Would There Be Green In Iran Without Purple In Iraq?

Interesting question posed by Bruce at Gay Patriot:   "Raise your hand if you think the Iranians would be marching now if Saddam had not been taken out in 2003 and successful elections [held] in Iraq?"   And he's not the only one.   He points to an article by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times: For years we have been told, we neocons, that other cultures don’t want our liberty, our American freedom. Yankee go home! But it isn’t true. Because millions of Iranians do want it. Yes, they want their sovereignty, and demand respect for their nation and its great history. No, they don’t want foreign interference and manipulation. But they still insist upon their rights and their freedom. They know that liberty isn’t American or British. It is Iranian, it is human.   It is not part of their [Iran's] precious heritage that someone be charged with a capital offence for circulating a petition on women’s rights. Nor that nine-year-old girls should be eligible for the death penalty, and children hanged for their crimes. There is no special Iranian will, even given their religious conservatism, that students should be flogged in public for being flirtatious, and homosexuals hanged in the streets.   The protests for Mr Mousavi do not just expose the lie of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory. They expose the lie that there is something Western in wanting democracy and human rights. Yet how many commentators, particulary from the so-called progressive Left, have given their smug and smarmy sermons about "respecting" other people's cultures and how other people may be quite happy to not have the freedoms that we enjoy?   Bruce ends with a quote that bears repeating.   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.   Surely some of the most simple and yet profound words ever written in the history of humanity.

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