Most Western policymakers are kooks…
Caroline Glick: The Iranian Revolution and Establishment Prejudice
The Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Western policymakers have repeated history not because they have been ignorant of history, but because paying attention would make it difficult for them to adopt policies that conform with their prejudices.
This is the unavoidable conclusion of the lessons not learned from the Islamic revolution in Iran, which marked its 40th anniversary last week.
In the years leading up to the Khomeinist revolution, and the forty years of the Islamic Republic, the fictions that misinformed the CIA, the State Department, and the governments of allied nations in 1979 have survived more or less unscathed.
From time to time, U.S. administrations set them aside in favor of reality. But they always returned to the fore.
President Donald Trump is the first president who appears willing to reject altogether these prejudicial predispositions of the foreign policy elites. But he is fighting an uphill battle.
The foreign policy establishment in official Washington vehemently opposes Trump’s approach to Iran and the wider Middle East.
They share two damaging predispositions.
The first is the casual anti-Americanism of the left. Anti-Americanism, in this context, is not a desire to see America destroyed. In its mild form, it manifests itself in a general sense that anti-Western forces are justified in their hatred of the U.S. and U.S.-supported regimes.
As the Mitrokhin archive of KGB files revealed, and testimony from Soviet bloc defectors made clear, many of these anti-Western forces were supported, and even created, by the KGB.
But all the same, left-leaning American and European foreign policy hands were and remain predisposed to believe the worst about their own countries, and their allies and clients.
This anti-American predisposition has blocked U.S. (and European) policymakers from understanding reality in two ways.
