Biden's 'Free Iran' Blunder

Nothing good will come from the president making off-the-cuff promises about “freeing” another country, especially when it is a country with a long history of U.S. interference in its internal affairs

Perhaps the president should stop talking for a while:

President Joe Biden on Thursday told supporters “we’re gonna free Iran” after audience members appeared to call on him to address the ongoing protests that have spread through that country in the aftermath of the death of a young woman in the custody of its security forces.

“Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran,” Biden said in an aside during a campaign rally for Democratic Rep. Mike Levin. He added, “They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”

Nothing good will come from the president making off-the-cuff promises about “freeing” another country, especially when it is a country with a long history of U.S. interference in its internal affairs. At best, this is careless, empty rhetoric that the Iranian government will cite as “proof” that foreign governments are behind the protests, and at worst it suggests that the president may be entertaining the idea of trying to exploit the protests to push for regime change. I assume this is just a case of Biden being careless, but it is still harmful to the protesters and it foolishly gives encouragement to hardliners in the U.S.

The United States is not going to “free Iran,” because it is not within our government’s power to do this and our government has no right to interfere there in any case. It is not up to “us” to do this because it is not our country, and the Iranian people are the only ones that can change their political system to one that most of them would find acceptable. I might add that our government is not really interested in a free Iran, but in a compliant one, and a genuinely representative Iranian government is not what Washington wants. The U.S. would rather have a cooperative dictator in Iran than democratically elected leaders that pursued an independent course, and our government has never worked to make the Iranian people freer. On the contrary, our government’s economic warfare against their country has made the Iranian people less prosperous and less free. You cannot continue to impose “maximum pressure” sanctions on a country if you want it to be freer.

It is appropriate to criticize the Iranian government’s use of force against protesters, but it is wrong to give protesters false encouragement that the U.S. is somehow going to come to their aid. Even if the U.S. were to make such an attempt, our government is so clueless about Iran that it would not know where to begin. Any effort to interfere on behalf of the protesters would almost certainly backfire on them and on the U.S. I’m sure that the president wasn’t thinking about any of this when he said “we’re gonna free Iran” because it was a cheap applause line a few days before an election, but his careless remark will likely have unwanted consequences in the weeks and months to come.

The best thing that the president could do to show solidarity with the Iranian people is stop waging economic war against them and to make it easier for Iranians living abroad to send back remittance payments to their relatives and friends. That might not directly lead to any major political changes, but it would help ease the burden that Iranians have been carrying for all these years. Granting sanctions relief is one constructive action that the president could take now, so of course that is not being considered.