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After two days of criticism that he should explicitly side with the Iranian opposition, President Obama yesterday said he was "deeply troubled" by the Iranian regime’s willingness to resort to violence, and while it’s "up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be," he believes "the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected." Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council — whose blog has been a valuable resource for getting information from and about the opposition — told me that the president’s comment was "completely on point." Obama took a "strong stand for human rights, free speech and the [cessation] of violence," Parsi said, while at the same time making "sure that the issue is Iran, not the U.S.," and in particular "electoral fraud, and the rights of the people to get their votes counted."
Now, irony is when someone who helped broker the sale of American weapons to the Iranian government calls someone else "a leading apologist for the regime," but if you read my colleague David Weigel’s piece today about conservative advice for President Obama on Iran, you noticed that Michael Ledeen said exactly that about Parsi. Dismissing Parsi’s argument that external rhetorical support for the opposition could be used against it by Ahmadinejad, Ledeen told David, "Why would a statement supporting the freedom of the Iranian people undermine the movement?"
Parsi said he wouldn’t reply to personal attacks. But he said, "no serious human rights actvist has gone out and supported making the U.S. the issue in the election," since real human rights activists support "condemning the use of violence" by the regime. "What these conservatives are saying — they’ve got no track record of supporting real human rights in Iran, and are only seeking to advance their own agenda" by making "the U.S. part of the issue," Parsi said. "They pretend to speak in favor of the protesters without ever considering what the Iranian people want. And the people who brought us the Iraq war don’t have a leg to stand on on this issue."
Crossposted to The Streak.
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You should ask Trita how many times he met with Ahmadinejad when he came to New York for the UN General Assembly.
And that would be evidence of his sympathy to Ahmadinejad? I’d better remember never to meet with anyone I disagree with.
If Trita is an apologist for the regime, nothing that he’s been doing for the past several days makes any sense at all. Ledeen should know better than to smear him like this.
Well lots of people who explained away Ahmadinejad in 2005 today look at the crowds in the streets of Tehran and have come to the sensible conclusion that Iran is not a democracy, and that Iranians are furious at their regime. But at best Trita is very late on this and I don’t think NIAC has any better channel to the opposition than your twitter feed. I welcome the netleft’s about face on Iran. Michael Ledeen knew this regime was not a democracy in 2005, when also there were widespread reports of vote fraud, but most of the opposition boycotted. He knew it in 2004 when the Mullahs disqualified all the reformist-Khatami legislators from running for re-election, he knew it in 2002 when the show trials started for Abbas Abdi, he knew it in 1999 when the students at Tehran University were taken away to Evin and he knew it in 1996 at the start of the chain murders. In this period, I remember ceasless calls for engagement and drivel about how Ahmadinejad was an “iranian neocon”–a sinister formulation that trivializes a stalinst and demonizes Republicans.