McCain: The Iranian Resistance and Us

Senator John McCain has written an essay about the importance of last year's Green Revolution in Iran:

One year ago this week in Iran, the desire for democracy gave birth to an indigenous political reform movement that is more promising and more consequential than anything the Middle East has seen in a generation. One year ago, the conventional wisdom held that the prospect for political evolution in Iran was dim and distant. But as it often is, that conventional wisdom was utterly wrong: After the Iranian people were denied their right to a free and fair election, the world watched in awe as a sea of protestors—by some estimates, as many as three million Iranians—swelled into streets all around the country. Ordinary Iranians realized that they could not remain neutral in the struggle for human rights in their country, and they became part of it. As a result, history was made before our very eyes: one year ago, democratic change in Iran looked rather improbable, but just one week later it looked virtually inevitable.

Unfortunately, we also watched the ensuing crackdown, which was as swift as it was brutal. Peaceful protestors were attacked in the streets by masked agents of the Iranian regime, then dragged away to the darkest corners of cruelty. Many of Iran’s best and brightest were forced to flee in fear from the land they love, and to seek asylum in places such as Iraq and Turkey, where they remain today as refugees. We read the desperate pleas of terrorized Iranians as they shouted for help through whatever cracks they could make in Iran’s government-censored Internet. And then, on June 20, 2009, the entire world watched as a young woman named Neda bled to death in the streets of Tehran. And on that day, I believe, we witnessed the beginning of the end of this offensive government in Iran.

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