Two quotes from the July 2, 2009 New York Review of Books relating to the effects of US politics (mostly domestic) on foreign countries US politicians haven't the slightest clue to understanding.

Malise Ruthven wrote a review of several books on Iran, titled "Divided Iran on the Eve" -- of the elections, that is, and all that has and will come after them. The books, which all seem interesting: Abbas Amanat: Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism (IB Tauris); Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press); and Ray Takeyh: Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (Oxford University Press). The latter book is most relevant for reassessing US foreign policy.

Iran's foreign policy since 1979 was initially driven by Khomeini's desire to export his model of Islamic justice, which failed to gain any real traction with the predominantly Sunni Muslims, and was brought to a standstill by Iraq's brutal attack on Iran, including US backing and Iraq's chilling use of poison gas. This tended to make Iranian revolutionaries reclusive, defensive, and vindictive, but the postwar peace allowed other reformist strains to develop. The US, whether because we cynically prefer an Iranian enemy or because we're simply tone deaf, has consistently undercut Iranian efforts to ease tensions with the west.

Takeyh is blunt in his condemnation of the Reagan administration's complicity in Saddam's use of chemical weapons, and is especially critical of the opportunities that the Bush administration missed for improving Iran-US relations after the September 11 attacks. The 1997 election that brought the moderate President Mohammad Khatami to power against the wishes of the clerical elite led by Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader, should have demonstrated by Washington that the regime was far from monolithic, even if some of its agencies were engaged in terrorism.

There is no question, however, that the prospects for "one of the most intellectually vibrant democratic movements in the Middle East" were thwarted by a combination of factors. One was Khatami's personal dislike of confrontation: "Despite his deeply held democratic convictions, [he] proved too much a man of the system" whose "penchant for order overwhelmed his desire for change." Another was the constitutional straitjacket that Khomeini had left behind, giving the members of the conservative-dominated Guardian Council power to block the will of a parliament whose candidates they had already vetted ideologically. But external factors, driven by US policies, were decisive.

George W. Bush's notorious "axis of evil" speech in January 2002, linking Iran to its enemy Iraq and the maverick Communist republic of North Korea, undermined many of Khatami's achievements in improving Iran's international profile, and convinced the hard-liners that the Islamic Republic would become the next target in Bush's "war on terror." The build-up to the US invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 -- one month before the invasion -- conservatives regained nearly all of the seats they had lot in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement. This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for "Islamic suitability." The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad's election as president.

This shows once again how right-wing forces on both sides of virtually any conflict work together to perpetuate the conflict. Moreover, it shows how right-wing dominance of either side tends to create its mirror on the other side. Khatami (and Iran) had the misfortune of coming to power as the neocons, with their anti-Iraq/anti-Iran demagoguery, were gaining traction in Washington under Clinton and took over the shop under Bush. With sworn opponents like those, Iranian conservatives under Khamanei could point to the failure of the reformers to improve relations with the West.

Obama's win in Washington gives the Iranian reform movement a second chance, which seems to have panicked their right-wing -- not so much the clerics (although there are those) as the Revolutionary Guards and militias that make up Iran's influential military-industrial complex. How this will play out remains to be seen, but the worst possible scenario -- a coup and Pinochet-style purge -- is one that Washington, if not Obama, has long banked on.

For some uncharacteristic reason -- maybe sheer mischief -- NYRB assigned Mahmoud Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror to Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times opinion writer who has spent much of the last decade wailing over the Darfur problem. As Kristof notes:

Mamdani is also deeply critical of my own reporting about Darfur and regards my kind of journalism as a central part of the problem. He would certainly consider me to be the last person to provide a dispassionate re-examination of these issues or his book.

The review won't surprise Mamdani, but, as is often the case with Kristof, that's beside the point. The quote I want to point out is:

Samantha Power, now a national security official, wrote a superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of genocide, noting that time and again the United States refused to intervene in genocides even though it knew more or less what was going on. She titled her book A Problem from Hell, and that's what Darfur is. But there have been other problems from hell, including Kosovo and Bosnia, that have been, if not solved, at least hugely mitigated. The lesson from places like Kosovo is that the most urgent need is less for sophisticated technical solutions than for political will to face the problem squarely. It's too early to know whether President Obama will do this, but at the moment I'm not optimistic.

To some extent, that's a reflection on the Save Darfur movement and on scribblers like myself who took up the Darfuri cause. We have failed to foster the political will to bring about change. For all our efforts, the situation on the ground may soon become worse. A "Darfur fatigue" has set in, and the movement has lost its steam. And of course the movement was always compromised by its own shortcomings, from infighting to naiveté to the ubiquitous penchant of advocacy groups for exaggeration.

One problem with fomenting a political movement in the US to "save" some far flung sect of humanity is that its implicit purpose is to motivate some action by the US government -- an action which for surplus capacity and lack of imagination is invariably military. Kristof has a wish list of this sort, including imposing a "no fly" zone on Sudan and selling anti-aircraft missiles to factions in south Sudan. Darfur would never have had this problem in the first place but for the interference of outsiders -- Libya and Chad had big roles, as did the anti-government rebels in South Sudan, who saw an opportunity to weaken the government in Darfur. The US couldn't intervene without compounding the whole problem -- in particular, by turning the rest of Sudan against us, a no-win scenario. It isn't even clear that the "save Darfur" movement has not already made matters worse by hardening the battle lines. (I haven't read Mamdani's book yet, but gather that he makes that point and more.)

If you look back, the intervention in Kosovo wasn't much of a success either -- but in any case it was driven not by a "save Kosovo" movement but by NATO's need to find something to do once the Soviet Union has passed. Hue and cry over foreign calamities is pretty selective in the US: nothing even gets noticed without an aggressive PR effort and a few opportunists like Kristof, who take the occasional case and blow it out of proportion.

Thus far Obama has shown admirable reluctance to get entangled militarily or emotionally in foreign events except for the Af-Pak problem he inherited and made a campaign commitment to. He seems to at least have some instinctive grasp of what he can and cannot do -- the latter is a remarkable skill that his predecessors eschewed as a matter of personal and national pride.