I read the first two sentences of this Mark Steyn post and had a sinking feeling that he was writing something sensible and important about the Muslim world:

Lisa, your second post is really the answer to your first one. What if we’ve already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it?

Fortunately, he turned out not to be going in the direction I feared at all. Where he should have gone, however, is this: People who call for a “Muslim reformation” seem to have completely forgotten what happened during the Protestant Reformation. The dime-store version, though, is massive religious wars in which huge numbers of people died. This happened on the European continent and also in the British Isles. It’s true that in the long-run the Reformation led to the development of doctrines about religious tolerance and liberalism, but it took a good long time. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were written in 1517 whereas John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration was written in 1689. In between came an awful lot of wars, witch-burning, fanaticism, etc.

Clearly, any analogy between present-day circumstances and 16th and 17th century Europe is going to be very, very, very imperfect but this seems to me to be the direction an appropriate analogy would take: the Islamism-related violence we’re seeing is in some ways reminiscent of the violence associated with the Reformation and Counterreformation rather than something that would be solved by something Reformation-esque.

I think it’s important to put the revelations that Iran halted its nuclear “program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure” in the context of the broader trends in US-Iranian relations that Gareth Porter (among others) have reported on. Specifically, in 2003 we know that the Iranians attempted a diplomatic opening to the United States. Porter reported that in exchange for actually getting something, Iran was prepared to abandon its nuclear program in a hard-to-reverse way:

To meet the U.S. concern about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, the document offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology.” It proposed “full transparency for security [assurance] that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD” and “full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols).”

There have been some efforts to discredit what Porter, Flynt Leverret, and others have said about this attempted opening, but the NIE’s conclusions about Iran’s nuclear program seem to strongly support it. With their secret enrichment activities exposed, the Iranian regime was reconsidering the utility of continuing such efforts in the face of international awareness and disapproval of them. The Bush administration then decided to squander this opportunity and focus on saber-rattling and dreams of regime change. But the thing about pressure is that you’ve got to be willing to take yes for an answer instead of just blundering around.

Meanwhile, how outrageous is it that the best twelve months of alarmism from Bush & Cheney have come in the context of an environment where they’ve long had access to the intelligence community’s assessment? Answer: Very outrageous.

Here’s the declassified portions of the New Iran NIE about how the Iranian nuclear hype is mostly hype.

Everyone lets please ignore Mark Mazzetti’s reporting:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb. [...]

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran’s ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”[...]

The new report concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program, it would still be at least two years before Tehran would have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still “very unlikely” Iran could produce enough of the material by then.

The only appropriate response to this is to do what we’ve done already with IAEA information on Iran, with IAEA information on Iraq, and with Intelligence and Research Bureau information on Iran: ignore it.

Note, after all, that this assessment of the Iranian political system is in line with what the overwhelming majority of experts on Iran think, so we should do what we’ve been doing with regional experts for the past six years: ignore them.

Islamofascism is on the march. Deniers and appears must be ignored.

I, for one, am confident that we can pull Operation Ignore off with sufficient hope not only from the Bush administration but also from the Washington Post editorial page which, I trust, can treat us to more sermons on how the people generating the alarmism are the ones really trying to stave off war.

I guess if Hugo Chávez can’t even get majority support in a referendum for proposed changes to the constitution that he can’t be much of an aspiring dictator, can he? On the merits, I’m obviously not an expert in such things but Chávez’s proposals — an end to presidential term limits plus concentration of more power in the president’s office — are probably a bad idea for a country like Venezuela and it’s probably a good thing that they were defeated. Still, the level of pious screeching about Chávez’s authoritarianism from people who think the dictators (“emirs,” etc.) of Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, etc. should be treated with nothing but the utmost respect has always chafed.