The New Republic

You can count on the State Department for nothing.  Inside the Bush administration it argues for
"soft power" directed at Iran.  Actually, it's just fine in Foggy Bottom to
have foggy policies which, in the struggle with the Tehran of the mullahs, means no policy at
all.

Experts argue that there is an ongoing conflict between
enlightened and liberal Iranians who are imperiled by the regime of the
ayatollahs and their thugs.  After all, one
has to admit that the Shah left a more tolerant and educated population than it
seemed at the time.  Their children are
trying to find their place in the world, and it is located not in the
dictatorship run by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his comrades.

For many years, the U.S. had been quietly supporting a
quiet revolution of the communications on the Internet: to give people courage,
to help people make alliances, to allow people to think and talk.  (Israel has been doing that too, and
reliable people tell me that Israeli radio is extremely popular.)

Now, we learn
from Eli Lake
in yesterday's Sun, that the State Department "has ‘effectively killed’ a
program to disburse millions of dollars to Iran's democratic opposition":

In an interview yesterday, Scott Carpenter said a recent decision to move the
$75 million annual aid program for Iranian democrats to the State Department's
Office of Iranian Affairs would effectively neuter an initiative the president
had intended to spur democracy inside the Islamic Republic.

 

[…]

 

Mr. Carpenter, who headed the Middle East Partnership
Initiative and was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern
Affairs until he left the Bush administration this summer, predicted the $20
million devoted to supporting the activities inside the Islamic Republic would
be relegated to what he called "safe initiatives" such as student
exchange programs, and not the more daring projects he and his deputy, David
Denehy, funded, such as training for Web site operators to evade Internet
censorship, political polling, and training on increasing recruitment for civil
society groups. 

It took a bit more courage for a young Iranian to be in such
a program.  But these are the kinds of
programs that succeeded in Eastern Europe.

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