I beg you, hold back
Reader comment on item: Will Washington Betray Anti-Regime Iranians?
in response to reader comment: Iranians need to tell us what freedom is...

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Sep 4, 2008 at 16:12

The USA needs to stand back from what is happening inside Iran. I for one trust the MEK about as far as I can throw the Statue of Liberty. In their own circles, they boast about having been the first "revolutionary fighters" insdie "the nest of spies" back in 1979, so the USA has absolutely no business at all backing them. Their peculiar mixture of Islamicist radicalism and revolutionary Marxism is scarcely calculated to inculcate positive views of the USA.

We have stuck our collective noses into too many of the world's hotspots with nothing to show for it than the status of being almost universally disliked. Our only successes--the rebuilding of South Korea and Taiwan--are wasted, because it is clear that a hostile Communist China is poised to be the dominant player in that region, no matter what.

Much as I respect Dr. Pipes' expertise, I believe that official America is simply too clueless about the varioua regions of the Islamic world, Islam, people who don't speak English, and religion in general (including the Evangelicals living in the suburbs of Washington, DC itself) to craft reasonable policies to deal with a part of the world in which political ferment is couched in an alien, theological vocabulary.

Yes, Islamic radicalism is likely to make a mess of much of the world lying between the Kama and the Comorros, Nigeria and Nigxia, and Mauretania and Mindanao. But, perhaps, when the Islamic radicals' future "Army of Martyrs for the Liberation of Al-Quds" (or whatever they will call it) becomes just that and nothing more, and perhaps ends up making Israel roughly the size it was under David and Solomon out of military necessity, that fermenting Crescent of Crisis may just cool down and come to realize it has more to gain by cooperating with its civilizational near neighbors than by perpetrating Huntingtonian "bloody borders".

BUT: The USA embarking on a crusade against Iran will only freeze us where we've been for far too long. We cannot--and hence must not even try--save the Islamic world from itself.

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