THE DEMOCRACY/SECURITY CONFLATION. Beyond the obvious, what's puzzling about Ken Baer's attack on Ezra is this claim: "[s]ome even go so far as to excuse the Iranian regime, the better to deny the very existence of a threat." Even leaving aside Baer's hackish misrepresentation of Ezra's position, he's conflating two very different questions. First of all, the Iranian regime is obviously illiberal but not as repressive as many other regimes (say, Saudi Arabia) that one apparently doesn't have to support bombing in order to meet the Ken Baer Test of Seriousness. And secondly, does Baer seriously believe that a genuinely democratic Iran would be less of a threat to Israel? And if so, on what evidence? The fact that democratic regimes in which citizens have generally liberal values generally don't pose a security threat doesn't mean that this will be true of democracies in which the population isn't particularly liberal and is generally even more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than governing elites. If Baer wants to argue that Iran is a security threat, he needs some independent evidence he's not revealing; that the Iranian regime isn't fully democratic 1.) isn't in dispute and 2.) in itself neither here nor there in terms of whether it's a threat to the United States.
--Scott Lemieux
