As the crisis in Iran deepens following Friday's disputed election and Western democracies debate its legitimacy, it seems important to remind ourselves that the burden is not on the people to prove state impropriety but on the state to demonstrate that it is expressing the will of the people. The verdict is unmistakable. Even the MSM is catching on.
NYT editorial:
There is no transparency or accountability in Iran, so we may never know for sure what happened in the presidential election last week. But given the government’s even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud.
On Sunday, as protests continued, authorities detained more than 100 prominent opposition members and ordered some foreign journalists to leave the country. According to news reports, Mr. Moussavi remained in his home but was being closely watched. In a triumphalist press conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad seemed to threaten his rival, declaring that the former prime minister "ran a red light, and he got a traffic ticket."
If the election were truly "real and free" as Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted, the results would be accepted by the voters and the government would not have to resort to such repression.
WaPo editorial:
What we can say for certain is that the election was neither free nor fair. When a regime peremptorily chooses which candidates can run; shutters newspapers, Web sites and television bureaus; silences text messaging; and throws critics into prison -- such a regime should not expect its pronouncements on election results to garner any respect.
So, as a first step, the Obama administration should take care not to signal more respect for those results than they merit. Administration officials are right to be responding cautiously and to let the process play out. But there are principles that the administration could be defending even now, squarely supporting the rule of law and democratic expression in Iran. The United States could make clear that a government wanting to be taken seriously by the international community should not use violence against peaceful protests, arrest opposition leaders and their followers, jam radio broadcasts, or block Internet use. It could call for a transparent process to address opposition claims of fraud.
Of course, there are two huge problems for the Obama administration in addressing the situation in Tehran: they don't want to undermine the reformists by feeding the notion that they represent a foreign threat, and President Obama is tasked with preventing the regime from developing a nuclear bomb.
So with the eyes of the world set to focus on Barack Obama this week in anticipation of an eloquent defense of democracy and human rights--despite the obvious reasons constraining him, it would seem prudent to project American idealism through his hero and our Greatest President. Despite all the current diplomatic constraints, America remains a powerful symbol for all aspiring freedom. President Lincoln challenged the nation to support freedom for all. His call for a new birth of freedom continues to echo as a challenge for the world today.
Abraham Lincoln on people power:
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Abraham Lincoln on change:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried.
Abraham Lincoln on responsibility:
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Abraham Lincoln on freedom of the individual:
As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
Abraham Lincoln on government:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
[T]hat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln on the America:
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.