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Is it possible that there is a connection between the leak in 2002 about the highly classified U.S. intelligence program — which the paper chose to publish despite the fact that it knew it was creating trouble for U.S. intelligence — and the recent arrests of Esfandiari and the others?  ~Gabriel Schoenfeld

I can see a reasonable argument for why it was probably not the best idea to have a big news story on a CIA recruiting operation, but it is a bit rich that we’re supposed to think that one newspaper story did more to put Iranian-American visitors under suspicion of espionage than, oh, the last five years of official sabre-rattling, “axis of evil” speeches, and loose talk about the use of tactical nukes…and a little thing called the invasion of Iraq.  Tehran might have deduced from these other things that the United States government was going to try to infiltrate and spy on their country quite apart from anything they learned in the newspapers here.  In Schoenfeld’s view, it is presumably not Washington’s belligerence and threats that would make Tehran suspicious of Americans in Iran, so why would a single newspaper story have made that much difference?  If government policy does not provoke hostile responses–if anti-American hostility just sort of happens for no rhyme or reason–what could one newspaper story do? 

If Tehran is so paranoid about the CIA, and I don’t doubt that it probably is (unlike Americans, people in other countries seem to be under the impression that the CIA is competent and good at what it does), why do we need to look any farther than the unreasonable, unrealistic anxieties of Iran’s government?  Surely, the Times story should have been confirmation of the appalling limits of the CIA’s reach into Iran.  If I were an Iranian government official, I would feel very relieved that this was the best the “Great Satan” could manage.  It might even make me lower my guard.  Who knows?  

Could it be that Schoenfeld takes the Iranian regime to be a relatively rational state actor when it allows him to score points against the supposedly subversive media?  Besides, to hear the Commentary crowd tell it, Iran is a totalitarian nightmare state filled with the very vapours of Hell (this is only a very slight exaggeration of what they and their allies say), so why would they expect there to be a rational reason for the regime’s behaviour that could be traced to a newspaper story?  They are not exactly the people who believe that activist U.S. foreign policy has adverse consequences for us, so why would they assume that U.S. journalism has adverse consequences for Americans overseas?  It sounds a bit like blaming American journalism first! 

On a more serious note, as anyone who reads the papers these days knows, Tehran is cracking down on everyone in the country, and has been tightening the screws on the population for many months, and for the last couple of years it has been an unusually poor time to be an American visiting Iran given the heated rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and steady efforts in some parts of the American press to gin up a new war fever against Iran.  Weak, repressive regimes also tend to be rather jumpy about foreigners, especially citizens of major powers whose governments have made it clear that they intend the destruction and/or overthrow of the regime.  It is quite possible that the causes of the current crackdown and the general anxiety about American spies that Tehran must have (given that we have two major military deployments on either side of their country and a small armada in the Persian Gulf) would have resulted in the arrests of these citizens in any case. 

Look at this another way.  Instead of giving the Times grief for reporting news, however unwise the decision may well have been, we should ask the obvious question: this is the CIA’s idea of developing human intelligence “assets”?  No wonder we never know what’s going on in other countries, since the cunning plan for extracting information from countries such as Iran is to ask ethnic Iranians to spy on the old country.  This is not exactly an unexpected way of gathering information in another country.  The Iranian government must already presume every American visiting is a potential spy; this story simply confirmed what they were already going to assume anyway.  Note that this is another bad consequence of maintaining a sanctions regime that makes the presence of Americans in Iran highly unusual and therefore that much more subject to official scrutiny and paranoia, since the reasons for Americans being in Iran today are very few. 

You pretty much have to laugh when you read this bit, though it is actually quite depressing:

The article explained just how the agency hoped to use emigres to get at their relatives in Iran. “If family members trust each other, they’ll tell you things you can’t know otherwise, can’t get [from satellites]. If you’re really lucky, you might recruit somebody involved in the nuclear-weapons program,” was how one former CIA officer explained it.

Sure, Cousin Mahmoud might even take you on a tour of Natanz! 

The question we should really be asking at this point is: why on earth should the public have ever believed intelligence claims about Iraqi WMDs when it comes via unreliable channels similar to those being encouraged here?  For that matter, given the still-parlous state of our human intelligence resources in Iran, why should we trust government claims about Iranian weapons programs now?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any [bold mine-DL]. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

Is there something beyond the solidarity of the decent that ought to have impelled every commentator and editorial page in the U.S. to express unequivocal support for Sir Salman this week? ~Tim Rutten

Something occurs to me as I read this.  The first point has to be that everyone has already taken Salman Rushdie so terribly seriously for decades that many people are perhaps more than a little tired of hearing or talking about him in any context.  Goodness knows I am.  I have some difficulty feeling very sympathetic for someone who, given his background, knew perfectly well that his words would incite the responses they incited and went ahead and wrote them anyway, all the while claiming great victimhood in the process.  Obviously, the man should not be threatened with death for what he writes–that is the bare minimum fundamental to a free society–but one reason you may see fewer excited apologies for Rushdie is that he had to be a fool to write what he wrote, knowing full well what it would mean to Muslims.  Will we still be running around declaring our admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali in this fashion thirty years hence?  With any luck, we will have forgotten all about her, just as we may one day be free of having to hear about Salman Rushdie’s ego. 

The second point is that this claim of a “great silence” by Mr. Rutten is complete nonsense.  There have been plenty of papers that have been decrying the threats made against Rushdie, just as many people defended the Jyllands-Posten when its editor chose to publish the “Muhammad” cartoons.  More examples could undoubtedly be found, if I were inclined to waste more time tracking them down to disprove Mr. Rutten’s false hyperbole, but if both the Sun-Times and the Chronicle can agree that Britain should stand by its decisison there would seem to almost be a broad consensus across the gamut of mainstream opinion in support of Rushdie’s knighthood, or at least in support of Rushdie’s right to write whatever he might wish to write.  If it has not become a week-long obsession for all media outlets, perhaps this is because the headline, “Innocuous event occurs, Muslims claim deep offense, begin rioting” has become rather predictable and uninteresting.  Why, just today we have two columns rallying to Rushdie’s defense (while complaining about the supposed lack of concern everyone is showing), and I have yet to see anyone in this country saying that Britain should withdraw the knighthood under pressure or justifying the Muslim response to it.  If there really is less commentary on this than on other controversies, perhaps some people don’t say much about a topic because the situation seems so clear that there is no need to say anything else.  Mr. Rutten does understand that there are other things going on that may actually be more important than controversy over Salman Rushdie’s bauble, yes?  

Rutten’s memory of the controversy last year seems distinctly skewed:

You may recall that most of the American news media essentially abandoned Rose and the Danes to the fanatics’ wrath, receding into cowardly silence, as mullah after mullah called for the cartoonists’ death, mobs attacked diplomatic and cultural offices and one Muslim country after another boycotted Danish goods.

Well, no, I don’t recall that exactly, because I’m pretty sure this did not happen, just as I’m pretty sure Rutten doesn’t know what he’s talking about with respect to the response of the American news media to the recent controversy.  The only thing worse than the phoney tolerance and sensitivity that he attacks in his article is the even phonier intolerance against non-existent phoney tolerance.  It’s absolutely right to mock the pretensions of multicultis when you can actually uncover them engaging in pretentious, faux tolerance  of outrageous things.  When the reality seems to contradict this criticism, it comes off as just so much lazy media-bashing.  It would be like my saying, “Why don’t American academics speak out against the absurd attempt by some British academics to boycott Israeli academics?  This is outrageous!”  That would sound pretty good, except that many American academics have spoken out against the boycott.  If I were someone who wanted to engage in some lazy attacks about the inherent anti-Israel bias of the American academy, because this already confirms my prejudices about the academy, I would not bother to have found this out, just as Mr. Rutten seems intent on doing with the media in this country.   

A digression on this business of the proposed boycott of Israeli academics and universities: I can think of few more stupid and counterproductive efforts to a) force policy change in another country and b) advance whatever cause it is the people engaged in this boycott believe they are advancing.  Even if we all agreed that Israeli policy vis-a-vis Palestinians ought to change (and I think it should), what possible good would it accomplish to punish Israeli academics and educational institutions with international boycotts?  Are they the ones setting policy?  Of course they aren’t.  On the contrary, their members may well be among those pushing for different policies of the sort that the would-be boycotting academics want to see adopted.  Punishing Israeli academics for the mistakes or even crimes of the Israeli government is like holding Turkish academics accountable for the repression of the Turkish state, even when that repression is directed against those academics themselves.  It would be like other nations forbidding British scholars from participating in conferences because they oppose the policies of the Blair Government in Iraq, or banning American researchers from their work overseas because of something the Bush administration has done.  This is an insane, unprincipled approach and one that is almost certain to perversely strengthen domestic political support for the policies the boycotters wanted to change, as it also lends to these policies  now the respectability of being associated, in a roundabout way, with the cause of Israeli academic freedom.  Incidentally, why has Tim Rutten not actively denounced this boycott?  Silence is a scandal, or so some pretentious columnist once told me.

Rutten also mentions the higher numbers of journalist deaths during the last few years in the Iraq war than had happened during Vietnam, asking:

Why so little attention to this toll?

So little attention by whom?  Journalists have been paying quite a lot of attention to the deaths of their colleagues in Iraq and around the world in the last few years.  Indeed, it has been one of the distinguishing features of the Iraq war and has been the cause for a fair amount of reporting and commentary in its own right. 

If you want to find a cause for why this has received less attention, look to the usual suspects who actively vilify all of journalism as the repository of disloyalty and anti-patriotism and who consistently inspire in their audiences contempt for news reporting by complaining about its insufficiently pro-war content.  Can you imagine the outcry against ”the MSM” if they were to spend a lot of time focusing on the deaths of journalists in Iraq?  You can almost imagine some Hugh Hewitt clone, if not the master himself, saying, “Serves ‘em right for refusing to report all the good news in Iraq!”  We would see a lot of commentary talking about how these stories about journalists’ deaths are proof of why the media are undermining the war effort, and that this “explains” why the journalists are subverting the cause out of loyalty to their fellow journalists.  The thinking here would be that if the war is getting journalists killed, this would give journalists some special incentive to help end the war.  Any media critic would immediately recognise the absurdity of this, since it has been the major media that have made sure to make the possibility of withdrawing from Iraq seem absolutely crazy and irresponsible, but that wouldn’t matter to those who are already invested in the idea that all journalists in this country yearn for our defeat.  Additional coverage of the deaths of journalists would simply confirm this prejudice.