Both National Public Radio and (the eternally reliable) LA Times columnist Max Boot are singing slightly different arrangements of the same hymn today — pro-democracy dissidents in the Middle East need our help in order to bring democracy to their countries.

NPR’s Deborah Amos interviewed a Syrian physician, Kemel Labouni, who had spent time as a political prisoner for his opposition to the Ba’ath Party dictatorship in Damascus. The willingness to speak out against tyranny in such a place speaks well of the man’s courage. (The fact that Amos was able to conduct the interview in the first place speaks to the fact that someone in the Syrian government was okay with the interview happening.) But what had me screaming obscenities at the radio was Labouni’s request that the US do “anything” to bring “democracy” to Syria. Only that will stop the oppression and the torture. (I suggest he look next door at Iraq and notice that the former Ba’ath Party torturers are still in business, plying their trade for their new “democratic” masters.)

Senor Boot writes of Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji, who has been on a hunger strike for nearly two months to “protest his unwarranted imprisonment over the last five years for the crime of criticizing the theocratic thugs who have hijacked his country.” Boot laments the lack of press coverage in the United States of Ganji’s cause, and compares him with Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Ky, among others. It is probably a valid comparison, and again, I salute Ganji’s courage in confronting unjust and immoral state power.

But Boot suggests we must do more, not only to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons from getting into the wrong hands, but also “to make sure that the cry of freedom — Akbar Ganji’s cry — is not extinguished in Iran.”

I know what Boot wants — war. Lot’s more war. There is little I can add here about Max Boot’s bloodlust. But does Labouni really want to see visited upon his county, the people he shares a community with, the destruction, fury and evil that the American way of war brings? Does he really think “democracy” — whatever that is — will solve all his and his country’s problems? Does he really know what he’s asking for he plaintively asks for “anything?”

No, Sayyed Labouni and Sheikh Ganji, I respect and admire your struggles but I will not kill you or your countrymen. Ask of me anything else, but I will not sanction death or murder. Not by your governments. And certainly not by mine.