Iran protests through koolaid goggles

A few hours ago, I mentioned the Code Pink statement made on Friday that Obama was doing the right thing by staying out of the Iranian protests. Of course, the following day Obama reversed course and issued his toughest statement on the situation to date.

That’s the way I’d do it – if Code Pink thought I was right about something, I’d change course, too. But I set out to look at what the far Left is saying about the protests and they all seem to think that President Bush is still pulling the strings.

I also mentioned Paul Craig Roberts’ piece seething with Bush Derangement Syndrome. As evidence that the Iranian protests are a CIA plot, Roberts cites Kenneth Timmerman of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran;

For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim?

What Timmerman actually wrote on June 11th was;

As we’ve been saying all along, despite the popular enthusiasm for the elections, the State Department money and training being pumped into the “green revolution,” it won’t be the people who vote who count, but the people who count the votes. If past elections are any guide, the regime leadership will get together at 2:30 AM on Saturday morning, weigh the exit polls against the popular pressure from the street and the pressure from within the IRGC, and decide the outcome of the election based on a calculus of regime survival.

Maybe Timmerman knew there’d be a protest because he knows the limits of the Iranian people for being BS’d. It’s really no mystery, is it? Timmerman was also the first to notice Arab-speaking Hezzbollah trainees among the Iranian militias – does that make him an agent of Ahmadinejad?

Jon Raymond quotes the Pakistan Daily in his kooky rant based in fear of a neocon plot;

More evidence of orchestration is provided by the protesters’ chant, “death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad.” Every Iranian knows that the president of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed Westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator, as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him.

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.

On American TV, the protesters who are interviewed speak perfect English. They are either westernized secular Iranians who were allied with the Shah and fled to the West during the 1978 Iranian revolution or they are the young Westernized residents of Tehran.

Many of the demonstrators may be sincere in their protest, hoping to free themselves from Islamic moral codes. But if reports of the US government’s plans to destabilize Iran are correct, paid troublemakers are in their ranks.

So because the Pakistan Daily assures us that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are not dictators, we should believe it. I’d submit that if they conspired to alter the vote count, that alone makes them dictators. Wouldn’t you?

But Raymond thinks it’s still Bush that’s behind this stuff in Iran;

Interestingly, it may well be a fact that America is the force behind the uprising. Maybe not Obama.

The Left is still a little reticent about blaming Obama for anything.

Raymond’s further evidence of a neocon plot; everything is green!

It’s interesting how transparent and open to the media this Iranian uprising is. It seems like a well coordinated media campaign, complete with an official color (green), and the latest Web 2.0 social network technology. The Huffington Post is live blogging the Tweets and videos. Twitter is inundated with second by second accounts of the happenings in Iran. They even have little green overlays for Twitterers to place on their icons, in a showing of “solidarity”. The BBC and CCN have almost complete access, compared to the Iraq War. But is this solidarity and access contrived and seeded by the CIA?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are quite the opposite in transparency.

He goes on that our soldiers don’t get overlays for their Twitter avatars – so there must be a CIA-inspired plot in Iran. High-larious!

It seems then, more likely than not, that the CIA is now behind the uprising in Iran. This uprising is a little too convenient for Republicans and right wingers looking for a new emergency situation that will give them the right to exercise their military industrial complex to secure and control Mid-Eastern oil, and boost Shell, Exxon, General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin and KBR to boot. That’s been their plan all along, and Obama is messing it up.

He admits that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist – but that’s what neocons want you to think about him. So don’t you dare call him a lunatic, you neocons.

In the meantime, the Islamic Republic is fomenting their own conspiracy theories. Their foreign minister accused the Brown government (is that a “color revolution, too?) of interfering with the election;

We witnessed an influx of people before the election. Elements linked to the British secret service were flying in in droves, he charged.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also on Friday accused the evil British government of meddling in the June 12 election, which the opposition has protested was rigged.

Britain dismissed the charges as unacceptable and summoned the Iranian ambassador in protest. Tehran had summoned the British ambassador on Tuesday to protest London’s comments on post-election unrest.

Mottaki charged that Britain did not want anyone to go to the polls.

Back to the Right side of the spectrum, Don Surber writes that Obama had to give his statement yesterday to cover for the Left;

The only reason that President Obama issued a statement on Iran was to give the Left a talking point against the argument that yes, the Bush Doctrine rocked the house in Iran.

Obama does not have to give Andrew Sullivan gay marriage now. Obama let Sullivan off the hook by issuing a press release on Saturday that actually did more harm to teh Iranian protesters than good, because it is so mealy mouthed.

But Sullivan and the rest on the Left don’t care. For them, all Obama had to do was issue a press release and the world will turn all unicorns andrainbows.

I checked Surber’s site and don’t see any green overlays, so he must not be a neocon.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Code Pink, Foreign Policy