Iran’s local elections seem to have gone poorly for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his slate facing a variety of setbacks in local council elections. Someone who knows more about Iran than I do indicated that there was more significance in the results for something called the Experts’ Council, where Ahmadinejad’s allies also fared poorly. As Sam points out, however, despite all the attention he’s gotten in the West, Ahmadinejad doesn’t control Iran’s foreign policy nor neither his ascendancy nor its reversal should have any potential implications. One doubts that such minor things as “recent events” or “accurate analysis of the Iranian government” will deter America’s Iran hawks, however.

Speaking of which, two good policy papers on Iran out recent. Here’s Justin Logan on why starting a war with Iran is a bad idea. Here’s Flynt Leverett on how to strike a deal with Iran. And here’s the White House trying to stop Leverett from publishing.

For a while now I’ve been seeing sporadic publications by someone named Josef Joffe. His views always seem kind of crazy. But only kind of. And since he lacks clear-cut affiliations with crazy institutions, I tend to think maybe he’s not as crazy as he seems. But then I see another article and I think “how crazy is this guy?” But, here he is, the editor of Die Zeit in Germany and, frankly, I don’t think of Continental newspaper editors as likely candidates for padded cells. This virtually uncritical review of Mark Steyn’s book in The New York Sun is, however, the last straw. The man’s ’round the bend — as much if not more so than Steyn himself:

If the Europeans have thrown in the generative towel, Mr. Steyn plows ahead, the Muslims have not. They are lean, mean, and super-fertile, and they are thrust forward by a mighty sense of moral superiority as they look down on the decadent, libertine, and slothful West. Again, Mr. Steyn has a point. There is a lassitude about Europe that stands in stark, possibly tragic contrast to its glorious past — when its adventurers roamed the four corners of the globe as conquerors, when it produced everything, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, that makes up Western civilization.

Honestly, what is one to say? There’s a long and, frankly, not especially distinguished tradition of this sort of thing. You may recall that as far back as The Great Gatsby sensible people were satirizing this as blowhard Tom Buchanan recommends Rise of the Colored Empire by “this man Goddard,” a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s forgotten non-masterwork The Rising Tide of Color. Actual arguments about economics and international relations tend to go missing here as we try and blend together anxiety about the changing social role of women with anxiety about the changing ethnic composition of society and serve it up as a tale of foreign menace and western decline. The next step, which Steyn already seems prepared to take, is to start castigating the broad population for its weak-kneed unwillingness to see the necessity of drastic measures from whence it’s a short step to the need to abrogate democracy, etc., etc., etc.

In case any other members of congress are interested, The New York Times offers up a short background briefing on Sunnis versus Shiites. Someone ironically, they don’t actually address the question that tripped Silvestre Reyes up, so in case you don’t know al-Qaeda appeals to a strain of Sunni Islam group while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization. It also bears mentioning that the religions are organized different. Shia Islam is semi-hierarchical, a bit like Anglican or Orthodox Christianity, while Sunni Islam is organized more like Protestant Christianity where, in practice, some preachers have more status than others but there’s no formal institutional hierarchy among them or linking them together.

Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for The Washington Post, has a reasonably perceptive column up following his meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice, he notes, is quite persuasive in terms of pointing out shortcomings of the old approach to Middle East policy. Her preferred replacement strategy, however, is shot-through with logical and factual problems and, in essence, stands no chance of working.

All fair enough. But so why has Hiatt spent the past five years supporting the Bush/Rice foreign policy and lashing out at liberals for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the blinkered pseudo-push for pseudo-democracy?