It’s early morning as I sit here in Baku, Azerbaijan and the news coverage of the Iranian protests is nearly 24 x 7 in the region.  For those of you in Rio Linda, Azerbaijan borders Iran to the north and east and sits on the Caspian Sea.

I wonder aloud about the nearly 500,000 Iranian protesters who are angry about the results of the recent election. To put this into US terms, that would equate to nearly 2 million people turning out in the streets!  To be sure, I have no illusions about the election itself.  This election can best be understood as a proxy challenge to the orthodoxy of the ruling clerics, Khamenei and Rafsanjani.  You might recall that Rafsanjani served as president of Iran and is considered a moderate internationally and is a proponent of the business class domestically.  Khamenei is a dogmatic conservative focused on retaining power through the Islamic ruling class.  However, this discussion is not meant to be treatise on Iranian politics.

In fact, the daily protests are even less about the selection of a particular leader as both Mousavi and Ahmidenijad represent the traditional politics of Iran.   The former being the father of Iran’s nuclear program and the latter the hard line anti-Zionist and international antagonist!  No, the outcome of the election while interesting is really instructive in context of the protests now ongoing in the country.  You see, the people of Iran know that their rights to expression are restricted by the Islamic regime and they can see that even Iraq enjoys a greater level of freedom than the people of their country.  It will be interesting to evaluate the impact of Bush’s legacy in Iraq in context of the model of Arab democracy that is evolving in that region and the impact of that policy on the Persian people of Iran.  To be sure, Twitter and other social networking technologies have made the youth of Iran acutely aware of the benefits of freedom that are now enjoyed by the Iraqi people.  You simply won’t hear this analysis in the MSM as it would suggest that the loosely expressed “Bush Doctrine” might indeed have taken root in this region.

No, the reality is that these protesters have simply had enough and are looking to express themselves in context of a leadership that has for too long suppressed these desires.  And of course, we see the resulting crackdown on these people which includes beatings, arrests and even killings as a result of the government’s actions.  Now we should think about this conflagration not in context of our international interests but in context of our domestic situation.  You see, these people, knowing the odds of success and the reprisals to come were willing to put themselves and their lives on the line for something they believed in.  The fact that Mousavi represented the alternative to Ahmidenijad was only part of the logic.  More importantly, these people understood the politics of their country and the lack of freedoms they were experiencing in that country.

As such, these protests were spectacular in their scale and in the likely outcome of repression and violence that was inevitable when the ruling mullahs are challenged by the people.  So as I sit considering the US I am amused by our own lack of enthusiasm for issues that this nation faces.  I wonder if we are willing to put ourselves on the line given the implications of the budget deficits and the likely impact of those deficits on our way of life and that of our children and grandchildren.  We see our own government issuing reports identifying protesters as possible terrorists, although cooler heads prevailed and the report was “corrected”.  I am struck by the fact that as our liberty is eroded, few are willing to stand firm for the principles of this nation and the God given rights of its people that the founding fathers understood.  All too often we shrug and expect someone else to correct the injustice. 

Think about it.  People have barely whimpered as the administration has fired CEO’s, placed incompetent or people of questionable ethics into key roles, hired inexperienced kids to manage huge government rescue plans, spent trillions of dollars with little to show, created new Czars to oversee actions in the private sector, proposed new super agency powers for the Federal Reserve and now wants to control eighteen percent of our economy through healthcare reform.  And where are the protestations?  Silence!  Instead we get an infomercial from the MSM and prime time “crisis” speeches from this president that are meant to urge actions that will correct the injustice without paying for the consequences of those actions. In fact, we have been relegated to a people who are to be lorded over by a government that tells us they know what is good for us without examining the likely outcomes.

And what are those outcomes?  Inflation, collapse of Social Security & Medicare, health care rationing, interest rate increases, boundless regulation, higher costs and higher taxes.  This is not simply lamentations of a conservative but the stark reality of life with a government out of control!  Unlike the mullahs, our “clerics” are proponents of big government levers of control.  They want you to accept the premise that they know the reality and all of this spending and redistribution is necessary to correct the imbalances of the system.  The reality is that we are so heavily regulated and so encumbered by government intrusion into every aspect of our businesses and our lives that we are unable to see the dilution of our individual liberty.  For while all of this has gone on for decades, no one in government has ever proposed a substantial limiting of those powers, regulations or spending!

So as I sit hear watching the images in Iran, I am impressed by the people who are willing to fight the fight, put their lives on the line and make their wishes known to a group of clerics who literally control every aspect of that society.  And yet, there they are, in the streets taking action and stating their case.  All the while recognizing the likely outcome – more repression and retaliation while exacting little substantive change.  And yet they march.

Meanwhile, at home we are seeing the future of our children being mortgaged through crushing debt and the growing power and pervasiveness of a government that wants us to believe that all of this regulation is for our own good!  So far, those arguments seem to be accepted as pabulum by the masses.  Yet the reality will be starkly understood by those same people as the jobs do not materialize, taxes rise, quality of life decreases and more and more people become dependent on all aspects of government for their daily lives.  No, we don’t have mullahs but we do have an administration that has “not let a good crisis go”.  I wonder whether we will finally rise up and make our own voices heard or have we lost so much that we are playing a “prevent defense” hoping to keep what we have left.  In this context, I am reminded of my own father’s views about this football analogy – the prevent defense prevents you from winning!