Monday, June 15, 2009

Say it with me one more time

Last year, I wrote:

The quickest way to remove the mullahs from power in Iran is also the approach dictated by libertarian foreign policy prescriptions: Lift all sanctions, bring down all trade barriers, and announce that the US will henceforth treat Iran (or, to put a finer point on it, Iranians) as ... friends!


The consensus I'm seeing on all sides of the "Iran policy question" in US political circles, from "nuke'em 'til they glow then shoot'em in the dark" hawks to absolute non-interventionists is that the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was possibly a case of outright election theft and almost certainly, at the very least, a manipulated and corrupted poll.

If that's the case -- if the majority was silenced at the polls and is now being suppressed in the streets -- what I wrote last year is more applicable than ever. Here's another snippet:

Lift the sanctions, declare friendship ... and the theocratic regime in Iran would be lucky to last a year.


The US lacks the moral standing to criticize Iran for vote-rigging, etc. -- we have yet to deal with our own stolen presidential election of 2000 or with the highly plausible allegations of large-scale fraud in the two presidential elections since (the alleged Republican "Diebold coup" in Ohio in 2004, or the Democrats' alleged nationwide registration fraud operation through their ACORN proxies in 2008).

Instead of censuring, or attempting to bring pressure on, Iran's government over the kind of stuff that happens here all the damn time, the US government should just take away that government's biggest bogeyman, its trump card -- the US as Great Satan. Doing so would add momentum to the obvious popular discontent and, I predict, lead relatively quickly to a revolution, maybe even a relatively peaceful one, that would put a regime more friendly to the west in power.

I wonder if Obama has the stones for this kind of Hail Mary?

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