I wonder what it would be like to be a right-wing pundit. No sense of shame. No accountability. I could just write things like “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust really occurred.”

Max Boot, the author of those sentences, isn’t a fool. He isn’t ignorant. He knows Ahmadinejad doesn’t run Iran’s foreign policy and that, therefore, proposals for negotiations with Iran have nothing to do with heart-to-hearts with Ahmadinejad. He just doesn’t care. He opposes negotiation with Iran. So he wants to make negotiation with Iran look bad. So he states — falsely and knowingly — that the ISG proposed negotiations with Ahmadinejad which sounds worse than an accurate presentation of the ISG proposal would sound. He knows that his colleagues in the conservative punditocracy won’t think less of him for deliberately misleading his readers, and he knows that his editors at The Los Angeles Times would never consider saying “sorry, Max, we don’t like to print columnists who deliberately mislead our readers” for to not give free rein to whatever kind of wingnuttery some conservative wants to publish would merely confirm that the media is liberal.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall noted that the Brookings Institution, an erstwhile left-of-center think tank, will be hosting an event featuring Frederick “Surge” Kagan and remarks “I don’t know off-hand what other Iraq confabs Brookings is holding on Iraq this month. But highlighting the one truly nutball idea about what to do in Iraq — and none of the more sane ones — seems an odd stance for Brookings.” If you read the transcript from Kagan’s unveiling of his plan at AEI you’ll see that Ken Pollack, who takes the lead on Brookings’ Iraq stuff, was on hand and very positive about Kagan (“We put together a 150-page report in February of this year which looks remarkably like the plan that Fred’s team put together”) and overwhelmingly devoted his critical remarks to tackling the straw man of “people who oppose continued involvement in Iraq particularly but not limited to many in my own party, basically assuming, asserting that there would not be any consequences from withdrawal in Iraq.”

Whether the Kagan-Pollack meeting of the minds enhances Kagan’s credibility or detracts from Pollack’s I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. Certainly my general approach to life is to listen to well-respected experts, then where their advice turns out to be terrible keep on listening to them rather than turning to different voices, so I don’t see why one would have any doubts about this.

Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann call the Kagan plan “unrealistic and dangerous” before noting: “The neoconservative architects of the war claim that those who oppose increasing the number of troops do not understand the implications of failure in Iraq. But they have it backwards. Those who opposed the war from the outset understood the difficulty and scope of the task at hand, while the war’s architects are the ones only now coming to grips with the catastrophic implications of a possible civil and regional war.”

Hot on the heels of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad’s supporters suffering various setbacks in Iran’s semi-democratic elections, the dormant-for-a-while Iranian student movement seems to be revving back up again in its protests against the system. People have gotten their hopes up about this sort of thing before, obviously, and been disappointed. People have also sought to leverage the bravery of these people into a lot of unseemly chest-thumping — “if I blog about this a lot, then I’ll be a hero of the revolution!”

At any rate, you may recall my blog dustup with Ali Eteraz a couple of weeks ago. I guess you could say he and I have our differences, but his site turns out to have lots of content related to domestic developments in Iran and other Islamic countries, much of it quite interesting and will presumably have something on these developments.

UPDATE: See, e.g., here.

The former Soviet world’s most wild and crazy strongman is dead. Good obituary fodder: “Niyazov, 66, who crushed all dissent in his reclusive state and basked in a unique and bizarre personality cult while ruling a country with huge natural gas reserves, died overnight of cardiac arrest, state television said.” Next up, political instability:

“I expect there will be a massive fight for power now in Turkmenistan and it’s likely to take place between pro-U.S. and pro-Russian forces,” said a Russian gas industry source, who declined to be named. “Gas will become the main coin of exchange and the key asset to get hold of.” . . .

“Our first task is to return to Turkmenistan within hours … In Turkmenistan there is no opposition, they all sit in prisons or under home arrest. But outside the country opposition exists and it is coming back,”one activist, Parakhad Yklymov, told Reuters by telephone from Sweden.

Russia said it hoped Turkmenistan would stick to Niyazov’s course. “We count on the new Turkmenistan leaders continuing their course and further developing bilateral ties,” top Kremlin aide Sergei Prikhodko told Itar-Tass news agency.

I think trying to compete with Russia for influence in Russia’s “near abroad” is something of a mistake. The situation in Turkmenistan is always going to be more important to politicians sitting in Moscow than it will be to politicians sitting in Washington, and we’re just going to end up losing any struggles for influence that we engage in.