I’m concerned about what appears to be a stolen election in Iran, and even more concerned about government violence and suppression of dissent.\u00a0 It’s encouraging, even exciting, that Iranians are finding ways around government censorship to get their story out to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
In this country, conservative politicians are criticizing President Obama for not “doing enough,” whatever doing enough is.\u00a0 Carpetbombing Iran with mimeograph machines, maybe?\u00a0 Look, the rulers who stole the election, the rulers who are shooting Iranians in the streets right now, are already<\/em> blaming the Great Satan for fomenting unrest . . . how many more of their own people will they kill if the USA actually does begin to foment unrest?<\/p>\n We have a long history of meddling in Iran, but beyond enriching American weapons manufacturers and oil companies I’m not at all sure what we got out of it.\u00a0 Overall, I’d say, we lost more than we gained.\u00a0 What has changed to make anyone think there’s any possible benefit to be had by meddling again?<\/p>\n I think President Obama is doing exactly the right thing.\u00a0 Deplore the violence, ask the Iranian rulers to show restraint and allow free speech, but otherwise stay hands off.\u00a0 It’s an Iranian problem, and it’s up to the Iranians to solve it.<\/p>\n And don’t forget, the Iranians wanted an Islamic republic.\u00a0 As far as I’m concerned, they are reaping what they sowed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m concerned about what appears to be a stolen election in Iran, and even more concerned about government violence and suppression of dissent.\u00a0 It’s encouraging, even exciting, that Iranians are finding ways around government censorship to get their story out to the rest of the world. In this country, conservative politicians are criticizing President Obama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2322,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions\/2322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}