The Center Cannot Hold

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer..." - Yeats, The Second Coming

I have to admit, my stomach turns when I read reports of young people getting shot, beaten and hacked and stacked like cordwood then to hear fucks like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei whining and puling about being "bullied."

It's plain that this democracy is no longer one in name only. It's also just as obvious that both the government and Mousavi have completely lost control over their people. The battle for democracy, for now, is being literally fought in the streets of Tehran. And, for now, one side is still much better-armed than the other.

Whatever reason our president ever had for maintaining some distance has long since been proven fallacious. This is a human rights emergency every bit as pressing as that in Darfur, which still rages unabated. To stand by and let this happen, content merely to watch at scenes like this, is to contribute to the bloody anarchy that we're now seeing in Iran.

If Iran really was a democracy, then Obama would e right in allowing it to reassert itself. However, this isn't a democracy reasserting itself. This is a blood-soaked dictatorship desperately lashing out to keep itself in power.

Obama loves to quote Dr. King and his long moral arc that bends toward righteousness. But there's nothing righteous about this frustrating noninvolvement. This lack of democracy that is far worse than anything we'd ever seen out of Iraq that justified our invasion cries out for out involvement. If anyone out there knows a petition to sign to send to the President to stop this madness either with our own troops and getting NATO to send their own peacekeeping forces, I'd surely appreciate it and so would the people of Iran who are now literally calling for our help.