Don’t Stop Meddling Now

For the past few years we’ve spent hundreds of millions promoting democracy in Iran only to have President Barack Obama sit on his hands when Iranians take to the streets to demand it themselves. There’s something tragically familiar in this. In the early 1950s President Eisenhower encouraged Hungarians to fight back against their Soviet oppressors. As Ralph Peters puts it in today’s New York Post, “When they did, we watched from the sidelines as Russian tanks drove over them.” On February 15, 1991, about a week before the Gulf War ceasefire, President George H.W, Bush said on Voice of America radio: “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: And that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations‘ resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” Weeks later, Iraqi Kurds and Shiites rose up against Saddam. While they were crushed and executed en masse by Saddamn, President Bush played down the significance of the conflict and distanced the U.S. from the revolutionaries. The anger this seeded in the Iraqi population came back at the U.S. in spades when Saddam’s regime could no longer be mollified.

The problem is not that the U.S. “meddles.” It’s that it meddles until it doesn’t. And that not only creates distrust among hopeful peoples around the world; it leaves conflicts festering until such time that their resolution is both critical and formidably difficult. If the situation in Iran passes quietly from uprising to mourning, don’t think we won’t have created a whole new army of burned former allies.