Presidents of Virginia Lecture Series

Focus on President Jefferson.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008.
Schlesinger Center Forum at NOVA's Alexandria Campus.
Start time is 7:30pm.
Directions to the Campus: http://www.nvcc.edu/alexandria/CampusInfo/directions.htm
Free to all, $1 an hour parking at North Beauregard Parking Deck.

Mitt

Interesting Op-Ed on Mitt Romney. Probably too late.

Great piece by Bowden

Mark Bowden, fantastic author of Black Hawk Down, makes a fantastic point:

Sometimes the best way to deal with your enemies is to just leave them alone.

. Indeed. Particulary with Iran.

There were reports from Tehran last week that Ahmadinejad might be on the outs with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The country's spiritual tyrant has been distancing himself from the former student revolutionary turned politician, whose leadership has made sensational and occasionally bizarre international headlines. Ahmadinejad has proved expert at lowering the hemlines of the nation's women, but less so at lowering the country's spiraling inflation. Despite sitting on one of the largest deposits of oil in the world, Iran continues to import gasoline and sputter toward economic decline.

The Iranian president is the inadvertent (but predictable) victim of the recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which found that the country's secret nuclear-weapons program had been suspended in 2003.

There is a wonderful lesson in this. The estimate contradicted the Bush administration's warlike rhetoric about Iran. This no doubt caused some red faces in the White House, which had been selling a wholly different story, but it had the additional and inadvertent effect of pulling the plug on Ahmadinejad, whose game for the last four years has been provoking the United States in order to raise his stature at home.

It worked like a judo move. The sudden and unexpected removal of pressure from our side caused Ahmadinejad to fall on his face. He has found himself without The Great Satan as a foil for his rhetorical nonsense. My hopeful guess is that Iran's leadership will tilt back in a more moderate direction in coming years, and Ahmadinejad will go back to making trouble with his Revolutionary Guards.

There is a persistently juvenile quality to him and the guards that dates all the way back to the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, an act that has done more to damage Iran's standing in the world than any in modern history. The deadly game of chicken with the U.S. Navy in the Strait of Hormuz on Jan. 6 was more of the same. Ahmadinejad and his ilk are dangerous, but mostly to themselves and Iran, a fact that at long last may be dawning on even the mullahs in charge.

When your enemy is paddling toward falls, just wave.