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I’m skeptical, though for not entirely rational reasons. One of the pundits who kicked off the greening is Andrew Sullivan, who has an insufferable and rather self-indulgent tendency to run off half-cocked at romantic-seeming causes, and whom I don’t really trust on issues more complex than like being against torture. It’s worth recalling that he once and not so long ago condemned the anti-war left as akin to traitors, so his adoption as a voice of reason is perplexing. Watch your back, is all I’m saying.*
Ben Dueholm: “I must have been in the john when Hashemi Rafsanjani [formerly Ayatollah Khomeini’s commander-in-chief] went from being a genocidal madman to the patron of Iranian liberalism.”
- Here’s a great example of why, from Ben Dueholm’s post linked above: “Sullivan says that Mousavi has been clever ‘to coopt the rhetoric of the revolution and to appeal to religious sensibilities.’ Since Mousavi was Prime Minister from 1981-89, one imagines that ‘coopting’ is not quite the right verb in this case.”
