When Wish Replaces Thought is a neglected classic by a forgotten thinker, the late Professor Steven Goldberg.1 He reminds me in some respects of Camille Paglia — pugnacious, learned, and full of opinions that outraged everyone. Unlike Paglia he never seems to have cared about publicity and retired to obscurity. (So has Paglia, come to think of it. I haven’t heard from her in years.)
The title came to mind when I read this note2:
I responded skeptically, which you can read there.
Since I can’t express these sentiments better than Sohrab Ahmari, let me simply link to a tweet of his and quote it in full:
Most of the Iran analysis American policymakers, and especially the hawks, rely upon is pure wishcasting. And the professional Iran-watchers are mostly wishcasters. It's dangerous for America, and I hope to give you an example that will help you see how and why.
I don't claim to be an "Iran-watcher." I was born in Iran, lived there until I was almost 14, and still speak the Persian language fluently (but by no means perfectly). But I'm an opinion generalist who mostly concerns himself with domestic U.S. economic and political issues.
Still, I do occasionally weigh in when the old country is in the news. I've learned the hard way, however, to do so with great modesty. Simply put, if you aren't inside the country, it's very hard to really know what's going on.
Yet a great deal of US-based Iran analysis today rests on the armchair musings of my fellow exiles who haven't visited the old country for years, sometimes decades. Many of them conflate the views of people in their own urban/educated/upper-class milieus with the sentiments of Iranians at large. They substitute what they want to be the case in the Islamic Republic with what is actually the case.
Whatever they proclaim any given moment, I've learned to refract through a sort of mental skepticism lens, which is in turn based on certain hard facts: namely, that the Islamic Republic has a strong base of popular support; that its endurance isn't based on brute repression alone, but the fact that it has purchased the buy-in of millions of rural and once-dispossessed Iranians through public developmentalism (not just ideology). This lens has stood me well.
Consider: In 2022, when the women's hijab uprising broke, I wrote a piece for The American Conservative in which I argued that "this latest uprising is unlikely to succeed" because it has no answers to such questions as: "Who would you have rule us? What principle of unity and continuity do you propose? How are you going to hold a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic nation-state together? How are you going to overcome the Islamic Republic’s hard core of supporters, conservatively estimated at 5 million and armed?"
Predictably, the piece got attacked by the professional Iran wishcasters of the left and right. I was accused of "Orientalism" and "illiberalism." They said I was cruelly disregarding my compatriots' yearning for "freedom of choice," blah blah blah. "Sohrab Ahmari's Vacuous Critique of the Anti-Hijab Protests" ran one headline. "The Iranian People Are Ready to Seize Democracy" ran another polemic targeting me.
Now, two years later, that ferment of 2022 is utterly dead. And some of the institutions that assailed me are publishing postmortems.
If, listening to the democracy wishcasters, you are betting on the great velvet revolution to topple the mullahs, or on millions of Iranians to greet foreign liberators with roses, you're likely to be disappointed. And your disappoint is likely to come at great cost to US policy and the national interest.
Political correctness is a form of wishcasting. And there’s plenty of it on the right.
Kelli is representative of many Western women who now find themselves exiled from their natural habitat on the left by the woke progressives. They retain all of the attitudes of the left and have just as hard a time as their former comrades understanding anyone who doesn’t share their world view, which is most of the world.
It never occurs to them that most people, especially the peoples of the Middle East, are fundamentally conservative, home-family-and religion-oriented people to whom concepts of freedom and liberal democracy are alien. It never occurs to them that their Substack and X friends are extreme outliers.
I remember talking to an “Iran affairs specialist” right after the revolution. He was sure that it wouldn’t last long. “Most Iranians aren’t religious,” he assured me. At the time I assumed he must know something… but even then I was skeptical. I later learned that this guy was analagous to a specialist who learns about the US by visiting the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I learned that most area-specialists tend to live in bubbles.
Like Ahmari, I do not claim to be an expert on Iran, much less Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Yemen. But neither is Kelli, who does claim to speak for this vast, diverse populace spread among four distinct Middle Eastern countries based on tweets and Substack posts.
I don’t know what is going on in Iran, which is a developed country with a relatively educated populace. But I do know a little bit about Lebanon. It is a seething snakepit of contending communities with no common culture. It was set up by the French for the Maronites who, having failed to keep their prize by emigrating and having few children, lost it to the Shiites.
(I have met a few Lebanese Christians who struck me as quite anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. Maybe I met the wrong Christians. But I don’t think so. I think that their unenviable position as a minority in a Muslim country, and one with a large Shiite population at that, has broken and coarsened them. They had to adapt. God save Israel from this fate!)
Yemen and Afghanistan are both primitive, backward, tribal countries. The only thing I know about Yemen is that judging by what I’ve had in Israel, their cooking is great. I don’t know anything about the Houthis nor do I want to. Yemen is a backward, primitive mess. The idea that Yemen wants to “get rid of the Houthis” is absurd.
Then there’s this wishcasting by the usually acute Angry Demagogue:
The goal as we have been stating ad nauseum should be to create a situation where the Iranian opposition can topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and return the country to some semblance of normalcy.
Again, I don’t know enough about the internal dynamics of Iran to think that this has any chance of success but I have my doubts and again, here is Amari:
To the same question—who would you have rule us?—today’s Iranian liberals have no persuasive answer. Indeed, they have no answer at all.
Yet the Pahlavis were shockingly indifferent to the piety and profound conservatism of Iranian society. (Those photos of young women in miniskirts and go-go boots, beloved of Western and Iranian liberals reminiscing about how "open" the country used to be, played no small role in the shah's downfall.)3
I would also caution the wishcasters: be careful what you wish for.
Thought experiment: If you replace the mullahs with liberal democrats (highly unlikely, but let’s experiment), wouldn’t that be a threat to Israel? Do not assume they would be friendly to Israel. Plenty of liberal democrats are pro-Palestinian, and they would have to appease the Muslim base. As liberal democrats they’d be far more attractive and sympathetic to Western liberals than the current repellent lot, they’d seek peace with Saudi Arabia, and play off the US against Russia. How would Israel handle that?
Maybe it’s in Irael’s interst to keep a castrated mullah-ocracy in power. Stranger things have happened.
In any case, I’m not conjecturing about Iran’s future because it’s a total waste of time. And I leave the wishcasting to others.
I didn’t know that he was a Marine — I thought he was just a tubby Jewish academic. It explains a lot. Semper Fi, Prof. Goldberg!
Kelli reposted this, triumphantly. “Tell that to the purple-haired keffiyeh-wearers.”
No, I don’t talk to them. I don’t give a damn what they think. And: “Most Lebanese and Syrians” — based on what, a tweet? Some did.
Sound familiar, my friends? Isn’t the problem with the Kaplan Street gang that they shit all over traditional Jewish norms and religion?