TILTING THE AXIS :

The end is nigh (David Warren, July 19, 2002, Jewish World Review)

Iran has come to the boil. Against the background of huge public demonstrations, the reformist party that controls the largest block of seats in the elected but largely powerless Iranian Parliament yesterday threatened to walk out, if the ayatollahs continued to stall measures for social and political change. [...]

Last Friday afternoon, while the media were checking out for the weekend, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, delivered his most under-reported speech. It was timed to land Friday morning in Iran, Islamic sermon time, and this was part of the intended effect. The White House was delivering a "maximal" affront to Iran's "maximal" Shia fundamentalist regime. The speech deviated from the previous U.S. policy, which had been re-enunciated earlier in the week at a State Department press conference, of having nothing to say about Iranian demonstrations. It was fed to Iran in Persian ("Farsi" to the snobs), by a private, Iranian-exile satellite TV station in Los Angeles.

Mr. Bush weighed in with the demonstrators who had taken to the streets, by the hundred thousand in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, and by the ten thousand in Meshed and elsewhere -- huge events that also went almost unreported in our mainstream media.

Without naming names (as he also had not in his June speech disowning Yasser Arafat), he showed the U.S. no longer makes subtle distinctions between the "moderate reformist" President Mohammad Khatami, and the "hardline" theocratic regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; just as the demonstrators in Iran have ceased to make this subtle distinction, now observed exclusively by the ethereal types in Europe's foreign offices. [...]

The students first, and now every part of Iranian society except the people whose livelihoods depend on the tyranny, demand re-admission to the modern, explicitly Western, world. (Several of the Persians I correspond with have emphasized this point: "We are a Western people. We are not part of the East.")

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'm afraid that I, like so many others, misinterpreted the inclusion of Iran in the Axis of Evil as a rhetorical flourish.
But it seems that, as we're all having trouble getting used to, the President means what he says and has a pretty good case to back him up here. Moreover, it looks like he's serious about effecting regime change there. I'm happy to have been wrong and look forward to welcoming the Persian people back to the West. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2002 3:23 PM