The Unasked Question

June 22, 2009

Like most of us, I’ve been following the events (or as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs calls it, the “vigorous debate”) in Iran. I’m under no illusions that Mousavi is any kind of real democrat. There may be a Thomas Jefferson somewhere in Iran, but he’s not one of the candidates for high office. In prior elections, the presidential candidates in Iran were chosen by the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khameini. There was a choice between this West-hating hand puppet or that West-hating hand puppet. This year, for the first time, the Ayatollah allowed unapproved candidates. And why not? By allowing Mousavi to run it was designed to look like the election was going to be free, but Khameini had the results in the bag the entire time.

What the mullahs did not expect was that the Iranian people would also believe that the elections were free and fair. When the results were called into question, the Iranians felt betrayed by their leaders. With good reason, I might add.

Much to the shock and dismay of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, protestors took to the streets, demanding their rights to the free election that the Supreme Leader had promised them. Worse for the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, the protestors haven’t stopped despite a government crackdown. Protestors are being killed in the street, internet cafes are being raided for information about people who are trying to get the word out, the internet is being blocked as much as possible, foreign journalists are being “asked” to leave. Yet the protests go on. Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets, boy.

It needs to be stressed that the violence is largely one-sided. The protests were peaceful, and remain mostly peaceful, despite the skulls being cracked by the Iranian police and military. These were not riots that needed to be quelled. This was assembly that was deemed embarrassing by the reigning thugocracy. This is turning into a revolution. Whether or not it succeeds depends entirely on whether the Iranian people can stand up to the mullahs, and whether the police and military begin to side with the people against the government. Already there have been reports of police refusing to “do their job” by beating people’s heads in. There has been nothing like this in the Mideast since 1979, when the Islamists seized power when the Shah was overthrown.

The Iranians are clearly tired of living under Islamist rule. Despite being one of the more “progressive” countries in the Middle East (which it always was), Iran is still a theocracy where women are oppressed and everyone is subject to the rule of Islam as interpreted by fundamentalist crazies.

Much has been made over the youthful demographic of Iran. Iran has a huge number of people under the age of thirty, and media reports attribute the protests to this supposedly young, hip, generation. I’m inclined to think that is our media projecting their cozy view of anti-Vietnam protests onto a foreign country. The fact that so much of Iran is under 30 may play a role here, but I don’t think it is some kind of skeleton key to unlock the mystery of the protests. Those under 30 have never lived under any type of government other than the Islamist theocracy they are now protesting. So where do they get the idea for free and fair elections?

It seems to me that there is a legitimate question here that has, to my knowledge, not been asked by anyone. That question is simply this: What role, if any, have the free and fair elections in Iraq and Afghanistan played in this protest?

Part of the reason for America invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was this: Iran was a country straining at the leash. Having a free Iraq on one side and a free Afghanistan on the other side, might just inspire the Iranian people chained by that leash to pull a little harder and seek a genuine political process in the governance of their nation.

Clearly the Iraq War was a mess in many ways. The wrong commanders were on the job, Donald Rumsfeld hung on for far too long, and George W. Bush put too much faith in his men on the ground. A lot of lives were needlessly lost because of poor planning. The “surge” changed that.

Advocating the use of more troops in Iraq when everyone was screaming for a full-scale retreat was an act of political courage. That act got John McCain the GOP nomination to be President, and it won a war (albeit belatedly) for George W. Bush.

As things were bad and getting worse in Iraq, largely supplied and funded by Iran, there was no whisper of dissent in Iran. But now, with Iraq largely stabilized and peaceful, with Iraq’s economy booming, with Iraq enjoying a free press, the protestors are out in the streets demanding…well, demanding the kind of elections that the Iraqis have.

If Iran should fall and some sort of democracy take root there, I have no doubt that Barack Obama will take the full credit when he runs again in 2012, despite the fact that until last Saturday the message he was sending could only be interpreted as supporting the current leadership in Iran. But if, and I admit it’s a huge if, some sort of democracy does emerge in Iran, will some small part of the credit rest with the Mideast policies of George W. Bush and the change those policies brought to Iran’s next door neighbors?

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Posted by Blaknsam

Obama Gets Off The Fence

June 21, 2009

Yesterday, President Obama issued a statement regarding the protests and subsequent brutal government crackdown in Iran:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

There, now was that so hard?

UPDATE: It appears that Iowahawk has gotten his hands on the first draft of Obama’s statement to Iran. As with all things Iowahawk, it’s worth reading.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Obama Speaks Softly, Carries Small Styrofoam Stick

June 15, 2009

Well, it only took a few days and a lot of pressure for President Obama to speak out about the situation in Iran. I don’t have the transcript yet, but I just finished watching him on the news.

He should be commended for saying something, I suppose, but what he actually said was, as usual, weak and full of equivocation.

Obama said that he was “deeply troubled” which is all well and good, but then he went on to stress that he still has plans to meet Ahmadinejad, and he strongly implied that the Ayatollah’s promise to investigate the election results won’t be a complete sham.

When I get the full transcript (his statement was typical of Obama sans teleprompter…long and rambling), I will post it here.

UPDATE: I couldn’t find the transcript but Hot Air posted the video:

As I said in my earlier post, now is not the time for an “Evil Empire” speech, though the mullahocracy in Iran surely merits one, but a strongly-worded acknowledgement that the United States understands that the election (and the promised “investigation” into the election) was a farce and the response to the protestors was brutal and should not be tolerated is not too much to ask from the leader of the free world. Even the French managed to use the word “brutality” in their condemnation.

But Obama is “deeply troubled.” There’s that frowny face again.

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Words Matter

June 15, 2009

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” it was considered to be a scandalous remark by so many well-heeled left wing intellectuals. Throughout America and Europe, liberals pounced on Reagan’s comments as an example of impolitic speech that was sure to enrage our Soviet adversaries (by the mid-80s the Left was no longer thinking of the Soviets as enemies). Reagan was told that it was far better to approach the Soviets with an open hand, to speak with them as an equal superpower. He was told the Soviets could be trusted. The nuclear freeze movement fretted that an arms race would only lead to a nuclear cataclysm. The nuclear disarmament crowd insisted that if America destroyed all of their nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would be morally compelled to follow suit.

Of course, Reagan had other methods. He referred to the Soviets as an “evil empire” and stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”

Reagan’s method worked. Aided by Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, Reagan’s public and unflinching call for an end to Communism started revolutions in the Soviet states brewing. The Solidarity movement in Poland, started a few months before Reagan’s first victory in 1980 found friends in the White House, at 10 Downing Street, and in the Vatican. The moral support those three world leaders lent to Solidarity was like a cannon shot in the halls of the Kremlin. The KGB even tried to have the Pope assassinated because of his talk of freedom in his native country of Poland.

Liberation movements began to grow throughout the Soviet Empire, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.

Importantly, word even reached those who had no voice. Imprisoned in a Soviet gulag on trumped up espionage charges, the great dissident Natan Sharansky still got word of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, and word spread throughout the gulag via a series of taps on walls and toilets.

I have to laugh. People who take freedom for granted, Ronald Reagan for granted, always ask such questions. Of course! It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell’s Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.

It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s “Great October Bolshevik Revolution” and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.

We were all in and out of punishment cells so often—me more than most—that we developed our own tapping language to communicate with each other between the walls. A secret code. We had to develop new communication methods to pass on this great, impossible news. We even used the toilets to tap on.

The point of all this is that words matter. They are important. A simple speech or declaration by an American President can echo throughout the world and reach even the blackest depths of prison camps. In the Age of Twitter, the word can spread within hours.

As I type, Iranian dissidents are protesting an election that is almost certainly rigged and that has ensured another term for the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The protesters are being beaten and jailed. The press has been shut down in Iran. The internet is shut down (though it seems they forgot about Twitter, which is earning its plaudits in Iran right now). The human desire for freedom is being crushed, and the cold hand of authoritarianism is wrapping itself around the throats of people who expect their elections to count and who want their voices to be heard.

WHERE IS OBAMA?

I don’t expect an Evil Empire speech, although one is deserved. It is too early for that. The White House is, apparently, “monitoring” the situation. What a profile in courage our President is!

Mr. President, a simple statement of solidarity with the protestors, a simple acknowledgement that the election appears to have been rigged, a simple quote expressing outrage at the Iranian government for the harsh treatment of protestors and the suppression of speech and the press…that’s all. Your words will be heard, Mr. President. They will resonate in the Iranian streets, in the jail cells of Tehran, and all throughout the Middle East. You will send a strong message to our sole ally in that region, Israel, that you will not be cowed by Iranian strongmen. Mr. President, you are gifted with an almost supernatural eloquence. It’s time to use it.

Update: Hot Air is providing really good coverage.

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Posted by Blaknsam