nabat

Mr. President @POTUS: Look out your window. Look at Lafayette Park. Look at the four corners. You’ll see Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kościuszko, and von Steuben, two Frenchmen, one Polish patriot, and one Prussian officer. Foreign commanders whose countries helped George Washington and a ragtag revolutionary army defeat the most powerful empire on earth. That is the American origin story. A revolution against tyranny that survived because others stepped in to help. There was no shame in it then, and there is no shame in it now. Now look to the center of the park. You’ll see Andrew Jackson, not President Jackson, but General Jackson, the man who fought the British at New Orleans. Yet even with that victory, America still lost the War of 1812. The White House was burned. The republic nearly collapsed. This young country almost disappeared because no one came to its aid when it stood alone. When the Iranian regime says it wants to “negotiate,” that is not diplomacy, it is delay. Authoritarian regimes negotiate to buy time, to regroup, to identify protesters, and to finish the job. If this regime survives, what follows will not be stability, it will be a bloodbath that locks their power in permanently. America has never been neutral in the great moral struggles of history. Europe after World War II, large parts of Asia freed from imperialism and totalitarianism, Kuwait liberated from invasion, genocide confronted in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yes, mistakes were made. But Iran is different. This is a people openly demanding regime change, under live fire, in real time. You have a historic opportunity. If you give the Iranian people hope and then legitimize their executioners through deals and hesitation, history will not forgive it. Look at Lafayette Park. America knows what happens when free people are abandoned, and it knows what happens when allies step forward at the decisive moment.