Try as I might, it’s been hard to ignore the news that escapes from Iran, where a potential rebellion has apparently been quashed. People took to the streets after the June 10 election that featured two major candidates for president: incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
From an American foreign-policy standpoint, there wasn’t much to pick from. Both see us as a Great Satan, though Mousavi was a bit more moderate, and both wanted to continue Iran’s nuclear program. Neither seemed intent on removing Iran from our previous president’s “Axis of Evil.”
Ahmadinejad reportedly won with 66 percent of the vote, and many are suspicious of the tally, since some sectors reported more votes than potential voters.
Such counts are not unprecedented, even here in Colorado. In 1880, there was an election to determine whether the seat of Chaffee County would move to Buena Vista or remain in Granite. Buena Vista cast 1,128 votes for itself; the most generous contemporary estimates put its total population at 1,200 — at a time when women could not vote. Yet some Buena Vistans have the gall to accuse Salida of stealing the courthouse in a 1928 election.
On April 2, 1904, the community of Kremmling in Grand County had 51 registered voters, and 52 of them voted in favor of incorporation. When I practiced journalism there, I saw many lively facets of municipal politics, such as when the mayor punched out the chairman of the zoning board after that board voted to dissolve itself, but never was the legality of the town’s incorporation questioned.
Back to the dubious election results in Iran. Thousands of people took to the streets in protest, and President Barack Obama caught some criticism for not supporting them more vigorously.
But just what should he have done? Being from Chicago, where the graveyards sometimes come alive on Election Day, it’s not as though he can give credible lectures about the virtues of American ballot counts.
Should he have given vocal support to the Mousavi movement? I don’t know about Iranian politics, but I know that one way to torpedo any reform movement in this country is to accuse it of getting outside support; people who want jobs or food are accused of being manipulated by “outside agitators” or “international conspiracies.”
In other words, explicit support from the United States is unlikely to improve the protesters’ credibility in Iraq.
Or should Obama have gone beyond vocal support to encouragement of a rebellion?
After the defeat of Germany in World War II, the Soviet Union installed puppet governments in eastern European nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. During the early 1950s, our Radio Free Europe encouraged rebellion and implied that American support would arrive.
Hungarians took this seriously in 1956, installing a new neutralist government and taking to the streets to support it. The Soviets responded with tanks. There was no American support as the rebellion was crushed. Many Hungarians felt betrayed.
In more recent times, after the first Gulf War in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush encouraged Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Saddam Hussein. They did. Hussein responded with massacres and poison gas. Bush the Elder looked the other way.
Despite having military forces on two sides of Iran, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is in no position to provide military support to the Iranian protesters. Even hinting at this would be irresponsible.
So it certainly appears that President Obama has spoken sensibly about the troubles in Iran, or at least a lot more sensibly than some of his right-thinking critics, who appear to have forgotten an old piece of street wisdom: “Don’t let your mouth write checks that your body can’t cash.”
It’s good advice for life in general, and especially appropriate for American foreign policy.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) of Salida is a freelance writer and history buff, and a frequent contributor to The Post.
