Obama Says His Response to 2009 Iran Protests ‘In Retrospect…Was a Mistake’
Patrick Goodenough | October 17, 2022(CNSNews.com) – As the world watches and reacts to anti-regime protests in Iran that entered a second month at the weekend, former President Barack Obama conceded that, in hindsight, decision-making in his White House on how to respond to an earlier protest movement was wrong.
In an interview on a podcast hosted by former Obama White House staffers, he recalled that in the internal debate on how to react to the 2009 “Green Movement” protests some argued that vocal support from the U.S. would undermine the protestors.
“You guys will recall there was a big debate inside the White House about whether I should publicly affirm what was going on with the Green Movement,” Obama told the “Pod Save America” hosts in the episode aired on Saturday. “Because a lot of the activists were being accused of being tools of the West and there was some thought that we were somehow gonna be undermining their street cred in Iran if I supported what they were doing.”
“And in retrospect, I think that was a mistake.”
Obama told the podcast hosts – former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, former advisor for strategy and communication Dan Pfeiffer, and former speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett – that the U.S. should “shine a spotlight” and “express some solidarity” whenever it sees “a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom.” . .
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/international/patrick-goodenough/obama-says-his-response-2009-iran-protests-retrospectwas
This, IMO may be the greatest failure of his eight years in office. Iran could have been flipped. Half of its population was age 25 and younger at the time with zero remembrance of the '79 hostage crisis. Not only did Obama screw this up, but he sold out all of our CIA assets there, leading to the executions of at least two dozen people. And then he flew a plane full of cash to Iran to help pay for their nuclear program. How much different it would have been if Iran had undergone the same revolutionary movement as Egypt and had gone the way as Iraq.
