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I’ve held off writing about the crisis in Iran because, as an observer following it via TV, newspaper and Internet, it just seems so distant.
But Madeleine Albright said something last night on Rachel Maddow (I heard it today on a podcast) that I think makes some sense to me, helping to structure my own response and sense that we need to support the protesters as fellow “small d” democxrats, but that our own national government’s involvement can only inflame the situation.
Maddow asked Albright whether there was “anything that the American people-not our government-but American citizens should do or could do” to help the Iranian dissidents.
Albright, who served as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, said that we are looking at a “two-level thing” and that “the U.S. government has to be very careful not to become the football, as we have been saying, and not to be the story.”
On the other hand, dissidents and those who protest around the world are always very encouraged when they know that Americans care. And through all this modern technology, it is so evident that we are always on the side of those who want freedom.
And for me, Rachel, what this shows is democracy is alive and well. You know, people question whether people want to make decisions about their own lives, and what you’re seeing out there on the streets is people want to be in control of their own lives. And democracy from below is something that is a very, very powerful movement.
I’m not an Albright fan — she, like everyone else who has run the State Department, is too beholden to that strain of “realism” that has left us on the wrong side of too many conflicts.
But I think she is right here. The specifics of our relationship with Iran — the mutual mistrust and our own sense of victimhood in this relationship tied to the hostage crisis and so incredibly ignorant of the history that helped create the conditions that led to the late-’70s revolution in the first place — make it important that our government stay out of things, that we not give the regime an opportunity to use the United States and a false sense of Iranian patriotism against the reformers. That would take steam away from the protests and likely drive a wedge between the more conservative poorer classes and the urban reformers.
It’s something we need to acknowledge — and then extend to other hot spots in the Middle East. “We are,” after all, as Chris Hedges wrote on Truthdig the other day, “the biggest problem in the Middle East.”
We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.
He goes on to say that “We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East.”
The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence.
Does that mean we should ignore what is happening? No. But it is not the government that should act. The Iranian people need our support, need us to speak up and speak out and to do the honorable thing and give the Middle East back to its people, to stop meddling.
More from Hedges:
The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal “wars of aggression.” They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.
Hank Kalet 
Again I'm with you on this–and I guess that means with Albright as well. Showing support for peoples' struggle for justice and democracy is very important. Even simply bearing witness, as ineffective as it may seem, is an important act. While there may be little I can do to aid the people of Iran in their struggle for a more just society beyond modifying my Twitter account and re-tweeting key information, I can recognize my nation's role in creating the modern mess that is the Middle East, and work as a citizen through my votes and my activism to pursue rectification and push for U.S. involvement in the region to be truly in support of democratic movements and the right of self-determination as expressed through democratic means.
The Iranian theocratic dictatorship and police state is truly an abomination. They are beating and killing their own people who want to be free of this terrible oppression. The tyrants are forcing the families of the demonstrators who were killed by the police to pay for the bullets that killed them. The Iranians had to endure the brutal reign of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi only to be replaced by theocratic tyrants. The US backed and supported the Shah who was just as oppressive and vicious (if not more so) to his own populace.While we decry what is going on in Iran it might be wise to keep in mind that we have put down our popular protests against governmental over reach. The Bonus Marchers were brutally suppressed by the Hoover administration and some of them were shot dead. Hoover called out the troops, calvary and even some tanks to disband the Bonus Marchers. The civil rights marchers were brutally treated in the south in the 50s and 60s. The Kent State protesters were killed along with innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with the protest. Demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago were beat, tear gassed and hauled off to prison.
And, yet you trust the gooferment to keep us safe? We'd be better off if the governments were afraid of the people. Didn't some dead old white guy say that? Government is the meme that oppresses and kills us. We need to change that thinking before it kills us.
I've always been a civil libertarian, not to be confused with vile soulless libertarianism. I am not a blind sycophantic worshipper of \”government.\” I wish libertarians would apply the same strict standards that they apply to government to capitalism. Capitalism and the so called free market can be just as crooked, corrupt, acquisitive and sleazy as some of our legislators. Where is the libertarian paradise? No where, it does not exist and never will. Yes, there are crooked politicians, yes, government does fail sometimes but the solution is not to get rid of government or to reduce it to Calvin Coolidge levels. The solution is to fix it, shine the light of truth on it and hold our politicians accountable. Capitalism is predatory, sometimes corrupt, criminal and monopolistic. Does that mean we should get rid of capitalism? I am not captive of a rigid ideology as are libertarians and other free market gangsters. I am for actual free markets, actual entrepreneurship not fixed market crony capitalism.Wall Street landed us in a financial mess, should we get rid of Wall Street, that would be the libertarian logic. The government sometimes fails, so get rid of it according to the libertarian logic. Capitalism fails so let's get rid of it?Libertarians offer no solutions, just empty rhetoric.
*** begin quote *** Wall Street landed us in a financial mess, should we get rid of Wall Street, that would be the libertarian logic. The government sometimes fails, so get rid of it according to the libertarian logic.*** end quote *** Wall Street didn't do it alone. Could not without government. See the problem ALWAYS originates with the government and it's supposed charter to use force. It's that force that allows corrupt men to impose their will on others. You blame \”capitalism\” and confuse \”mercantilism\”, \”national socialism\”, and \”government control consumerism\”. Unfortunately, the \”division of labor\” that allows us to support a larger population. Austrian economics explains that it's the fiat currency that creates the out of control government and the boom / bust business cycle. Make no mistake, the truly free market, (which we haven't seen since the pre-Civil War), has its share of excesses. It does have the advantage of being the most \”honest\”. Sorry, but you'll never escape the realities of government, force, and fiat currency. You have to change your thinking.