Clarity In The Defense of Freedom

posted at 1:26 am on June 21, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Once again, people are dying for freedom. Some have pointed out it’s a somewhat threadbare freedom, a revolution that began because one mullah-approved, America-hating politician with a shady past was robbed by the other mullah-approved, America-hating politician with a shady past. Foreign-policy realists remind us the Iranian people have, as a group, been violently anti-American for decades, and they wouldn’t have transformed into allies just because Mousavi managed to win a recount over Amadinejad.

The stakes are higher than that, now. The entire oppressive theocratic regime is tottering, and it will only be able to shore up its foundations with a mountain of bones. People have rarely been able to achieve freedom without bloodshed, because tyranny is death – its willingness to kill is the only way it can keep its captive populations in line. We in the West are not always honest with ourselves about how well that usually works for the tyrants. The cudgel for those speak out of turn, the lash for those who try to escape, a bullet for those who resist… it’s a brutal formula practiced for ages, around the world, because it’s effective. Modern technology gave oppressed peoples more ways to organize, and plead their case to the outside world – but it also gave the tyrants more efficient ways to murder them, when they have satisfied themselves the outside world will do nothing. Hundred and forty word Tweets turn cold and silent when a fifty-ton main battle tank rolls into view. The Tweets are only powerful when someone listens, and answers. Otherwise, the tank will always have the last word.

We don’t have to like the Iranian people as a whole, or the government they might erect to replace the mullahs, to respect and support their struggle for freedom. America’s sacred duty is the defense and promotion of liberty, and we do this because it’s right and just, not because it will create useful allies. Let this bloody day stand as an enduring lesson that free men must never stand silent in the face of oppression, no matter what geopolitical tacticians might say about carefully calibrated messages and surgically precise displays of indifference. It didn’t take long for the Iranian regime to blame the strangely subdued Obama Administration for manufacturing the uprising, as part of their justification for suppressing it. This should surprise no one. Why are we always crediting totalitarian dictators with some modicum of honesty and fair play, when they never display any of those traits? Why do we elect people who stand there with expressions of dumb shock on their ice-cream stained faces, when their carefully crafted non-statements of non-interference and “deep concern” dissolve in a hail of bullets, acid, and fire… followed by dictators pointing accusing fingers at their exquisitely disengaged and non-committal selves? The thugs who rule Iran were going to blame the Great Satan for this crisis anyway, as anyone with an ounce of common sense knew all along. The president should have raised his voice and earned the blame. As it stands, an army of anonymous posters on Twitter have done more to befriend and support the Iranian people than the American government.

Biting our tongues and looking the other way while captive populations are brutalized never gets us any of the benefits our highly nuanced foreign policy elite promise. It only earns us the scorn of struggling peoples, and makes us vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. Obama’s pathetic attempts at self-justification to the contrary, no one in the Revolutionary Guard is going to take their fingers off a trigger because they suddenly remember Obama’s milquetoast Cairo speech, and decide they can’t be killers in a world where the American president vowed to defend the rights of Muslim women to wear the hijab.

The president’s statement today said that “we are bearing witness” to the Iranian people’s belief in justice, “and we will continue to bear witness.” No. The task history has given to the American president is not “bearing witness” to the brutalization of innocent people, the way her neighbors “bore witness” to the murder of Kitty Genovese. Our task is to speak out, call evil by its true name, and let all the world know exactly where we stand. Our government should have done that days ago, weeks ago. Whether they win or lose, the survivors of the Iranian uprising will remember that dozens of their friends and family were dead by the time Obama got around to clucking his tongue at the regime that murdered them.

Thomas Jefferson warned early Americans against “entangling alliances.” Now we have a president who tries to preserve his entangling alliances by hoping the rest of the world will forget he’s an American. We have a United Nations Security Council to handle sending out weak and ineffective letters of “grave concern” for us. Our duty is to speak with passion and clarity in the defense of freedom. We may be forced to deal diplomatically with torturers hiding behind chests full of “decorations” they awarded themselves, or gutter trash thugs robed as divine lawgivers, but they should never look into an American leader’s eyes and see anything except barely controlled distaste. No one on Earth should have cause to spend one instant wondering where America comes down in a battle between brutal dictators and those who courageously resist them. No American should have cause to spend one instant wondering where their President comes down, either.

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