A Little Belated Thought on the Iranian Revolution

Hi readers. Its been a long time since I felt the motivation to put a blog post together, but this one felt short and sweet enough to post about without spending hours analyzing and re-analyzing what I had written. I hope you enjoy the insight, and take a minute to remember the Iranian people.

"Now, I am against sending troops to Central America. They are simply not needed. Given a chance and the resources, the people of the area can fight their own fight. They have the men and women. They're capable of doing it. They have the people of their country behind them. All they need is our support. All they need is proof that we care as much about the fight for freedom 700 miles from our shores as the Soviets care about the fight against freedom 5,000 miles from theirs. And they need to know that the U.S. supports them with more than just pretty words and good wishes. We need your help on this, and I mean each of you-involved, active, strong, and vocal. And we need more." - Ronald Reagan, remarks at Annual Dinner of the CPAC conference, 1985.


Not a whole lot to say about this, except that it reminds me of the situation with the Iranian protests last year. (Or was it earlier this year? My laziness is over-powering my fact-checking.)  While sending American soldiers to support the Green Wave business would have been a catastrophe (and I don't think anyone was saying we should have), the Iranian people were reaching out to us. "You stand for government of the people. We are the people, trying to regain control of our government. Send us money, send us supplies, send us a good word."


I wish the U.S. government had, officially, even so much as spoken out in favor of these people.  Obama has the respect of the world's people far more than Bush did.  For him to have remained neutral was a shame.


(Side notes: 1. It was the Iranian protests/uprising that led me to Twitter in the first place. Watching the events unfold in real-time was a fascinating experience.  2. You can read the full set of remarked delivered by Reagan at that dinner here.)