Explorations on the Far Side

My apologies to Gary Larson, but it just seemed so apt with respect to what follows.

As I indicated in my last post yesterday, I spent some time last night prowling around in the world of conservative journalism and blogs. I haven't done enough of that yet to get a sense of things, so I will withhold judgment for a while. But I couldn't resist this one.

The Wall Street Journal's list of their favorite web sites led me to Instapundit, where there was a brief post indicating that Bush's Inaugural Address had played well in Iran. Intrigued, I followed the link to this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh. Since this post consisted almost entirely of a quotation from yet another source, followed that link as well, and ended up at a at post by the "Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran."

This article does report that Bush's speech was greeted with wild approval. The problem, though, is that the article is entirely devoid of support. It is based exclusively on "reports" that are wholly unattributed and asserts as facts events for which no scintilla of evidence is provided.

For example, the lead paragraph is this:

Reports from across Iran are stating about the massive welcoming of President George W. Bush's inaugural speech and his promise of helping to bring down the last outposts of tyranny.

One would think that if there were reports "from across Iran", it would be possible to cite at least one, or explain at least how the authors came to know of these reports. But they do not. The second paragraph continues in this vein:

Millions of Iranians have been reported as having stayed home, on Thursday night which is their usual W.end and outgoing night, in order to see or hear the Presidential speech.

The rest of the "article" is more of the same: utterly without support or attribution, shot through with the passive voice and making claims that only the determinedly credulous could take at face value. The article has all the hallmarks of a fabrication.

That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that this "report" has been picked up a uncritically re-disseminated by several blogs, one of which is a "favorite" of the Wall Street Journal.

Last week, Seymour Hersh reported that "'The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,'" and that "'The Pentagon's contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated,'" based partly on a belief that there is widespread internal opposition within Iran that would coalesce and overthrow the existing government if only the United States would act decisively:

The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

Where does this belief come from? Is it possible that they actually accept as true the assertions such as those quoted above?

I had a brief sojourn with AA a couple of years back. The not-drinking part didn't stick, but one aphorism did: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."