Godwin's Law is obsolete: Roger Cohen sounds the fascist alarm

Like most people with any pretense to argumentative discipline, I've long subjected myself to a broad version of Godwin's Law -- that any comparison of a current situation to Hitler's rise is likely to be fatuous, sloppy, alarmist.  A more general stricture: you don't let loose with the ultimate f-bomb, fascist -- so often a catch-all for any alleged impingement on liberty.

No more. As Trump's promises of mass violence and discrimination against Mexicans and Muslims sprouted this fall, and his hold on a growing chunk of the electorate grew, the question of whether he's a fascist got some serious media scrutiny. Robert Paxton, one of the foremost scholars of fascism, essentially answered yes and no a few weeks ago. In brief, while Trump is too purely narcissistic to put forward a developed mystical vision of tribalized national glory -- his "vision" of America is basically "follow me and win win win like me" -- he has all the other core elements: a narrative of national decline, scapegoating of marginalized groups, theatrical deployment of violence and promise of more violence, intimidation of media, refusal to accept losses, grandiose self-display.

As Trump has established a near-lock on the Republican nomination, his support swelling and solidifying, it's become clear that Godwin's Law is obsolete, as I tweeted a few days ago. Today an establishment stalwart, the New York Times's Roger Cohen, ventriloquizing all of Europe  sounds the alarm, full-blast:

Would you kill the Boys from Brazil?

Professing himself a lifelong Zionist, Roger Cohen proclaimed a kind of apostasy yesterday:

Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.

I am reminded of the conflict dramatized in Ira Levin's terror novel, The Boys from Brazil (spoiler alert).  In it, a relentless Jewish Nazi hunter gets a tip from a caller in Brazil and tracks down a final life project set in motion by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele: cloning dozens of little Hitlers around the globe and placing them with elderly, authoritarian adoptive fathers. Ultimately the protagonist, Liebermann, obtains a list of the (literal) Hitler youth and their locations. A militant "never-again" rabbi, Gorin, demands the list, determined to have the clones killed.  That leads to a final confrontation:

America's "inward turn" is moderate and proportionate

It's hard to deny, as Roger Cohen charges, that Obama and his surrogates have whipsawed the world with mixed signals in the wake of the Syrian government's chemical weapons attack on August 21. But Cohen overstates the case and its consequences when claiming that Obama's "dithering"

marked a moment when America signaled an inward turn that leaves the world anchorless.

The president has reflected the mood in America. Almost two-thirds of people surveyed think the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Principle backed by credible force made the United States the anchor of global security since 1945 and set hundreds of millions of people free. Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.

The Times/CBS poll result cited raised my eyebrows too. Specifically, 62% said that the U.S. should not "take the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solves international conflicts," while just 34% said that the U.S. should do so. Perhaps even more striking, when asked,  "should the United States try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, OR should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs?" 15% said "try to change," while 72% said "stay out."

So U.S. "isolationism" is "growing." But growing from what?  The Times/CBS pollsters have been asking the first question since September 2002, when the Bush administration was selling its prospective war in Iraq and was pretty fresh off an apparent quick victory in Afghanistan. You could say that the U.S. was at the peak of post-9/11 triumphalism.  At that point, 45% said that the U.S. should "take the leading role," while 49% said it should not.  A drop from 45% to 34% is significant, no doubt. But it strikes me as quite moderate in light of the decade of disastrous war that followed.

How does Roger Cohen know what Egyptians want?

With all due respect to Roger Cohen's long experience as a reporter, how does he know what the Egyptian revolution has been "about"?

He addresses the question with apparent confidence:

The uprising that ended decades of dictatorship and led to Egypt’s first free and fair presidential election last year was about the right to that vote. But at a deeper level it was about personal empowerment, a demand to join the modern world, and live in an open society under the rule of law rather than the rule of despotic whim.

In a Muslim nation, where close to 25 percent of Arabs live, it also demanded of political Islam that it reject religious authoritarianism, respect differences and uphold citizenship based on equal rights for all.

Cohen's sources? Heba Morayef, head of Human Rights Watch in Cairo, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the world famous "liberal modernizer" (Cohen's phrase) who signed onto the generals' coup. That's it -- the sum total of his cited sources for telling us what 80-plus million Egyptians want.

Parsi, Sick, and Cohen lament in concert as U.S. spurns fuel deal

As the drama of Iran's election and post-election resistance movement unfolded last year, I came to appreciate the blogs of Gary Sick and Scott Lucas - the latter, Enduring America. deploying an array of Iranian and Iranian-American voices and other analysts along with Lucas. * Both blogs did a good job mapping out the extent to which the Revolutionary Guard, in concert with (or in increasing control of) religious hardliners, had effected a militarist takeover of key ministries and industries during the Ahmadinejad era.   Both, at the same time, offered long-term perspective on the missed opportunities between the U.S. and Iranian governments, whose interests potentially converged on several fronts over the last two decades.  The New York Times' Roger Cohen, while perhaps somewhat too credulous about the benign intentions of the Iranian government prior to the stolen election of last June, basically shared these perspectives.

In the past week, as the Obama Administration spurned the fuel swap deal with Iran brokered by Turkey and Brazil -- with U.S. encouragement, they claim -- those who have seen potential in wide-angle negotiations between the U.S. and Iran have writhed in frustration. These include Cohen, Sick and National Iranian American Council president Trita Parsi, whose ABC news was reposted on Enduring America. Their arguments overlap, and mutually reinforce, e.g., that the new agreement preserved the essential features of the original deal (albeit at a point at which Iran has had another eight months to process fuel -- the 1200 kilograms to be removed from Iran now represents 55% rather than 70% of its stock, according to the U.S); that the Administration's chief grounds for rejecting the deal -- Iran's insistence that it would continue to enrich uranium -- was not a condition of the original agreement; and that spurning Brazil and Turkey sets back the new multilateralism that Obama seemed last year to embrace.  Behold their shared agony:

Dispelling dystopian dyspepsia

Gideon Rachman goes dystopian on us with a forecast of international failure on the Iranian front backlit with back-to-the-future foreboding of a new era of blood and iron. In a comment, I try to clear the air via Gary Sick and Roger Cohen's congruent glimpses of a route to a negotiated solution with Iran.

Wings beating against a web?

As Roger Cohen movingly pointed out this past weekend, the uprising in Iran has doubtless humanized the country in many Americans' eyes: at the moment, "Iran" is likelier to evoke "Neda" than "mullah."

It's a sad irony that this humanization may be occurring at the precisely the moment that the current regime becomes most dangerous. The popular uprising, and the old-guard reformist movement to which it responded, may represent the beating of wings against a tightening web.

As Neil MacFarquhar and Gary Sick have both detailed, the advent of Ahmadinejad in the wake of the reformist Khatami was not just a swing of the political pendulum. Ahmadinejad has rather accelerated a militarist takeover, packing the bureacracy, state-run media, educational institutions, and state-controlled major economic enterprises with allies from the Revolutionary Guard; and pursuing an ultra hard-line foreign policy that includes full-throttle pursuit of nuclear fuel processing capability.

While it's generally been assumed that Khameini controls Ahmadinejad, both Sick and MacFarquhar suggest that the reverse may be closer to the truth. Sick:

Over the 20 years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar, or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic republic—military, political, economic, and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

If it's true, as Sick suggests, that Ahmadinejad's advent in 2005 marked the beginning of a quasi-fascist transformation of the Iranian theocracy, it's interesting to note that Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, led a coterie of extremist veterans of a long, brutal, ultimately losing war effort into positions of power approximately 15 years after the war's end.

After two years' overexposure to John McCain's fulminations, Americans should be skeptical of the propensity to compare every dictatorial regime that represses its own people and poses a security threat of some kind to the Nazis. Iranians have given the world reason to hope that the hardliners' days in power are numbered -- and no one should underestimate the staying power of the children of the people who ousted the Shah. The current system may also yet evolve from within, as faction within the power structure push to respond to public pressure. But the uprising has also thrown into sharp relief just what the Iranian people are up against.