Kenneth M. Pollack’s slights of hand

Damn the non-homographic homophones! Damn them to hell! They make fools of us all! Just last week I recounted my struggles with the “summery/summary” slough, and now, over at the National Review, poor Kenneth M. Pollack is having “slight” problems of his own, writing in his piece “Why Push Back On Iran?”

“We can all speculate about why Iran’s hardline leadership continues to insist on treating the U.S. as its enemy: how much of it is overdeveloped Persian paranoia based on past American sleights (real and imagined), how much is a need for an enemy to preserve some ideological justification for an increasingly unpopular regime, and how much is a more traditional Iranian desire to unseat the reigning hegemon so that they can dominate the Middle East themselves.” [My emphasis, of course]

Well, there’s a lot to unpack—or disagree with—in that sentence, but I’d like to begin by taking issue with both the spelling and the substance of Ken’s reference to “American sleights,” complaining much more about the latter, for the error in spelling is, of course, quite trivial, and, quite possibly, not even Kenneth’s doing.

But forget the spelling and get down to substance. What American “sleights” could Ken possibly be referring to that have provoked that “overdeveloped Persian paranoia”? That slight case of interference back in 1953, when American and British intelligence overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government to install Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the shah?¹ Or was it the slight that occurred after our quasi-ally Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and the U.S. intervened on Saddam’s side when it appeared that he might lose, supplying Iraq with extensive intelligence on Iranian troop deployments, intelligence that enabled Saddam to counterattack effectively, using both conventional and chemical weapons? Or was it the slight that occurred on July 3, 1988, when the USS Vincennes, an American warship in Iranian waters (in contravention of its standing orders), shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 on board, followed by a second “slight” when US officials, including Vice President Bush, lied their collective asses off about it, followed by a third “slight” when the commander of the Vincennes, rather than being court-martialed and sent to prison on 290 counts of manslaughter, was instead given, upon the conclusion of the ship’s voyage, a certificate of commendation? Are these the slights you had in mind, Mr. Pollack?

The remainder of Ken’s lengthy article is filled with lurid tales of modern-day Persian wickedness, a continuation of the “traditional Iranian desire to unseat the reigning hegemon so that they can dominate the Middle East themselves,” a tradition that, as far as I can see, has not much manifested itself since the days of Alexander the Great, who put the kibosh on the Persians in the Middle East some 2,500 years ago.²

Hilariously, Ken “explains” that all these terrible things—which, he is compelled to admit, are not always Iran’s fault—are all our fault, because we haven’t been running the Middle East the way we should have—though Ken fails to notice that many of things he’s complaining about are the result of our disastrous invasion of Iraq, which he most notoriously promoted.

Ken’s cries for American “leadership” are so passionate that I could only conclude that he had gone “full Trump”, deciding that, in effect, if this be fascism let’s make the most of it, but in a subsequent article, “Keeping the Iran Nuclear Issue in Perspective”, he does a complete, though disguised 180, providing, I would think, his earnest readers a severe case of whiplash, explaining, with suitable evasiveness, that the current nuclear agreement, negotiated by those no-dick simpletons Barack Obama and John Kerry, is, well, the only possible basis for peace in the Middle East and that Bibi Netanyahu is a lying sack of shit. But not in so many words.