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Before we go converting what's happening in Iran into the American Revolution...

... let's remember that the internal politics of any country always has more to do with them than it does with us.

And--more importantly--let's remember that Iran is one of only a handful of countries in the world where Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man who approved the 1982 truck bomb attack that killed 282 US Marines in Beirut, could be considered a moderate reformer.

On this one--unlovely as it seems, both Barack Obama and Ron Paul are correct: we can't do a damn thing to influence the outcome in Iran short-term, and we will have to deal with whoever ends up in power.

If you think this is some kind of progressive/liberal foreign policy failure, let me remind you that it was George H. W. Bush who stood by while we had basically the largest military force ever assembled in the history of the planet and watched Saddam Hussein crush the Shi'a and Kurd uprisings in 1991 after the Gulf War.

Comments

G Rex said…
Far from it, I've been thinking more of the Tiananmen square massacre. Reformer Zhao Ziyang spent the rest of his life (17 years?) under house arrest for expressing sympathy for the students, and Li Peng and Jiang Zemin ended up on top for being hard line. It was the same sort of intraparty power struggle, expressed in street movements, but significantly in the PRC they had to ship in rural troops (Mongolians for example) to quash the demonstrations lest the local troops flinch at shooting fellow Chinese. The Iranian security forces don't seem to show any such squeamishness at gunning down or beating fellow Persians.

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