Prairie Weather

Sarah

Well, gollee!  Maybe this is a trend.  Maybe more Republicans -- governors, senators, whatever -- will do a bunk.  Maybe Sanford and Palin are the beginning of the end.  We can but hope.

The house on C Street

Terry Gross, NPR's "Fresh Air":  Since the Republican Party's defeat last November, the party has been struggling to redefine itself.  That's become more difficult in the wake of John Ensign and Mark Sanford.  Ensign and Sanford have something in common in addition to both being Republicans who have confessed to out-of-wedlock affairs.  They're connected to a Christian group known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship."  Ensign lives in a house on C Street in Washington, DC, that's registered as a church and that's owned by a foundation affiliated with the group. In Sanford's press conference about his affair, he said he'd "worked with C Street" which he described as a Christian bible study group.  Usually between five and eight lawmakers live at the house on C Street.  If you've never heard of C Street or "The Family," it's perhaps because "The Family" prefers it that way!  It's a pretty secretive group and very powerful.  The long-time leader, Doug Coe, was included on Time magazine's 2004 list of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Coe was described as "the stealth Billy Graham, specializing in the spiritual struggles of the powerful."  My guest, Jeff Sharlet, is the author of the book "The Family:  The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power."  (It just came out in paperback.)  Sharlet is a contributing editor at Harper's and Rolling Stone, and as associate research scholar at NYU's Center for Religion and Media.  ...Jeff Sharlet, what is "The Family" or "The Fellowship's"  idea of Christianity that it's trying to spread?

Jeff Sharlet:  Well, it's a very unusual organization. So much so that some traditional Christian right organizations consider it heretical.  It goes back to this vision that the founder, a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide has in 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression.  He believes that god comes to him first in the person of James Farrell --who's the head of US Steel and Vereide by that time was a prominent minister travelling in those circles -- and reveals to him that the Great Depression and all economic suffering is a punishment for disobedience of god's laws.  So any kind of New Deal is not the way to go!  And then god gives him a second revelation which is that Christianity has been getting it wrong for 2000 years. At its best, it talks about the poor, the weak, the suffering, the down-and-out.  He believes that god tells him, very literally using these words: "Abraham, your mission is to serve the up-and-up, those who are already powerful.  If you can get their hearts right with god, then they in the positions of power that god has placed them in will dispense blessings to those underneath them."  One Senate staffer, who had been affiliated with the group for a while, described it -- I think very aptly -- as "sort of trickle-down fundamentalism." 

TG:  So "The Fellowship" or "The Family" -- that's why it ministers to powerful people like congressmen and senators.

JS:  Yes, absolutely.  Congressmen, senators, foreign leaders -- what they want is ... one document says, "We are trying to build a family of world leaders who are bound privately through our networks with this particular understanding of Christianity.  If we can just do that, we'll be able to bring peace to the world, free markets (which they equate with Christianity) and all these other blessings which they also tend to conflate with American power.

TG:  What's the connection in the philosophy of "The Family" between free markets, capitalism, and Christianity? 

JS:  Go back to this moment in the Great Depression that I described where they see this as a sort of punishment from god for what they see as a sin of socialism.  Attempts to regulate the market are "prideful".  They take "the invisible hand" very literally -- the invisible hand of capitalism.  They say that what you have is an invisible hand through which god touches the hearts of corporate titans, leaders, and so on.  They then run their companies.  "The Family" began primarily as a union-busting organization.  That was their sort of first mission.  They were terrified of organized labor in the 1930's.  But they tapped into an order American tradition which goes back to something in the 19th century called "the businessmen's revival"  -- this idea that, if you have Christian men of business and Christian politicians, and so on, you don't need laws to protect the poor because they will protect the poor.  It was very paternalistic potentially very dangerous tradition because, of course, it leads you away from accountability.  If you can say "we don't have regulation, we don't have oversight, we don't have laws, we just have god operating in the heart of these men," well, we're left without a lot of recourse when a powerful man like, say, Governor Sanford or Senator Ensign goes off the rails!

TG:  So what about the "values agenda" which has been so important to the Republican party in the past few years?  Does "The Family" emphasize an anti-gay agenda, anti-abortion, pro-abstinence education?  Are they supporters of the "values agenda" in addition to emphasizing the more capitalist approach?

JS:  Yes, but not rigidly and only secondarily.  To them, the idea of free markets working through elites, that's the top concern. Doug Coe, the longtime leader of the group -- I sat in one time on a meeting with Doug Coe and Congressman Todd Tiahart of Kansas.  Todd Tiahart was there almost auditioning to get involved in this thing.  He was trying to show off his dedication to those kinds of meat-and-potatoes Christian right issues, talking about "the threat of Islam" and abortion.  Doug Coe -- he doesn't necessarily disagree with this line of thinking, he sort of nods his head and says, "that's fine", but "you're really thinking very small" and "these are hot-button issues."  He says, "The real work of the kind of governance we're after is what he calls "Jesus Plus Nothing."  "Jesus Plus Nothing" means "Jesus Plus Everything."  It means everything gets filtered through Jesus.  The examples he gave:  he asks "What does Jesus have to say about Social Security?"   And in "The Family's" case, it's privatize -- which is almost always their answer.  Privatize.  "What does Jesus have to say about building roads?"  "What does Jesus have to say..." about every single issue, including in your own life.  You organize men like Ensign and Sanford and maybe Todd Tiahart into cells so they can ask, "What does Jesus have to say about what's in my life?"  And they actually give veto power over their own lives to the other men in their prayer cells.  (That's their language, by the way. "Cells" sounds like an inflammatory term, but it's actually got this old evangelical pedigree that long predates the current association.)

TG:  You compare "The Family" to televangelists' groups and you say that in some respects they are at opposite poles.  The televangelists want to get on TV.  They want to preach to a really large audience.  They want a megachurch.  Whereas the "The Family" is pretty secretive; they don't want any media attention; they don't want people to know their name!  Why?

JS:  The man I mention, the current leader, Doug Coe -- this was really his insight and it goes back to 1966.  He's the second person to lead "The Family."  The long-time leader was the founder, Abraham Vereide.  He didn't mind public attention.  He really liked it to be known that he was hobnobbing with senators and presidents and kings -- and that kind of thing.   He knew, also, that you had a kind of media that at that time didn't look too closely into the religious lives of politicians.  It wasn't considered that relevant.  And then you get this moment in the late '60's where two things are happening.  "The Family" is really expanding its reach into governments around the world -- the developing world.  They're dealing with a lot more unsavory characters.  At the same time, you have a media that's moving into one of these great investigative periods where the media are saying, "Hey, we're going to ask tough questions!  If you're going to go and pray with General Soeharto in Indonesia and then make an oil deal, we want to know about that!"  Well, Doug Coe sends out a memo to the various congressmen and politicians involved, and he says, "The time has come to submerge our public image."  They got rid of the letterhead and said, "From now on, when you do something through "The Family", don't say you're doing through "The Family," just say you're doing it yourself.  We're going to become invisible believing groups."  This is their language.  It's important because when someone says "invisible" it sounds kind of conspiritorial.  This is their language, their document.  They thought this would make them more effective.  I always try to see it from their perspective.  They do think that, "Look, we can do mroe good work for people. We can help these powerful people if we can give them a shield from public eyes." And that's fine for a pastor and an individual.  But when we're talking about political deals, it's a whole different story.

TG:  You mentioned that Doug Coe prayed with General Soeharto, a strong man in Indonesia, and then made an oil deal.  What are you referring to?

JS:  Yeh.  That's one of the stories I really delved into, into these documents. The way I was able to tell the story, I should say, for all its secretiveness -- "The Family" dumped 600 boxes of documents and hundreds of tapes in the Billy Graham Center archives in Illinois.  So I spent years going through these papers and so on.  And I'd find the whole alternative history of the Cold War.  We know about US support for Soeharto who came to power with the murders -- it's hard to know, anywhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 fellow countrymen whom he described as "communists."  Sometimes Soeharto's forces would wipe out entire villages on the premise that everybody in there was a communist and had to die.  He's one of the really great killers of the 20th century.  And Doug Coe and Abraham Vereide took a look at him and said, "That's a man of god!" Keep in mind...

TG:  ... Did they say, "That's a man of god" or did they say "That's a man we'd like to make a man of god"?

JS:  Good correction.  Neither.  They said, "That's a man god has chosen."  And this is an issue they're always dealing with.  They know the dictators they're dealing with are often very scary guys.  God chooses who he wants to work with.  God wants to fight communism.  Soeharto is a man who's fighting communism and he's killing 1,000,000 people.  Just look at the bible, they'll say.  The bible is filled with blood and killing and so on.  "God works in mysterious ways."  At the same time, they're reaching out to Soeharto, they're bring delegations of congressmen over there, they're bring delegations of oil executives who are financing their work over there.  One oil man, Harold McClure, wrote in a memo which was then circulated among congressional members, that he'd had an hour-long meeting with Soeharto and some of the oil people around Soeharto of course controlled the eighth largest oil company in the world at that time. They had an hour of prayer after which they moved onto business, and he said, "It's just been one of the most spiritual encounters of [my] life."  And also one of the most lucrative!  Which sounds deeply cynical but when you understand "The Family's" perspective, it's not.  They see wealth, influence and power in this kind of dumbed-down Calvinist way as a sign of their selection -- literally, their election by god.  They've been chosen for this wealth, for this influence.

TG:  So did this Christian right group, "The Family," make money on the Indonesia oil deal orwas it not about money for them?  The oil deal wasn't in their name.  It was for another party.  But what did they get out of it?

JS:  "The Family" is never about money for "The Family."  I think this is important for secular and liberal folks to understand about fundamentalism in general and this organization in particular.  They really believe what they believe.  They believe they're working for god.  This is not a simple exercise!  What they got out of it was the sense that they were helping Soeharto do his work as god's chosen man for this country. 

TG:  What is the house on C Street?

JS:  The house on C Street one of the ways "The Family" pursues its ministry of reaching out to powerful people and serving them.  It's a former convent.  It's registered as a church so it doesn't pay taxes at which "The Family" provides housing for at any given time 5 to 8 congressmen at below market rates -- so there's a bit of an ethical question there.  And they also play host to many other congressmen who want to come by for lunch or just to hang out.  Christian right leaders can use the house on C Street as a place where they can sit down in private with politicians and talk to them.  They'll have prayer sessions.  When I spent some time there they had a calendar prominently displayed on the wall with instructions for daily spiritual war.  So on Tuesday, for instance, you are to pray against the demonic stronghold of Buddhism.  Wednesday Hinduism is the problem.  Most of the guys who live there are a little more laid back than that.  And "The Family" doesn't require a doctrinal statement of loyalty.  You want to live there and be in fellowship with these guys?  That's fine.  It's soft-sell evangelism, not that kind of hard bible-thumping that you see on TV.

TG:  When you say that below-market rental rates pose ethical questions, did you mean because the house is officially called a "church" and it doesn't have to pay taxes so it can afford cheaper rates and it's questionable whether it's really or church or not?  Is that what you meant?

JS:  The whole deal.  Registering as a church so as to avoid taxes looks a little sketchy.  You have these congressmen who are living in a church which is not a church by any recognizable standards.  That seems like a tax dodge.

TG:  I've read there's a chapel inside?

JS:  Well, it's a former convent -- kind of an interesting building!  It doesn't function as a church.  Not only doesn't it function as a church, but the leader of the organization, Doug Coe, who's going there.  And Doug Coe will speak very openly against church.  Doug Coe doesn't like church.  He doesn't like that whole idea of Christianity as something you limit to Sunday mornings.  He doesn't like the idea of a church because churches historically are about sort of a bottom-up faith where everybody has equal access, right?  But Doug Coe teaches a very different idea.  He says that when you read the New Testament, you discover that there are concentric rings of authority.  There's the masses and Jesus speaks one way to them.  Then there's the disciples speaks one way to them.  And Coe says, "That's true now as well.  Jesus reveals himself more fully to his chosen."  And Coe believes -- Coe doesn't use the word "chosen" casually, they refer to themselves as the "new chosen" because they believe the Jews broke the covenant with god.  So the Jews are no longer the chosen people.   "The Family" are the new chosen.  They don't operate through churches.  So there's a little bit of a dodge there.  There's also (and I think this is a very minor question -- it's easy to get distracted by the ethical quibbles around the edges when there's this big giant question of transparency and openness in democracy.  But there is a question of whether these guys are getting below-market housing and should this be registered as a gift especially given that Christian right leaders are going there to lobby for the cause -- that there is unofficial lobbying going on in the house.

TG:  Although "The Family" is a very secretive group, the thing that's best known about it ... is that "The Family" or the foundation created the annual National Prayer Breakfast which is attended by the president, members of Congress, and important people from around the world.  Can you give the short version of how and why they created it?

JS:  The "why" first:  they wanted an annual ritual of consecration of the US to Jesus and they thought that if they could install this right at the heart of American civil religion they would be slowly moving America to becoming the godly nation they wanted it to be.  So in 1953, working with Billy Graham and Senator Frank Carlson who was Eisenhower's right-hand man, they went to Ike and said, "We want to do this."  They'd tried with Truman and FDR, too, and didn't get anywhere!  Ike immediately recognized it for what it was -- a blatant violation of separation of church and state, didn't want to do it, but he owed Senator Frank Carlson who was then one of the leaders of "The Family" a big favor.  Carlson had helped organized the evangelical vote for Ike.  Eisenhower agreed to do it.  "The Family" knew that once they got it rolling, then it becomes a tradition.  So now I've talked to congressmen.  You mentioned that you didn't know "The Family" runs it.  Almost nobody does.  The invitation comes on congressional letterhead. I've talked to congressmen who believe that it goes back to the beginning days of the republic.  (You can imagine James Madison rolling over in his grave at the thought of this!)  It's a pretty bland event on the surface of it.  It's supposedly ecumenical though their planning documents say -- one document describes this as "anything can happen and even the Koran can be read but Jesus is there infiltrating the world."  Well, this is the ecumenical event, supposedly, that has the sanction of US government and the US president and also becomes sort of a week-long lobbying festival for foreign officials.  One of the things that bothered me is that when I looked at who was coming -- the delegations from around the world -- almost more often than not it was led by the defense minister of small nations like Albania, Ecuador, and so on.  They're coming there to lobby and "The Family" is only too ready to help them do that in exchange for influence in their governments. 

TG:  Is there anything you'd like to tell us about the Sanford story or the John Ensign story that you feel you understand because you've studied "The Family"?

JS:  I was especially fascinated when Governor Sanford explained his decision not to resign by referring to King David.  He said, "Look, here's King David when the skies fell mightily but he went on."  By "fell mightily," he meant that King David had an adulterous affair and then had the husband murdered.  That's actually one of the core parables of "The Family" that I encountered and describe this experience with David Coe, the son of Doug Coe, who came around and gave us this long lesson and asked, "What made King David great?"  And the men I was with were all trying to say, well, he loved god and all this, and he said, "No, no, that's not it.  King David was a terrible man. He was an adulterer, a murderer. So why is he a hero of the bible?"  And the answer is, "Because god chose him. King David is beyond morality."  Their limited understanding of scripture.  That's a central parable in "The Family's" thinking and I could almost hear Doug Coe's voice when Governor Sanford is saying, "I need to keep governing because I'm like King David."

____

TG:  Jeff Sharlet is the author of "The Family"... He also co-edited the new book, "Believer Beware!  First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith," a collection of articles from the website he co-founded, "Killing the Buddha."

Iran

The situation in Iraq is, well, iffy.  It may turn out okay, it may dissolve into lawlessness and political upheaval.  It's the interplay between Iraq and Iran which may determine the immediate future of both countries. 

Trudy Rubin, always one of the most interesting and dependable columnists writing about foreign affairs (the Philly Inquirer) said this morning:

I think that the effect [of Iran on Iraq's situation]is going to depend very largely on how this struggle -- which is still going on and nobody should dispute that! -- plays out.  And that's why I think that what the Obama administration has done is very important -- to not intervene because it hasn't let the whole internal fight get highjacked by "this is an outside actor."   Even when Ahmadinejad tries to say that, the people don't buy it.  Maybe the hard core of Ahmadinejad supporters -- but most Iranians don't buy it. The opposition isn't tarred by it they clearly are not getting overt or covert US backing. 

Even yesterday you had on their websites the opposition leaders coming out and accusing Ahmadinejad of having himself done a "velvet revolution" -- in effect a white coup against the people of Iran.  It's language that is just shocking and stunning. It will circulate around Iran. 

The reason why that impacts back on Iraq is that Ahmadinejad and the current regime are heavily dependent on the Revolutionary Guards who have an al Quds force.  The ad Quds force is dominating the efforts to stir up trouble inside Iraq.  In fact, the al Quds force once sent a message to General Petraeus in which they said, "If you want to deal with foreign policy on Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, you've got to deal us in.  You've got to deal with us.  We make the foreign policy."  So the al Quds force is tremendously powerful under the current Ahmadinejad-Khameinei regime.  If things change internally, it's possible that the US could get more traction in dealing with the government and finding some confluence of interests in a stable Iraq.

Independence Day

I'm wondering whether it's possible to celebrate Independence Day as it's meant to be celebrated.  Sure, go ahead and set off some fireworks, burn some burgers.  But are we independent?  Do you feel independent? 

Do you believe the people are the chief drivers behind our government, or have other entities pushed us out?  Do you still feel that self-respect that Americans used to feel about our relationship with the rest of the world?  How about our efforts with respect to the environment?  Or do questions like this simply provoke a defensive, angry feeling that you don't want to go there, that you'd rather duck the whole issue and, well, bring on the hot dogs and flags?

________

One citizen asks an important question about our environment that many of us would just as soon avoid:  Is it treason? 

"Change." Oh. I get it. You didn't mean pocket change.

Maybe when Obama denied access to lobbyists, he really meant lobbyists who don't pay a fee for access.  Or is that just the Washington Post.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices. ...Politico and Daily Beast

Put that together with this tidbit and you'll know that the era of unleashed greed is far from over.

Who says the era of giant paychecks is over? The Wall Street Journal reports that with business returning to Wall Street, executive compensation will be making a similar comeback. Goldman Sachs, for example, is set to pay out $20 billion this year—about $700,000 per employee or double last year's $363,000 average. Of course, the big payouts depend on continued market improvement and on what field an executive is in. Junk-bond trading is improving, and so is compensation in that area, although asset-backed security paychecks are iffy because that market remains frozen. The real trick is making salaries competitive while managing public perception. ...Daily Beast and WSJ

There now, dearie.  Is your perception feeling nicely managed?

DOJ torture report

NPR reports that the Justice Department is about to release the results of its investigation into whether DOJ lawyers, under the Bush administration, violated legal ethics when they authorized "harsh interrogations."  NPR has a hard time with that torture word.

Did the lawyers in question, when advising the White House, deliberately skew their advice to give a go-ahead to torture?

So the challenge for Justice Department ethics investigators is to distinguish a legitimate judgment call from a violation of legal ethics that deserves to be punished.

Professor Luban [legal ethicist, Georgetown] says in order to make those distinctions, investigators at the Office of Professional Responsibility need to look at how the memos were created.

"I'm told that the [Office of Professional Responsibility] report looks at the e-mail traffic and earlier drafts which might give some other hint that the law was being cherry-picked and that the memos were driven by the result," Luban says.

Other sources confirm that a draft of the report included a detailed play-by-play of how the memos were created. That gets at the question of whether lawyers knowingly omitted important cases to skew their findings or really engaged in a good faith analysis of the issues.

The office conducting this investigation has never been under this much scrutiny before. Some of the Bush administration's defenders have accused the Office of Professional Responsibility of going on a political witch hunt.

Attorney Nadira Clarke defends the office. She used to work there, though she has no knowledge of this particular investigation.

"You want some kind of internal policing," she says. "The department is communicating to its attorneys what is expected of them in terms of their conduct and what conduct will be and won't be acceptable."

Attorney General Holder has said the report is practically finished. Now parts just have to be declassified before it can be released.

Mean, but probably justified, reaction to Franken's win

Ken Silverstein, who's had it with Democrats (or so it seems)(and so have I), has this reaction to Franken's now confirmed election to the Senate:

Finally Americans will get the opportunity to see what it looks like when a filibuster-proof majority is squandered.

Thing is, I don't want the Dems to be like the Republicans -- so in sync that you begin to wonder who's sleeping with whom.  But I do think the Democrats have set a new record for political irresponsibility. 

________

Meanwhile, a whole crowd of runny-nosed little boys are battling over Sarah Palin.

America moves left; Supreme Court gallops to the right

Parsing the direction(s) the Court took in the term just ended, Adam Liptak demonstrates that the Supreme Court has hiked manfully to the right.  "The Constitution, it turns out, means what Justice Kennedy says it means."  And Kennedy is now pretty much in the Chief Justice's pocket.

John Roberts has worked hard to set things up for a rightward turn.  It looks as though he's succeeding.  Along with Samuel Alito, he's leaving Thomas and Scalia to his left, unlikely though that once might have seemed.

The scariest possibility -- some believe it's a done deal now and I agree -- is what can happen to campaign finance laws.  We could pretty much lose them.  More than one analyst believes that the right, not a natural majority in the US, has found that only two methods guarantee Republican political victories:  ballot fixing and the loosest possible laws governing corporate financing of campaigns. Give our experience over the past decade, that scary notion is very hard to dismiss.

So we come back to the decision to push "Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission" into September, rather than decide it narrowly before the term's ending.  Liptak writes:

Even the court’s failure to decide a case could seem portentous.

In scheduling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission for re-argument in September, Chief Justice Roberts appeared to be setting the stage for an overhaul of the law governing campaign spending by corporations.

The case involves a polemical documentary about Hillary Rodham Clinton that the F.E.C. said was an “electioneering communication” that could not be broadcast during the Democratic primaries this year because a corporation had financed it.

The Supreme Court could have ruled in favor of the group that made the film on a variety of narrow grounds. Instead, it asked for fresh briefing on the validity of laws limiting corporate campaign spending.

A lot of us would like to see the 19th century law which endowed corporations with "personhood" overturned.  This move by the Court, however, would turn "personhood" into dominant force, making corporations the deciders of our elections.  In other words, the Court is on the verge of declaring that we are no longer a democracy. 

When that sinks in, think of the ramifications.  Hey!  WalMart might be making your health insurance decisions if you go with the public option.

Serious stuff to screw our elections

I won't go into detail -- I just ask you to think about it. 

On the one hand, we have Mitch McConnell's and three Republican appointees to the FEC efforts to backstop action by the FEC against a real estate baron in New York state who used threats against Democrats who were making contributions to their party.

On the other hand, we have the case pushed forward to September by the US Supreme Court.  It's the case which deals with whether a right-wing film made to discredit Hillary Clinton could be shown during the final weeks of her campaign.  The basic issue is whether corporate money can be unleashed to affect campaigns.

In both cases, we have what may be the death-knell to any control over corporate support for politicians and political groups.  No, I mean really threaten our democracy, pure and simple.  Think about liberating bullies on the right like the real estate wingnut  in New York with his corporate dollars?  What do you think of unplugging corporate contributions to pro-corporate politicians and their party.

Go read the stories and think about it. Gotta go.

The sad "end of the beginning" in Iran

Trita Parsi and Reza Aslan have been two of the most quoted Iran "experts" during the past ten days.  Now they've written what they call "an end to the beginning" of the story.  Part of the problem going forward, they say, will be the interference of external groups hoping to organize and revive the protests.

Iran's popular uprising, which began after the June 12 election, may be heading for a premature ending. In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized -- and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas. ...

... The lack of organization and execution is perhaps the most convincing evidence that the anti-Ahmadinejad movement is completely homegrown and void of any attempt to emulate the velvet revolutions of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. What is driving people to the streets is their sense of frustration and anger -- not a well-devised plan and training in clever nonviolent resistance techniques.

The leadership vacuum does not bode well for the movement's prospects of success, particularly when it comes to attracting those Iranian swing-voters to its side once more. And this creates openings for external meddling -- just not the kind you think.

Exiled opposition groups, whose political agenda sharply differs from that of the protesters in Iran -- indeed, many of these groups urged people not to vote in the elections -- have sought to fill the vacuum left by a beheaded and directionless indigenous movement. Though the outrage of these exiled groups against the Iranian government’s brutal violence is genuine, their efforts to impose themselves on the political scene have caused great frustration among opposition elements inside Iran. At a time when the movement in Iran is paralyzed, efforts by exiled groups -- groups that scorned the protesters only weeks ago for choosing to participate in the elections -- to fill the leadership vacuum are viewed as nothing less than a maneuver to hijack the movement.

This is playing right into the hands of the Ahmadinejad government, precisely because it would weaken, if not eliminate, the indigenous movement's trump card: its ability to attract the Iranian swing-voters back to its side. If the exiled opposition groups and their neo-conservative backers in the United States prevail in aiding the Ahmadinejad government, what started out as the largest Iranian mass movement since 1979 may end up as little more than the student demonstrations of 1999. Which is to say, an instance of hopes raised, then dashed. ... Foreign Policy