Ron Paul, Obama, Right on Iran
Iran, surrounded by U.S. bases. Who has better cause to feel the other side is an aggressor?************************************************
With former Governor Mike Huckabee chipping in on Iran, and the House voting 434-1 (Ron Paul was the only dissenting vote) for a resolution condemning the Iranian government over those elections, I feel compelled to inject some fact and reason into all of the hysteria.
While I am sure both sides tried to cheat where they could, there is no credible evidence of wide-scale fraud in the Iranian elections. Certainly not enough to change the outcome. Ahmadinejad appears to have legitimately won this election by about the same margin he won the last one. Reports of a close race early on were overblown, and Ahmadinejad dominated in the Presidential debates which followed those claims.
Democracy does not insure that other countries will pick the rulers that our rulers and media want them to. This is especially true of Islamic populations, which show a strong tendency toward heavy-handed rulers. The Palestinians elected Hamas. The Iraqis elected the party that once controlled the Badr Brigade and was involved in various acts of terrorism. It now appears that the Iranians have elected Ahmadinejad again.
One might argue that just speaking up and condemning the Iranian government won't hurt. They reasoning is that we are not committing our troops or dollars, just issuing verbal support for the protesters and against the government. The "empty feel-good gesture" argument does not take into account the fact that mainstream Iranians regard our policy of global military adventurism as a serious threat. Our condemning the government of Iran only strengthens their stature in the eyes of these people. It would be like Saddam Hussein speaking out against a candidate in our elections- the result of those words would be to bolster support for that candidate.
So while voting for this resolution may make someone "feel good", it actually makes the situation worse for those we claim we are supporting. It is another case of bad politics but good government. We should mind our own business. We have plenty of troubles here to tend to. President Obama (if indeed he is actually a citizen of this country) is continuing, and expanding, the same disastrous policies of the Bush administration. For once he is right about something, and we should leave off him about it.
posted by Mark Moore (Moderator) at Monday, June 22, 2009
4 Comments:
Wow, that took courage. I think we have to stand strongly against the human rights abuses that are taking place, but at the same time you are right. We have assumed that the election was a fraud simply because we don't like the guy. That is not evidence. Also, who are we to interfere in the sovereignty of that nation?
One thing we do have to watch closely is what this tells us about the values of the ruling parties. How does this translate to a nuclear armed Iran?
The ruling parties are using our military as global corporate muscle, as described by General Smedley Butler in "War is a Racket" over 60 years ago.
Re nuclear Iran, we cannot put the technology genie back in the bottle. Other nations are going to learn how to do what we could do in 1945. Our choices are genocide or adopting a sustainable foreign policy. One that is less threatening to other nations so that they are not motivated to insure their own destruction by slipping in a nuke on us.
Iran, or Persia, is a historically great nation. We have 50,000 nukes and have surrounded their country with military bases. Where do we get off telling them that they cannot develop nukes? Our concern should be getting them to agree to appropriate security measures for whatever they develop so that what they make cannot fall into the hands of those who are mad enough to use them.
I agree Iran is justified in its paranoid feelings towards America and the west, being that we're fighting wars on both sides of their country and sticking our nose in everywhere else around them.
I don't think who won was the real issue, they've been tolerating a ultimate supreme leader for 30 years, and he already said this election was a "divine assessment", which was basically him admitting to the fraud but saying it didn't matter because he was now choosing Ahmadinejad as president. Rather, this had to do with the level of blatant fraud and lies that the people were being told to swallow.
Now, was it clear Ahmadinejad probably won and there was little fraud? I don't think so, and I think you're going way out on a limb in saying as much... take a moment to read the list of Mousavi's grievances about the election. Just the fact things were changed during the vote collecting at the last minute, and not handled per the election rules to insure a fair election process, is enough to give anybody serious doubt about its legitimacy, and that's not even the most damning reality about this election that throws it into suspicion.
See PDF link below- Brookings Institute.
Re: Previous-War on Iraq paper- http://www.newamericancentury.org/
http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-4681-0-5-5--.html
As in 1930's thw money power elite will resolve the global credit problem they created via a global war.
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