As promised, a follow-up to my dialogue with Orcinus about Iran. You can now go read the original comment there. If you aren't going to, you may as well skip the rest of this item.

First, my reply to some of Orcinus's comments, emailed to him but never published anywhere.

Orcinus wrote:

I assume that you really mean treason here, and aren't just using the term in the toss-off Ann Coulter sense.

I think it was very bad foreign policy, and it was political dirty tricks, but I'm not convinced it was treason. You seem to be relying on the fact that Reagan was not in office at that time. But there's always an opposition party on hand, and it inevitably will affect one state's policy to contemplate who might soon take over power in another state. Is it really unheard of for a presidential candidate to meet with foreign leaders? If Howard Dean has a meeting with Vicente Fox or Tony Blair, is he undermining President Bush's foreign policy? No doubt some buffoon pundit will make the accusation, but is it really true?

I'm not convinced that it isn't treason either; I just don't think it's such an obvious call. Opposition party members frequently go out on trade missions and such. So do leaders of large corporations. Inevitably someone will say, "You know, this deal would work much better under a Democratic administration. Maybe we should wait until after the election and see what happens."

What Casey et al did in Iran is probably not much different from that. I imagine it was a lot of wink-nudge and "maybe we can help each other out" sort of talk, without any actual quid pro quo committed to paper. It's definitely sleazy, but I wouldn't be so fast to call it treason.

Frankly, I think that's yet another short-sighted distraction from the real issue. The real issue is that Reagan's team was making bad policy decisions with bad consequences. That would be cause for alarm whether he's in office or not. In fact, it's worse if he's in office because he's in a position to do more harm.

Two observations on that: First, Democrats have been nearly as bad on this. (And if you go back far enough, ie LBJ, they're even worse.) This is a bipartisan failing of American foreign policymaking. If some Democrat wants to take up the issue to try to change it, more power to him, but I don't think this is just a club for beating up Republicans. Even Carter, with his supposed human rights focus, wasn't so pure. He did support the Shah, after all, and Brzezinski was always getting involved in Kissingeresque skullduggery.

Second, I still don't want to lump all the neocons together. As I suggested, it's not a uniform policy agenda. Somebody there probably really does believe in promoting democracy -- but it's only in Iraq that he or she can put together a coalition to support action. Reason had an interesting article about how Wolfowitz, in spite of being a magnet for criticisms of GOP policy, might actually be the one most in agreement with the left on this. I think there's something to that.

In Orcinus's comments box, John Gillnitz wrote:

Two comments on this:

First, you're presuming that the Iranians with whom Reagan's team negotiated were terrorists. This is not at all clear. The Students of the Imam's Line, the group which actually took and held the hostages, can reasonably be called terrorists by virtue of the hostage-taking. But Reagan's team did not negotiate with the Students. They negotiated with the leaders of the Islamic Republican Party, then a minority party in the Iranian government. The IRP was expected to have some influence over the Students, but they were not themselves terrorist any more than the legitimate government was.

My second comment is regarding the idea of deterring terrorists by showing them that "terrorism doesn't work". This sort of muddled thinking is an inevitable result of our blurring of the definition of "terrorism".

In today's context "terrorism" generally means any method of large-scale violence which is not conventional warfare practiced by an entity other than a sovereign state. When the term was first coined, it was used to refer specifically to the technique of using terror to achieve some political goal.

Inherent in the old definition is the idea that terrorism is means to an end, not an end in itself. The terrorist hopes that the act of terror will somehow aid his cause. The Palestinian terrorist wants to establish a Palestinian state, the pro-life terrorist wants to change laws that make abortion legal, etc. Often the terrorist act is directed against a third-party for the express purpose of getting that third party involved.

In the current era, we've drifted away from that definition, which is fine, except that it leads to confusion. By the old definition, the 9/11 attack was clearly not a terrorist act. Many public statements after the fact seem to have missed that point. We hear, "they wanted to give us a message", "they wanted to take away our freedom", etc. In fact, they wanted none of these things. Quite simply, they wanted to kill a bunch of Americans.

That this is al-Qaeda's purpose is abundantly clear in all its mission statement and in all its actions. Al-Qaeda does not issue lists of demands, it does not seek publicity for its acts of terror, and indeed it frequently doesn't even claim credit. Al-Qaeda's mission is to kill Americans (and Israelis), and its members seek to do so.

The reason it's important to understand this is that this notion of showing them that "terrorism doesn't work" is meaningless, because it presumes they have some exterior political motive, which they don't. The way to show them that it doesn't work is to prevent Americans from being killed (which is something we want to do anyway).

Looking back on this, I think one element of my argument is overstated: the one where I say it was a very bad foreign policy for Reagan to have constructively engaged the IRP instead of the elected government.

As a result of more reading, I've got a better picture of the political situation in Iran in 1980. (I'll probably discuss this more when I get my "Books I've Read" section going, though the book in question is third in line....) Suffice it to say that I now think my original comment to Orcinus overestimated the relevance of the president and underestimated the power of the IRP.

If that's the case, then one might reasonably argue that the Carter administration was the one in error, persisting in negotiating with an increasingly irrelevant government -- perhaps an extension of the blind, wishful-thinking policy which caused them to be taken aback by the revolution in the first place. (The Carter administration never made diplomatic contact with Khomeini, neither before nor after the revolution.) Similarly, one might commend Reagan's team for being the first to see through the cloud of ignorance, bypass the phony government, and deal with the real power in Iran.

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