OBAMA’S APPROACH TO THE IRAN ELECTION CONTROVERSY IS RIGHT ON TARGET
HAVE THE REPUBLICANS LEARNED NOTHING FROM THE DISASTROUS FOREIGN POLICY PRACTICES OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION?
The tired and irrelevant voices of the GOP of old—McCain, Boehner, Cheney, Limbaugh, Gingrich, to name but a few, are calling for President Obama to stick America’s nose into the business of Iran’s election mayhem and to show support for the anti-government protesters who are putting their lives on the line to bring down the theocratic tyranny of Ayatollah Khamenei and his hand picked president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
How dim-witted does one have to be not to be aware of the catastrophic policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Their self-righteous and self important view that the whole world was begging to become democratic and that our nation’s mission assigned to us by the Christian God Almighty was to bring democracy to every nation in the Middle East and in time, the whole wide world.
That policy failed and failed so superbly that it nearly bankrupted our entire economic system. More importantly, it alienated the United States, a once loved and admired nation, from much of the civilized world.
By the eighth year of the Bush Administration, he was the most hated man in the world even out-ranking Iran’s Ahmadinejad for that title. The forty-third president was a loner. He went into the unwarranted war in Iraq with a flimsy coalition of the willing each of whom sent a piteous number of troops to aid the Bush army to topple Saddam Hussein from power for reasons yet to be discovered.
According to Wikipedia, “The original list prepared in March 2003 included 49 members.[3] Of those 49, only four besides the U.S. contributed troops to the invasion force (the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, and Denmark). 33 provided some number of troops to support the occupation after the invasion was complete. Six members have no military.”
However, Bush had to bribe many members of the coaltion to obtain any involvement in a war that was despised the world over from the very beginning of the preemptive invasion.
For example, Turkey, in 2003, was offered $8.5 billion in loans in exchange for sending 10,000 troops following the invasion. According to the agreement between the two countries, “the loans are contingent upon ‘cooperation’ in Iraq. The United Kingdom received a commitment from Bush to receive 1.1 billion British pounds in contracts for British companies for reconstruction projects at the completion of the war.
“In addition to direct incentives, critics of the war have argued that the involvement of other members of the coalition was in response for indirect benefits, such as support for NATO membership or other military and financial aid. Almost all of the Eastern European nations involved in the Coalition have either recently joined or are in the process of joining the US-led NATO alliance (namely Bulgaria, Georgia, Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania and Slovakia).[145], the exceptions being Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic which joined NATO in 1999. Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, for example, said on April 21 that Estonian troops had to remain in Iraq due to his country's "important partnership" with the United States.” [Wikipedia]
“At least one country, Georgia, is believed to have sent soldiers to Iraq as an act of repayment for the American training of security forces that could potentially be deployed to the break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.[147] Indeed, Georgian troops that were sent to Iraq have all undergone these training programs.”
It is obvious that a country that must buy support from forty-nine countries to send a handful of troops is not fighting a necessary war, not fighting a popular war and, perhaps, is not fighting a war whose soldiers will ever feel the thrill of victory.
The very same people that dragged the American people into Baghdad is now criticizing President Obama to aggressively support those in Iran who feel that the election was rigged, that the paper ballots of 39 million people were counted faster than humanly possible, that long before the polls were closed police and military forces were beginning to gather on the streets to prepare for potential protests by dissident voters and rumors were flying from every corner of the country alleging vote fraud.
Rather than rush to judgment which is the propensity of the far right and Conservatives in America, the new president elected to remain in the background, allow the Iranians to manage their own election to prevent the theocratic dictators from blaming the upheaval on the United States. He wanted, at all costs, to avoid being accused of stoking the fires of discontent.
Obama chose the proper course of action. He chose a course exactly opposite of the Bush approach to countries that were less than friendly to the U. S. While he has called for the Iranian government to remember that how they approach the unrest that is rocking the entire country is being viewed by people around the world. He has urged the government to give the people in the streets, the thousands of protestors who march for a new election, humane treatment. He has not interpolated our values, our form of democracy into the fray.
The president of our country must take the longer view of his event. What is at stake here is not just an election, but a potentially dramatic change in the Iranian government. It may send a message to the Ayatollah and the Mullah who are the real power behind the presidential seal and force a modification of the tyranny Ayatollah Khamenie and his fellow clerics have imposed upon the people of this ancient society.
Our president must remember and so must our people whether on the right or the left or in the center of the political spectrum that Iran’s attempt to conquer the atoms for whatever use they intend, is a far more consequential concern. Perhaps, the fall of this government would aid us, but this government will not fall if we interject ourselves into the fray.
There is more to this revolt than an election. Since Ahmadinejad came to power inflation has risen 26% which is a major cause for the dissatisfaction plaguing the Iranian people. There is not evidence that Mir Hossein Mousavi will bring a new form of government to Iran. He shows no outward signs of desiring to rid Iran of the theocratic quagmire confronting it today. If not, if he does not provide more freedom to the people, give women their rightful place in society and in the work place; if he continues his pursuit of nuclear weapons or nuclear power, our relationship with Iran will improve only marginally.
Americans will recall that in 1956 when the revolution broke out in Hungary, President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged the people of Hungary in their quest for freedom from Communist totalitarianism; however, they will also recall that he was helpless to do anything to aid them when the Russian army marched into Budapest and squelched the infant revolution.
Eisenhower had to take the long term view. A world war potentially would have been the end result of American interference.
We can not longer consider ourselves the Savior of the World, the great high God of Democracy. Our nation has neither the will, nor the financial wherewithal, or the prestige in the world to bring the theocratic despotism in Iran to its knees.
America must put its own house in order and stop the neo-conservatives in our midst from putting fuel on the fires of the very sick idea that America has a destiny to democratize the entire world. If we have learned anything from Iraq, we surely learned that preemptively attacking another nation for the purpose of bringing freedom and democracy to their land is a horrible idea whose time has long passed.
Mr. Gingrich is a voice that was once turned out of government and has no place in the new America that emerged with the elections of 2008. Mr. Boehner, while still in government as the leader of the Republican side of the House, has a mind cluttered with antiquated ideas irrelevant to the new country we are attempting to build. Mr. Cheney is simply a demagogue who could do nothing finer for his party than to hurry back to Wyoming and tape his mouth shut. McCain has outlived his usefulness and refuses to launch his mind out of the military rut and into the 21st century. Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, Crowley, and others on the far right of the political spectrum fought the good fight for their ancient ideas and by the grace of God and a man whose time has come, cleaned their clocks.
It is now the time to take a few decades to re-think their political policies, lick their deeply inflicted wounds and repent of their angry, antagonistic, and perverted approach to their political opponents.
Obama with his team of diplomats are doing exactly what needs to be done at this time and to remind themselves that we do not want to do what we have done in the past and alienate countries and their citizens because of an arrogant insistence that we know what is best for their nation’s future. We must remain humble and helpful, but not supercilious and overconfident in our treatment of other nations of the world regardless of size or power.
10:14:56 PM 
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