Picking Villains

Gregory Djerejian wades into the Iran debate:

I have seen friends and/or writers with whom I very often agree, namely Andrew Sullivan and George Packer, deride Flynt Leverett (and his wife Hillary Mann, whom full disclosure I have met as well) as “Ahamadinejad’s useful idiot” (Andrew), or accusing that their widely read op-ed is rife with “perverse interpretations, narrow legalisms, and ill-informed suppositions” (George). Perhaps the unfortunately shallow, cheaply provocative title of their op-ed helped lead to such broad-sides "Ahmadinejad won. Get over it", but I must say, I find it highly unfair to compare the Leveretts' in the same breath as, say, the execrable Marty Peretz, as George seems to here. The true villains, when it comes to Western bloviators, are those only too happy to see Ahmadi-Nejad win as it keeps the ‘narrative’ dumbed-down for facilitating the objectives of the ‘bomb Iran’ crowd, and they are quite a few of them, or somewhat related, assorted merry ignorants chastising Obama for having bungled his “3 AM moment”, not only getting the advisable policy prescriptions so deathly wrong, but also, to boot, resurrecting a particularly moronic portion of the recent campaign, which one might have hoped would better be relegated to the dust-bin.