentially extremely good news from Iraq.

Sorry for the latest round of silence; between work and stomach flu and flu flu, the last week has been more tense than I would've preferred. [And, fair warning: I don't know that this week is promising to be a whole lot better.] All of that said, I want to point to this bit and acknowledge that my inner pessimist is somewhat stunned. I'm still really worried about the politics of the Kurdish north, but the idea that demagogic warlordism may actually be in decline in the country as a whole is a thing better than anything for which I dared hope a year ago.

Drive-by nitpicking.

Richard Cohen has a particularly galling piece in the Post today arguing in favor of a prosecution-free truth commission system to get to the bottom of torture in the Bush years. Since I concur that that's likely to be the best we can get - since the bulk of the responsibility rests with figures who'll never, ever be dragged before an American court of law - you'd think that I'd let bygones be bygones and gloss over the points in which Cohen is being obtuse and/or disingenuous. And I probably would!

It's just that his icy contempt for people who have cleaner hands than his own is really ticking me off. [Plus, I'm sick, and in something of a bad mood anyway.]

So, a few points: first, one of the strengths of our constitution as it was designed is that it's meant to stand immune - or at least resistant - to the vicissitudes of public opinion, particularly when individual rights are at stake. Anyone who says with a straight face that torture (in some cases the torture of innocent people) shouldn't be prosecuted because lots of Americans were really afraid at the time the policy was enacted and sincerely thought that torture was appropriate is setting up a lovely umbrella argument for anti-immigrant violence from coast to coast.

Second, the fact that everyone Cohen hung with in early `02 may have been down with beating the crap out of captive prisoners doesn't mean he gets to accuse America as a whole of being hypocritical in finding torture unpalatable now. I'd argue it means instead that he needs a wider (and preferably more humane) group of friends and sources.

Third, okay, maybe it is unfair to prosecute torturers when the people who make policy go unscathed. That said, there's a lot to be said for setting some institutional precedent down - isn't there at least an argument to be had that there might be some positive value in teaching future generations of spooks that it might just be in their own best interests to refuse to carry out orders that are clearly contrary to the spirit of American law? It seems like a point that shouldn't just be shrugged away, even if one disagrees.

I'm just sick of people urging me to remember what irrational fear felt like.

It really is a different world.

US President Barack Obama promised to work towards a "durable peace" in the Middle East during a phone call to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Wednesday, Palestinian officials said.

Obama called the Palestinian leader a day after taking the oath of office and assured him that he intended "to work with him as partners to establish a durable peace in the region," Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.

Obama told Abbas that the president was the first foreign leader he called since taking office, Rudeina said.

"This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I'm making it only hours after I took office," Rudeina quoted Obama as telling Abbas.

Yes, yes. It's only symbolism.

Still: holy crap.

The new guy.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

I'm not as exuberant today as I was in the approach to it; the stock market took a hit, Ted Kennedy's back in the hospital, and all the world's impossible tasks are coming back into focus. Even if Obama's everything I want him to be - and, of course, that's not gonna prove to be the case - getting him into office is barely the end of the beginning of the great generational slog.

That said, I can't even begin to describe what a relief it is to be able to cut and paste passages like the one above and then to say that they came from the President of the United States.