Daniel Larison has a smart series of posts on the situation in Iran, making the important point that it is their country, not ours, and thus their business, not ours:
The casual assumption is that condemning foreign election fraud, of which there was probably a great deal in Iran, is both some kind of moral imperative and a strategically wise thing to do in order to aid Mousavi, which in turn is based on another questionable belief that Westerners are somehow obliged to aid him and his supporters. The first part of this is very dubious, and the second is clearly wrong.
Western policing of other nations’ elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country’s people.
This is a historically liberal impulse, this idea of universalism, that corruption in the elections of other nations are somehow an affront to American democracy, to the American people themselves. It is ridiculous.
But we live in a world in which this is now an article of conservative faith. Which leads us to Glenn Greenwald, who notes that the very people who have long advocated bombing Iran now profess the most concern over the supposed Iranian election fraud:
During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz entitled “The Case for Bombing Iran,” and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he “hopes and prays” that the U.S. “bombs the Iranians.” John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.
Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way — just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called “attack on Iran” or “bombing Iran” in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many — obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it’s some abstract decision in a video game.
But it is an abstraction, for those who so loudly advocate it. We do it all in the name of some lofty principle, which is another term for American hegemony. If principle/hegemony demands we drop bombs, then that is the moral thing to do. If it requires us to show our support for those we might otherwise have killed with our bombs, we will do that too. There is no moral consistency here, save the conviction that whatever furthers our hegemony, our commitment, is by very definition moral.
