It's Not About Us

Cato's Justin Logan makes a good point about how Washington's pundit class is handling the protests in Iran:

The second, related tendency is that of narcissism: to make foreign countries’ domestic politics all about us. In this game, American observers anoint from afar one side the “good,” “pro-Western” team and the other the “bad,” “radical” one and urge Washington to press its thumb on the good side of the scale. But doing so would risk winding up Iranian nationalism, a very real force that binds Iranians together more tightly than their differences pull them apart.

It's more than narcissism, it's hubris. As if our words will sanctify the righteousness of a cause and our silence will damn it.

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