Iran protests updates

It’s kind of hard to blog these days without a post about Iran. So here’s my first for the day. Start with the hour-old AP update for those who tried to ignore Iran this weekend;

Drew M at Ace of Spades writes that the Islamic Republic’s regime overestimated the number of phony ballots by only a couple of million.

But they aren’t sure if the 3 million extra votes really matter given how much of a landslide Ahmadinejad won by.

Iran’s Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

Mousavi is continuing to call for protests and volunteering his own martydom. That alone puts him head and shoulders above all of the mullahs and leaders I’ve seen lately. al Sadr comes to mind. But his spokes people deny he said it;

His camp, meanwhile, denied reports that he had proclaimed himself ready for martyrdom on Saturday.

“Mousavi has never said this,” his close ally, Qorban Behzadiannejad, told the AP. Mousavi’s Web site also said statements that Mousavi was preparing for death were inaccurate.

But the Washington Post reports that Ahmadinejad is willing to help Mousavi achieve martyrdom;

The semiofficial Fars News Agency, which has strong ties to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quoted a law professor at Tehran University as saying that Mousavi’s actions were criminal.

“Through uncivil and illegal means, he created an environment for unrest and hooliganism,” Firouz Aslani told Fars News. “Contrary to his claims of lawfulness, he acted against the security of the nation and the interests of the system.”

Five members of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani family were arrested and released yesterday, ostensibly to send a message to the popular ex-president who reportedly supports Mousavi’s call for a revote.

Many are upset at our own President for taking his kids for ice cream during this critical moment in time on Saturday – but not me. I’m afraid if we criticize every single thing he does, we risk sounding like the crackpots on the Left did for eight solid years. Sean M makes the same point, sort of, at doubleplusundead. But I will make this point about our President – if he doesn’t start using this unrest in Iran to our advantage (vis-a-vis nuclear proliferation and Iran’s support of the Taliban) he’s going to miss his opportunity and he’ll be blamed for a nuclear Iran and every death of US troops in Afghanistan. It’s Back Obama’s problem now and he can’t blame it on George Bush from this moment forward.

In an interview on CBS’ Early Show, Obama said;

President Obama says he does not want to become a scapegoat for Iran’s leadership as postelection upheaval continues, but Republicans are still saying the new president is being too cautious.

“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Monday on CBS’ “The Early Show.” (Fox News link)

“We shouldn’t be playing into that,” he said in the interview, which was recorded Friday.

In other words, he’s declared the popular movement dead on arrival. If he had confidence in the uprising, Obama would praise them without caring what the mullahs thought – like Jimmy Carter when he bet on the wrong horse in 1979. Ronald Reagan bet on democracy in Nicaragua and Central America and was vindicated. Obama would rather deal with the status quo at the cost of democracy and lives of brown people.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Foreign Policy, Terror War