“President Bush has consistently reached out to Iranian people, a nation that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute dubbed the “most pro-American in the entire region, if not the world”, and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called “the ultimate red state.”, while the un-elected anti-American government wields a minuscule 15-20% support.”
True, Carter was and is a disaster, and Obama is a regrettable joke on foreign policy, but I’m not sure those who subscribe to the sentiments in the above paragraph are much more in touch with reality.
They could not possibly know what they claim to know about how pro-American the Iranian people are. They have little idea what the people in smaller towns and cities, and rural areas think about America. Just because there have been student protests, and just because there are Iranian immigrants in the US who make the same claims, does not mean that anyone really knows how pro-American or anti-American or indifferent most Iranians actually are. Iraqis in the West were telling us how ready the Iraq was for democracy.
The same people thought Iraqis would embrace freedom and democracy as soon as Saddam’s Republican Guard had been routed and Baghdad occupied. And, here we are five years later still trying to stabilize the place, and the government, and with no good idea what will happen once our military is drawn down and security left to the Iraqis loyal to the present government.
This sort of happy talk about cultures and religions and peoples that we don’t understand so well has gotten us into bad situations before, and it can again. And the sort of unproven and unprovable statements as in the first paragraph are what often leads us into such situations.
Rubin and Friedman must record each other’s voices on cassette tape, swap the tapes, listen to each other’s fantasies, and then write “sources say the Iranian people are really pro-American”.
A couple of numb nutz.
They fail to understand that the mullahs and their associated Assahollahs have had nearly 30 years to purge most if not all American-sympathies out of the general population. The few ‘pro-American’ Iranians that might exist have to do so by keeping their burqas hiding their faces, and their mouths full of nothing but ‘allah akbars’.
The only successful way to eliminate the Iranian Islamofascist Scourge is to employ the Edward Teller Urban Renewal Method.
And the sooner the better.