..but not your own facts, as the saying goes. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute argued earlier this week in USA Today that the United States should pump more money into Iran in an effort to bring about the overthrow of the Iranian regime. According to Rubin, “those denouncing U.S. funding are not the imprisoned student and labor activists, but reformists loyal to theocracy, and gullible pundits.” Presumably that’s me in the role of gullible pundit, but let’s have a look at these “reformists loyal to theocracy” who constitute the only Iranian opponents to U.S. attempts to bring about regime change in Iran.

This from an article by Negar Azimi in the New York Times Magazine:

It is particularly telling, perhaps, that some of the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government have been among the most outspoken critics of the democracy fund. Activists from the journalist Emadeddin Baghi to the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to the former political prisoner Akbar Ganji have all said thanks but no thanks. Ganji has refused three personal invitations to meet with Bush. A member of a U.S.-based institution that has received State Department financing and who works with Iranians told me that the Iranians had expressly asked not to have their cause mentioned in presidential speeches. ”The propaganda campaign surrounding the launch of this campaign has meant that many of our partners are simply too afraid to work with us anymore,” she told me on condition of anonymity. ”It’s had a chilling effect.”

This from an article in Time by Scott Macleod:

Several mainstream Iranian reformers tell TIME that from the start they transmitted their opposition to the democracy program indirectly but clearly to American officials via the back-channel talks. Besides warning that it could trigger a crackdown, they argued that Iran’s reform movement had strong popular support and did not want or require foreign help. Outside backing has been an unusually sensitive issue in Iranian politics ever since a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1953 installed the former Shah. Instead, many of them argue, Iran’s democracy movement would be better served if the U.S. lifted sanctions and improved relations with Tehran, which would enable trade and cultural links to be expanded. “There is no serious individual inside or outside Iran who is going to take this money,” an Iranian reformer told TIME. “Anyone having the slightest knowledge of the domestic political situation in Iran would never have created this program.”

Note how Rubin has moved the goalpost such that genuinely Iranian voices of political reform with constituencies inside Iran have now been written out of the acceptable-to-the-US opposition to the Iranian government. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate who has most recently been working to spring imprisoned Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari from Evin prison, has become “loyal to theocracy.” And the only folks left are Michael Rubin-approved dissidents who want the U.S. government to become more deeply enmeshed with the opposition to the regime, with only one plausible outcome: poisoning the domestic political legitimacy of the opposition and getting the U.S. government more invested in regime change.

Maybe we need an Iranian Ahmed Chalabi.