“These dictators who are killing their own people are incapable of manufacturing even simple things and they are killing their people with weapons they bought from America and their allies,” Ahmadi-nejad charged Monday.
“The American government and its allies should be held accountable for imposing dictatorships on these nations in the past 30 to 40 years … and they are now claiming that they are supporters of the people and democracy!”
As is the case with so much of what Ahmadi-nejad says, he appears not to have checked his facts first. The main bloodletting has been in Libya where the military’s arms are largely Russian. No American arms have been sold to Libya since Moammar Qadhdhafi took power there in 1969 and kicked the Americans out of the air base they had there.
In Egypt, where the military is almost entirely supplied by the United States, the Army refused to confront the people in the streets. The killing there appears to have been instituted primarily by armed members of the now-ousted party of President Hosni Mubarak.
In Bahrain, a total of seven people have been killed in weeks of protests.
These are the three countries where Ahmadi-nejad has come out in favor of protests.
As for the United States installing the dictatorships there, the Khalifa clan has ruled in Bahrain since 1820, the Egyptian regime took power as a result of anti-western revolution of Gamal Abel Nasser in 1952 and Qadhdhafi took power in an anti-Western coup in 1969.
Iran officials have not yet come out publicly in favor of any of the other protest movements in the Arab. Some Majlis deputies have spoken positively about the protests in Yemen and Morocco, but the government has not given its endorsement or called for the ouster of the current regimes there.
(The Islamic Republic supported the uprising in Tunisia, but only after the government there had collapsed.)
Protests, mostly fairly limited, have also erupted in Oman, Sudan, Iraq, Jordan and Algeria without eliciting any comment from Iran.
Last week, Ahmadi-nejad supported the protests in Libya and Bahrain saying, “I seriously want all heads of state to pay attention to their people and cooperate, to sit down and talk and listen to their words. Why do they act so badly that their people need to apply pressure for reforms?”
By opposition count, a total of 82 people have been killed in Iran since the protests began in June 2009. Eighty died in 2009 and another two in the February 14 protest last month.
Meanwhile, students staged a protest outside the UN office in Tehran last week. They were protesting the use of force by the Libyan regime and chanted, “Down with the United States” and “Down with Israel.”