That response was so much smarter than the usual US-politician’s urge to “denounce” other governments in ways that have the opposite effect of strengthening the criticized regime’s hand.
<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\nLa transcripci\u00f3n:<\/p>\n
\nQ: Mr. President, on Iran, does the disputed election results affect \u2014 there\u2019s been violence in the street \u2014 in any way change your willingness to meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad without preconditions? And also, do you have anything to say, any message to send to people who are on the streets protesting, who believe their votes were stolen and who are being attacked violently?
P\u00fachica, qu\u00e9 bueno que tenemos adultos y con cordura en La Casa Blanca. Obama no pudo dar mejor respuesta a la pregunta sobre lo que pensaba sobre los acontecimientos en Ir\u00e1n. Sobre estas reacciones de Obama, Al Giordano dice lo sugiente: That response was so much smarter than the usual US-politician’s urge to “denounce” other governments in ways that have the opposite effect of strengthening the criticized regime’s hand. Smart, but deadly: It reframes the question of legitimacy from the easily clouded matters of electoral fraud to that of the more visible and gut-wrenching images that the whole world is watching as a result of the struggle to break the information blockade. On those terms alone, the regime is illegitimate, and the President’s words underscored that much more strongly by showing it, rather than just telling it. La transcripci\u00f3n: Q: Mr. President, on Iran, does the disputed election results affect \u2014 there\u2019s been violence in the street \u2014 in any way change your willingness to meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad without preconditions? And also, do you have anything to say, any message to send to people who are on the streets protesting, who believe their votes were stolen and who are being attacked violently? PRESIDENT OBAMA: Obviously all of us have been watching the news from Iran. And I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran\u2019s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football \u2014 or discussions with the United States. Having said all that, I am deeply troubled by the violence that I\u2019ve been seeing on television. I think that the democratic process \u2014 free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent \u2014 all those are universal values and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they\u2019re, rightfully, troubled. My understanding is, is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place. We weren\u2019t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can\u2019t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election. But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it\u2019s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views. Now, with respect to the United States and our interactions with Iran, I\u2019ve always believed that as odious as I consider some of President Ahmadinejad\u2019s statements, as deep as the differences that exist between the United States and Iran on a range of core issues, that the use of tough, hard-headed diplomacy \u2014 diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries \u2014 is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon; making sure that Iran is not exporting terrorist activity. Those are core interests not just to the United States but I think to a peaceful world in general. We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we\u2019ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we\u2019ve seen on the television over the last few days. And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching. And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[666,23,494,489,662,665,510,667],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-al-giordano","tag-barack-obama","tag-dailykos-tv","tag-iran","tag-iranian-elections","tag-mahmoud-ahmadinejad","tag-potus","tag-the-field"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamaravilla.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}