Iran would kill me for this post

Steven M. Nielson pretty much covers it all.

Forget that the Iranian Parliament is guilty of funding the corruption of a generation, by airing children's shows that promote suicide bombing as a means to an (un)holy end for the sake of defending their Islamic Republic. Forget that they are responsible for terror training funding throughout the world. And forget that they are the epitome of corruption of civilized society... But let one blogger attempt to speak out against that corruption, and the state will have their heads (literally).

At what point do we step in to save the life of someone who puts it all on the line to speak out against his government? We waited entirely too long to step in the way of Saddam Hussein and the mass murder and torture he put the people of Iraq through - if America had finished the job during the First Gulf War, we could have done so without having to run a second front in Afghanistan and may have even averted some of the terrorist activity that Hussein sponsored in the form of $25,000 payments to Palestinian homicide bombers. Wouldn't it have been nice to have an ally in the Middle East, in the form of a democratic Iraq, during the strikes against Afghanistan? Instead, we allowed Hussein to consolidate his power by silencing all dissenting groups through chemical warfare and mass murder. We're about to let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad do the same thing. As long as the silencing starts on a small scale, maybe we won't notice.