Democracy may be a "journal of ideas," but I wouldn't trust their quotes. In his attempts to make me a straw man on the subject of Iran, for instance, Ken Baer lops off the first half of my sentence, leaving me saying that that "attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda." The first half of that sentence, in a post whose evidence and argument Baer entirely ignores, is "[t]hat's not to say Iran doesn't have all sorts of human rights violations of its own." Sadly, Baer doesn't respond to my evidence of dissent in Iran, and doesn't provide any evidence of his own suggesting the country's dictatorial nature. This is how I become evidence that "[s]ome even go so far as to excuse the Iranian regime."
Forget the quote, though: Where are "the ideas?" Baer's fear is that I -- and the unnamed others I represent -- "excuse the Iranian regime" -- Excuse them from what? Baer doesn't say -- in order "to deny the very existence of a threat."
Problem is, it's hard to figure out just what Baer thinks the threat is. Almost the entire column is given to a recap of the Six Day War -- a war fought and won by Israel, but which Baer seems to wish America had entered. And when he does turn his attention to the present-day, the focus remains the same. "In Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran," he writes, "Israel is again staring down a possible existential threat, and the United States is once more facing a serious challenge to its interests in the region." So the actual threat appears to be not to America, but to Israel. This, assumedly, is what Baer believes I deny. But I don't. I just happened to be talking about America. I wasn't aware Israel had been annexed.
Indeed, the whole column follows the Ken Baer method of Iran demagoguery. A lot of assertions and insinuations that progressives are criminally incompetent on the issue, but not much in the way of facts, evidence, or argumentation backing him up. You can see the results of our last go-around on the issue here. It should be sufficient. Baer could have tried making a case to the contrary and explaining precisely what the dangers were and what needs to be done, but the piece offers neither argument nor prescription. It's straight assertion.
One more thing: I assumed this riposte would appear in the next issue of Democracy, as they have a section entirely devoted to responses, and I'm attacked by name in the article with an out-of-context, edited quote. Baer refused.
Clarification: Baer called to explain that we'd misunderstood each other. He didn't want a response focused on whether I was misquoted, but would be interested in one based on "deeper, more theoretical" disagreements. I, for my part, hadn't realized he thought my response would be mainly about the quotation, given that his reference to me is based on our broad disagreement about Iran's threat level.
