Hitchens on Iran

Christopher Hitchens has an article up at Slate called, "Persian Paranoia." It's well worth reading, especially for anyone who shares the Obama fantasy of accomplishing anything through negotiations with the current regime.  Hitchens makes some interesting points. He argues that worrying about outside intervention is pointless, because outside intervention will be assumed anyway.

The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.

He also asserts that Iran's rulers should not be viewed as entirely rational actors.

It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

Hitchens makes a couple of great points about U.S. "non-intervention." 

take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." 

And what about Iran interfering with our affairs? That point seems to get lost for many.

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons.

Hitchens doesn't say so, but we should be doing whatever works best to destabilize and undermine the current Iranian regime -- which is our enemy. Maybe we'll get an equally bad government in its place. But the odds are that we can't find one that is much worse, and more opposed to U.S. interests.