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A blast from the past

September 21, 2009 - 3:39 pm - by Richard Fernandez
Doug
2009-09-21 18:53:20

Kinuachdrach:
Ledeen bases his conclusions on a lot more than mutterings.

“Look at what didn’t happen in the streets last Friday. Not a shot was fired at the millions of demonstrators in Tehran. There are YouTubes of police fraternizing with the Greens. There are stories of Revolutionary Guardsmen helping the demonstrators, and even the Basij didn’t dare to attack or arrest, with a handful of exceptions (one of which is notable: in Tabriz, if I remember correctly, they started to round up some people, and the crowd turned on them, freed the would-be victims, and beat the Basijis to death).

And look at what else didn’t happen: nobody tried to arrest Mousavi or Karroubi.

Under the circumstances, you’d think that your government would be talking to the Greens. But you’d be wrong. Perhaps Hillary Clinton thought she was telling the truth when she claimed, a few days after the insurrection of June 12th, that “behind the scenes” we were helping the Iranian opposition. If so, she shouldn’t have said anything about it, but I don’t think she was well informed. There are no contacts between the American Government and the leaders of the opposition. One should not expect the new government to look kindly upon a President Obama who publicly sweet-talked the Tehran butchers, and all but begged Khamenei for a few minutes of his precious time. The same applies to the Europeans, all of whom scrambled for oil and other commercial contracts, and none of whom talked to the Green leaders.

As so often, Martin Luther King Jr. summed it up perfectly: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”