Perhaps the president should stop talking for a while:
President Joe Biden on Thursday told supporters “we’re gonna free Iran” after audience members appeared to call on him to address the ongoing protests that have spread through that country in the aftermath of the death of a young woman in the custody of its security forces.
“Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran,” Biden said in an aside during a campaign rally for Democratic Rep. Mike Levin. He added, “They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”
Nothing good will come from the president making off-the-cuff promises about “freeing” another country, especially when it is a country with a long history of U.S. interference in its internal affairs. At best, this is careless, empty rhetoric that the Iranian government will cite as “proof” that foreign governments are behind the protests, and at worst it suggests that the president may be entertaining the idea of trying to exploit the protests to push for regime change. I assume this is just a case of Biden being careless, but it is still harmful to the protesters and it foolishly gives encouragement to hardliners in the U.S.
The United States is not going to “free Iran,” because it is not within our government’s power to do this and our government has no right to interfere there in any case. It is not up to “us” to do this because it is not our country, and the Iranian people are the only ones that can change their political system to one that most of them would find acceptable. I might add that our government is not really interested in a free Iran, but in a compliant one, and a genuinely representative Iranian government is not what Washington wants. The U.S. would rather have a cooperative dictator in Iran than democratically elected leaders that pursued an independent course, and our government has never worked to make the Iranian people freer. On the contrary, our government’s economic warfare against their country has made the Iranian people less prosperous and less free. You cannot continue to impose “maximum pressure” sanctions on a country if you want it to be freer.
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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
Biden meant “free Iran’s oil” like in 1954 when a US-led coup imposed an oil Consortium Agreement.
As long as Biden and the new pro-war democrats hold sway, we’re basically screwed, as is the rest of the planet.