(I wrote this on the run earlier today; embarrassing typos are now fixed)
A delightful and helpful reminder for those contemplating “negotiations” with the Islamic Republic of Iran:
Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” quoted a former colleague in Tehran who compared dealing with the Islamic Republic to playing chess with a monkey.
“In the middle of the game, the monkey picks up your queen and swallows it,” she said. “Then what are you going to do? You are dealing with a country that is not going to follow your rules.”
Nafisi, like all the Iranian expats/analysts interviewed for the New York Times piece I quoted above, is in favor of engaging Iran, not bombing it.***
Mehdi Khaliji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, for example, makes a lot of sense:
With Iran, the United States needs to become both more confrontational in private, and less bellicose publicly, he said. For example, rather than threatening regime change and not doing much to back it up, he said, the American military should have come down hard on Iranian interference in Iraq while sounding more diplomatic in public. That approach would make Iran more amenable to compromise, he said [emphasis added].
Like I was saying yesterday, when I was talking about plan B: it’s all about hypocrisy public diplomacy. Get used to it.
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***In a demented attack earlier this year on Nafisi and her wildly successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (a work of dissident literature about the soul-killing totalitarian regime of the Mad Mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Columbia “scholar” Hamid Dabashi accused Nafisi of being a “native informer” and “colonial agent” serving the agenda of the Bush administration and of writing “a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire.” He called her work “reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.”
In an interview, he called Nafisi “the Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib dressed up as the simple, everyday comprador intellectual you might meet in the supermarket.”
I have no desire to get in between Persians. However, this is my wish for “Professor” Dabashi:
May all his teeth fall out except one, and may that one be the source of constant, agonizing pain.
