"Canada will not 'stay out' of Iranian politics: Cannon," CBC, June 19, 2009.

[Meddling in the domestic politics of other countries is an American tradition. See Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, and most recently Lebanon where voters were threatened with a loss of aid money if they didn't vote right. Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine are instances US sponsored color revolutions that have certain cookie-cutter characteristics in common with the Iranian street protests--the focus on presumed electoral irregularities, the use of students and the fine-tuning of PR messages for liberal Anglophone audiences. It won't be the first time the Harper government has adopted a monkey-see-monkey-do policy in imitation of the most offensive aspects of American policy.

The CBC, which has done little to resist or even report on our PM's restrictive information policies as long as their reporters get a story of some kind, concentrates on Iran's media offenses. The performance of cops in the street--also not a strong basis for Canadian self-righteousness--is scarcely mentioned. The Iranian government is doing what governments do, what the Canadian government did during the October Crisis and the Gustafson Lake standoff. This is another impossible battle for the moral high ground in a war of pots and kettles. Impossible because governments--whether democratic or otherwise--seem structurally incapable of introspection, i.e., reflecting on or even acknowledging their own failures. -jlt]

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Canada will not remain silent on the political situation in Iran after Tehran added Canada to a list of countries that it says is meddling in its internal affairs.

The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Canada's chargé d'affaires in Tehran to a meeting on Thursday, reportedly complaining that Canada has been spouting meddlesome comments and decrying media coverage of the outcome of Friday's presidential election that showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning by a 2-to-1 margin.

Journalists working for foreign media have been restricted from first-hand reporting on the streets in an attempt to block images and eyewitness accounts from the rallies.

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