When Nico Pitney of HuffPo and beyond appeared at the Obama press conference yesterday and was given (to the rage of many old hands) the position of Second Questioner, it was apparently by prearrangement. Pitney had been factored into the news conference by the administration specifically to ask a question Nico had put together from protesters in Iran. He affirmed, in an interview this morning, that the President did not know what the substance of the question would be, only that it would be about Iran.
Here's the exchange. I wonder if Obama would have given Pitney such a benign, measured response if the question had been asked today as the videos and news accounts of widespread brutalities pour in. His hope for a "peaceful path" isn't reassuring when the Iranian regime is clubbing women to death or throwning them off bridges, is it?
QUESTION: Yes, I did, but I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian. We solicited questions on tonight from people who are still courageous enough to be communicating online. And one of them wanted to ask you this: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of -- of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?
MR. OBAMA: Well, look, we didn't have international observers on the ground. We can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country.
What we know is that a sizable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, consider this election illegitimate. It's not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There is significant questions about the legitimacy of the election.
And so, ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States.
And that's why I've been very clear, ultimately, this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government.
What we can do is to say, unequivocally, that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with the peaceful dissent, that -- that spans cultures, spans borders.
And what we've been seeing over the Internet and what we've been seeing in news reports violates those norms and violates those principles.
I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that -- that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.
