Rick Santorum.Gage Skidmore/Flickr
At CNN’s Arizona debate Wednesday night, surging GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum blasted President Obama and his administration for standing idly by during the 2009 popular uprisings in Iran, better known as the Green Revolution.
Santorum, the former US senator from Pennsylvania, accused Obama of cutting funding for Iranian dissidents and failing to step in to support the revolution, which was sparked by widespread accusations of fraud in Iran’s 2009 presidential election. “We did absolutely nothing to help” the protesters and activists fueling the Green Revolution, Santorum argued. That echoed earlier attacks when Santorum said Obama “turned his back” on Iranian protesters.
Santorum’s off the mark here.
As FactCheck.org has pointed out, President Obama repeatedly supported the right of Iranians to protest what appeared to be widespread voting irregularities in an election that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claim 62 percent of the vote. “I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views,” Obama said three days after the election.
Days later, Obama railed against the Iranian government’s “violent and unjust actions against its own people.” The US, he said, “stands with all who…exercise” the “universal rights to assembly and free speech.” And there were more supporting statements like these from the administration.
It’s true that Obama didn’t dive headlong into supporting the Green Revolution as some might have hoped, but for good reason: the president insisted he did not want to give a Ahmadinejad a “tool” to undermine the revolution. Even then, as FactCheck.org puts it, “The fact is Obama treated both cases similarly: condemning the governments’ use of violence against their own citizens and supporting the protesters right to protest.”
