Iran's Protests and the Myth of Benign Silence
America will be blamed for the unrest anyway. Why not speak up?
When protesters in the Middle East take to the streets against their regimes, the United States finds itself in a dilemma, particularly when those regimes are allies. The United States, as a statement of policy, is committed to supporting democracy abroad and standing with democracy activists and dissidents. But how does it do that if it’s also committed to the survival of governments that—also as a matter of policy—deny their citizens basic freedoms?
Certain dilemmas remain, though, even when the regimes in question aren’t friends, but rather enemies like Iran, which has witnessed its largest protests in years, spreading across more than 80 cities. The so-called
