Leave Iran to the Iranians

[democratic]

-a conservative finally gets it!

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3554.html

Leave Iran to the Iranians
by Roger Howard
25 June 2004

The unhappy truth is that the only the Iranian people can engineer genuine changes inside Iran and our own interference, no matter how well-intentioned, is essentially misguided.

If they stood before some imaginary tribunal tasked with guarding human rights, Iran’s leaders would undoubtedly face a formidable indictment. As the June 7th report of Human Rights Watch organization made amply clear, the present regime continues to perpetrate some very gruesome deeds, even though the seven-year tenure of President Mohammed Khatami has supposedly championed ‘reform’ and ‘openness.’

But to argue that this disturbing state of affairs somehow justifies the outside world pushing its own overtly humanitarian agenda onto the Islamic Republic is, however, a very large leap of logic. Yet with an eye on a two-day conference in Tehran that began on 14 June, for example, Human Rights Watch nonetheless recently urged European Union diplomats to “take a much stronger approach in the upcoming EU-Iran human rights dialogue than they have in previous meetings with the Iranian government.”

While every country instinctively recoils from unwarranted foreign interference, Iran has more reason to do so than most, having endured thousands of years of invasion and foreign rule by the armies of, amongst others, Alexander the Great, the Arab tribes, the Ottoman janissaries, the Mongol hordes and the Russian Tsars. This means that resentment at foreign intervention continues to run deep, and criticism of Iran's domestic policies can often prompt otherwise bickering political factions to unite against the new foreign threat with equal indignation.

When thousands of mainly student protestors took to the streets of Tehran last summer, statements of support by the White House merely complicated an already difficult situation and allowed hardliners to portray the demonstrators as traitors: “it would have been much better if the Americans had just stood back and let things take their own course,” as a senior Western diplomat in Tehran admitted last to me last autumn.

The unhappy truth is that the only the Iranian people can engineer genuine changes inside Iran and our own interference, no matter how well-intentioned, is essentially misguided. Let’s leave Iran to the Iranians.

[Lenape85]

1. And Leave Iraq to the Iraqis...

...and Afghanistan to the Afghanistanis.

What these conservatives do not understand is that when one takes on the world like Bush does, it is not fiscally conservative in the least. An empire takes many resources to maintain, and this is why no great imperial power lives forever. It doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint to launch a pre-emptive war; just look at how much needed to be allocated for WWII (one of the last wars worth fighting).