J’accuse!!!

Michael Ledeen has a curious way of approaching the social form “accusation”:

You’re going to be accused of meddling anyway, since out there in the real world you are believed to be the leader of the forces of freedom and democracy.

Now, when I apply this logic to my daily life, it would seem to mean that it is appropriate and productive for me to freely engage in any behavior that I have been accused of, whether or not said accusation is true. Accordingly, I now invite the readers of LGM to accuse me of all manner of interesting and potentially lucrative misdeeds; once the accusation hits the internet, it’s all good, baby! I would also add that Mr. Ledeen must have at some point been accused of being an amoral, poorly informed fraud, because, well… you know.

More to the point, the political value of any such accusation is certainly connected to whether the listener believes it is a)relevant, or b) true. In the case of Iran, I think there are fair reasons to believe that such charges are understood to be politically relevant; the opposition has not, by and large, called for US support, and the regime seems to think that accusing the US could have political payoff. On the second point, I suspect that even Ledeen and his ilk would concede that the accusation is implausible, and that the protesters don’t currently believe that the United States is backing them (this is rather the point of his critique). As such, the Iranian regime’s statement would seem to undercut, rather than reinforce, its legitimacy.