It’s About the Iranians, not Us!
June 22nd, 2009 Posted in Foreign Policy, Neoconservatives, IranMany of the usual suspects, who helped get the U.S. into an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq, now are beating their breasts accusing the Obama administration of doing too little to support the protestors in Iran. Alas, these ivory-tower warriors are utterly heedless about whether Washington’s intervention would actually help promote democracy there. It almost certainly would not.
Writes Alan Bock in antiwar.com:
It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness and childishness of those who, as the Iranian situation unfolds, are practicing what Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal column Friday called “Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else’s delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.” Surely the sympathy of most Americans is firmly on the side of the protesters on the streets in Iran. But it doesn’t make Barack Obama a coward, appeaser, or friend of dictatorship that he hasn’t yet yelled from Mt. Everest that the U.S. government endorses the dissidents and scorns any regime that includes the dread Ahmadinejad.
Those who have been agitating for the U.S. government to do so – Obama’s reminder that the world is watching is apparently merely another sign of terminal lily-liveredness – are more interested in fawning and preening as bold freedom fighters (from the comfort of their easy chairs, clad in their pajamas) and name-calling domestic political opponents than in anything that might actually help to increase the freedom or dignity of actual people living in Iran. Indeed, such a declaration would more likely lead to harm than help for the brave souls filling city streets. You could think of them as peacocks spreading their colorful tails to display the bright colors, or adolescent boys boasting “my freedom penis is bigger than yours.”
Some of the cleverer among them may purposely be trying to get a significant number of Iranians martyred by the regime, if they calculate that’s what will facilitate regime-change. More likely, most of the Fox-type personalities are simply heedless and self-important.
I keep waiting for these faux-warriors to suit up and help in all the revolutions and wars that they want others to undertake.