The goal: tarnish Iran's current regime as much as possible
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 2:56AM ARTICLE: Iran Unrest Reveals Split In U.S. on Its Role Abroad, By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, June 23, 2009
An interesting article on the split between Cold War instincts and post-Cold War sensibilities. In a broadcast world, you need to broadcast your support, but is the same required in a peer-to-peer world, or does that just come off as old-school propaganda?
There would seem to be some middle ground between poisoning the well with Iran's leadership for another long stretch (we have so much history of regime-change-encouragement there) and not doing enough to reward the immense courage of the protesters, who are indeed quite inspiring.
So what additional skin can we put in the game to reward such behavior and highlight the evil of the crackdown?
I would say anything that keeps this thing as Iranian as possible (as one aide put it) but keeps it as top-of-the-global news food chain as possible. Also, anything that allows the global community to display its displeasure, so working the UN seems good.
In short, we want to make this period as uncomfortable and as revealing as possible for the Iranian regime. We cannot stop the crackdown, but we can tarnish the regime with it now and for a long time, as I--again--expect this to be a lengthy, Solidarnosc-like struggle if it is going to succeed.
Meaning big labor strikes are next.
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