Metallica vs. the Ayatollah >>

After WWII when the cosignatories of the Atlantic Charter scattered their separate ways, America stood astride the world as an industrial giant and a military superpower, an awesome beacon of light and liberty. Millions of immigrants risked life, limb, total divestiture, persecution, and absolute uncertainty, viewing the intrepid dream of human liberty as something more shining and worthwhile than avoiding the enduring hardships of this waking dream called life. In his valediction to the political theatre, Barry Goldwater wrote that we, a people who laud the blessings of human liberty, ought to have held a more stalwart position with the Hungarian Freedom Fighter. Goldwater writes:

“A truly offensive-minded strategy would recognize that the captive peoples are our strongest weapon in the war against Communism, and would encourage them to overthrow their captors.”

Sounds rather NeoCon for Goldwater to say, right? Decades later, the same people who trudged in manacles through the termite mound of totalitarianism were the most unabashed to support us in the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of a bloody secular tyrant. Borrowing from the Goldwater template, Ronald Reagan made sweeping moral pronouncements regarding the evils of centralized planning and thereby separated the Soviet government from the Russian people in his arguments. And during the vespers of the Soviet Empire, American rock band Metallica appeared in a Moscow air field in 1991 to thousands of adoring Russian kids. Urban legend has it that Mikhail Gorbachev personally invited the string-thrashers to jam in a newly-liberated Russia, perhaps a nod from the reformer acknowledging the corrupting and subversive power of rock music…a rage against a machine, if you will. And perhaps it was proof that blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and Rock were the soft power to spur democratic youth aggression, long before the Internet.

The current rigged Iranian election stands as a spectacle to the DNC, a party who themselves hold no reservations about rigging elections. And amidst this protest of millions of students, businessmen, and citizens screaming in defiance to their bloated elite and paramilitary oppressors, their only succor has been online gadgets like Twitter, Facebook, and Google—all pale replacements for the strong moral denouncement that the de facto commander of the free world should give. In recent days, the White House has rightly changed its tone to satisfy Congressional Republicans, but momentary lip service to this movement will not suffice. Gird your loins. We cannot be seen by the world as silent, because pure silence will be judged as a blessing to the men with the AKs, and the fact that so many protest signs are in English is an obvious gesture that they are speaking directly to the West, hoping to keep current the international moment.

Let me be unequivocal in stating that we cannot fight the battles of the world in every corner. We have a military stretched far and wide, paired with a reckless scale back in budgeted weaponry on the horizon to boot. And unless the despot of a rogue regime plunges his claws into America or her free allies, we should not and cannot bolster a people too apathetic to fight and die for their own namesake. Such arguments have been made concerning the Iraq war, and although I would disagree with that assessment for a number of reasons, Iran is a similar case to the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein. Both people wanted freedom, and we can either sit by, as spectators to a debacle, or we can stand on the principles in which we believe. Obama must lead the bully pulpit against this empire the way Reagan did, but he must do so not brandishing the American flag as a cudgel, or simply blessing particular sides, but allowing Iranians to see a difference in two distinct qualities of life. Instead of an all-out shooting war, we could fund anti-terror operations, covert democratic movements, and provide varying forms of support, thereby turning a tactic on the Iranian regime that it has used to fight proxy wars against Israel, democratic movements in Lebanon, and in other satellite nations. All of the aforementioned would be cheaper than Obamacare. But we cannot astroturf this democratic movement, as it must be owned and operated by the Iranian people, and not be perceived of as United States imperialism to moderate Iranians. If the movement reaches its fullest extent, the post-overthrow task of sifting through the cooled embers of their toppled police state -- keeping the good, and discarding the bad -- is a task we can leave to the same Iranians currently fleeing tear gas in the streets of Tehran.

If we ever do take overt military action against the government of Iran, we should do so not as emancipators, but in response to brazen nuclear ambitions, IAEA non-compliance, funding Hezbollah and Hamas in their terrorist acts against allies, and for the ever-encroaching nearness of plutonium on E-bay. Ahmadinijead is not simply refusing inspectors and denying culpability like Saddam did to the world, but is stridently announcing progress in firebrand updates to chronicle Israel’s imminent destruction. If Israel's hand is forced, all the conflicting dilemmas swirling about the election can be precluded with an honest path to a war of subversion on our part;  namely a fight that is merit-worthy of America and Israel’s claim to mutual defense.

Yet we cannot fool ourselves. The alternative to Mahmoud Ahmadinijead himself initiated Iran’s nuclear program. For that reason, let us hope that the public sturm und drang surrounding election goes beyond the personalities of two men, and into higher ideals. Were the people voting for a nuclear playboy alternative, or did they vote to the most liberal candidate that the Ayatollah’s filtered vetting process allowed, voting beyond the two men to a general concept of reform? The Iraqis seemed to want freedom from Saddam Hussein (which given his decades of regional truculence, attacks on Israel, and astonishing genocide, it was reason enough to oust the thug), while Iran, on the other hand, seems to just want freedom itself. Their struggle is not simply defined by the absence of a tyrant, rather the presence of a faceless idea.

To close, pothead comedian Jim Breuer once jested that Metallica is the only band with its own private army, leading rowdy fans on destructive riots through youth charisma and rebellion, all while upholding copyright laws and policing their followers' musical sharing. So the question lingers: what can Metallica teach us about democracy? >>