FRAMESHOP:FRAMESHOP: U.S. JOURNALISM WAKING UP

A hearty 'Good Morning!' to American journalists who are just now waking up to the insanity that has taken over the Republican Party--a movement filled with glittering generalities, violent rhetoric, and policy positions built on fairy dust instead of facts.

It's never too late,  I suppose. 

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria is a good example of a journalist who is now wide awake to the Republican "Islamofascist" let's-invade-Iran propaganda:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

Zakarai does not just stop at pointing out how wrong Podhoretz is, but takes the extra step of showing how the leading GOP candidate is buying into this propaganda:

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

Connecting Giuliani to the thick propaganda of the Bush administration and the paranoid insanity of Norman Podhoretz is a good start for Newsweek.

Let's hope they keep moving that direction.

© 2007 Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop