Iran Matters

Andrew Sullivan is doing some of the best and most important coverage of the protests in Iran right now. There’s also Twitter, of course, and the mainstream media is just beginning to catch up.

Why is this important? Glenn Greenwald, Daily Reveille, and my friend RealThog offer some thoughts that illustrate different aspects of why people should care. Laura Ann Gilman makes a good point, too. You can’t stop the signal. Our interconnectedness as human beings is reaching the point of the instantaneous and obvious.

This would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. It was unthinkable even fifty years ago. It is incredible and amazing that the whole world can be watching this sort of thing go down, that we can have updates of events as they happen from the people actually involved. Wow. Just…wow. And Twitter responding to calls to change its scheduled maintenance and downtime for 1AM or so Iran time so the protesters can keep using the service was a Good Call by a company. They’ve bought themselves a lot of credibility and goodwill with that one move.

I am reserving judgment on a lot of things related to this issue at the moment. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the people of Iran, or a significant portion of them, are protesting peacefully and do not trust the election results. The government has replied with truncheons and jackboots. I don’t think it will go so far as revolution, but I’m thinking Ahmadinejad didn’t win the election cleanly or clearly and what happens now will be incredibly important not just for the people of Iran but in the broader Middle East and by extension, the world.

And I’m thinking, thank God we have a President who thinks before he speaks now.

Wow. Just…wow.

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