No, Support the Freedom Fighters

Win or lose, democratic revolution has broken out in Iran. Even the fragmentary reports from journalists operating under tight regime control in very limited areas of the country show that the mass demonstrations now involve all classes and regions. This is no longer purely or even primarily a "student" movement, as it has been for the past four years -- although many of its leaders come from student ranks. People of all ages, from all walks of life, in every major city in the country, have taken to the streets every night for over a week to demand an end to the Islamic Republic and the free election of a secular, democratic government.

No, we should listen to the "Larry Johnson's" of this world and do nothing. Johnson, a former clinton counterterrorism "expert" presumably feels about Iran as Jimmah Carter felt about our "inordinate fear of communism."

Johnson is a typical pathetic, self-deluding fool, that is, he's a leftist.

Support for democratic revolution comes naturally to Americans, and we all thrill at the spectacle of brave people challenging corrupt tyrants in the name of freedom. Yet a surprising number of commentators and policymakers are fighting against the prospect of open American support for the Iranian revolutionaries. Their most recent argument is that open approval and, worse still, modest material support from the United States would somehow tarnish the purity of the Iranian uprising and even prove counterproductive.
This sort of argument is not new; we have heard it whenever we have had a president brave enough to speak the truth to tyranny. We were told that it would be counterproductive to denounce the gulag system and support the Soviet dissidents, that the Jackson-Vanik law (linking trade with the Soviet Union to freedom to emigrate for Soviet Jews) would be counterproductive, and that we must at all costs refrain from calling for greater human rights in the People's Republic of China. Yet every time another tyrant falls, his surviving victims invariably tell us that our words of support gave hope and strength to the freedom fighters and weakened the resolve of their oppressors. Bukovsky, Sharansky, Ginsburg, Walesa and Havel know the power of American support, as do Gorbachev, Jaruzelski, Milosevic and Marcos.

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