The brutal regime in Iran is holding an "election" this month as a way to create for themselves a veneer of legitimacy, and Michael Ledeen is calling on someone...anyone from the Bush administration or other Western leaders to denounce this exercise as the fraud that it is. Meanwhile, brave Iranian dissidents and democrats suffer and die at the hands of the regime for the cause of freedom. They deserve better from us...
We are now nine days from the sham elections, and still no Western leader has had the integrity to proclaim that the “elections” are a fraud, and they seem to have forgotten that the regime itself is the keystone of the terror network. Instead, our government maintains a pious silence on the matter, evidently more afraid of being accused of undermining the efforts of the French, German, and British governments to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with Iran on the matter of the mullahs’ impending atomic bomb.They do not wish to acknowledge that if Iran were free, we would not have to fear its weapons, because the Iranian people wish to live peacefully, in alliance with us. Moreover, with the Iranian keystone destroyed, the terror war against us would be gravely weakened, and our currently stalled support for democratic revolution would receive a much needed infusion of credibility.
Continued silence and inaction on Iran are shameful and cowardly, unworthy of any serious nation, let alone the world’s lone superpower. People are dying every day, above all in Iran and in Iraq, because we refuse to come to grips with Iran. Many of these are our own children.
Hello? Can we get this show on the road, please?
Ledeen has for years been the most consistent voice for stronger administration support of the Iranian democrats, as in this earlier column:
...the Iranians and the Syrians continue to support the terror war against us in Iraq. Here again, everyone knows it — nobody raised an eyebrow at the recent rumors that Zarqawi had taken refuge in Iran, because everyone knows he has long had Iranian support for his barbaric actions — yet our leaders are strangely unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion: The regimes must go......In his final days in office, Colin Powell went around the world announcing that the United States was not calling for regime change in Iran, and no one in Washington has gainsaid those words. Nor has anyone called for regime change in Damascus. In each case, official rhetoric, and apparently formal policy as well, are directed toward matters of less significance in the Global War: the nuclear ambitions of the Iranian mullahs, and the domination of Lebanon by the Syrian Baathists and their murderous Hezbollah allies. Yet it is clear to anyone with eyes to see that even these lesser goals cannot be accomplished so long as Assad rules Syria, and the mullahs rule Iran.
There is no escape from these imperatives, and no amount of clever diplomatic scheming with the failed governments of France and Germany — both of whom have been boisterously rejected by their own electorates in the past two weeks — and the feckless British Foreign Office can possibly accomplish them. If President Bush is serious about spreading freedom, then he must finally and openly demand an end to the dictatorships that oppose freedom with all their might.
Freedom is our greatest weapon against the terrorists, and we do not always need to send armies to support its spread. Syria and Iran are ripe for revolution, and the dictators know it. The revolutionaries are looking to Washington for clear and material support. They are not getting it today.
Stay on top of developments at Regime Change Iran.
Posted by dan at June 9, 2005 02:05 PM