Posted on 07/02/2009 5:01:14 AM PDT by Tolik
Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side
Last month, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest a rigged presidential election. Our president was extremely cautious in his initial criticism of the Iranian government’s fierce crackdown against the protestors. At first, President Obama said that the United States — given our history in Iran — should not be “meddling” in the country’s internal affairs.
Obama suggested that the leading opposition candidate, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi, might not be that different from the entrenched theocracy’s choice, the incumbent (and declared winner of the June election) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Finally, as both the crowds in the Iranian streets and the violence against them increased over the next several days, Obama conceded that he was “appalled” at the clerics’ repression.
In defense of the president’s hesitation, some of his supporters argued that our initial neutrality was aimed at not spoiling the administration’s earlier efforts at outreach to Iran’s Islamist regime. We were taking the realistic long view, they added, in which negotiations with the clerics might still curb Iran’s nuclear-weapon aspirations and their support for terrorism. As Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, put it, the “legitimacy” of the regime was “not the critical issue in terms of our dealings with Iran.”
Perhaps Obama also wishes to avoid former President Bush’s muscular approach in the Middle East, which ended up in costly efforts to foster legitimate constitutional governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, after removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side in Iran. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, isn’t suddenly going to embrace the U.S. because of Obama’s more charismatic approach, much less stop subsidizing terrorists and developing a nuclear arsenal.
For over three decades, the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations all reached out — both overtly and covertly — to the Iranian theocracy, with offers of normalizing relations, secret arms deals, back-channel meetings, and occasional apologies. But the clerics today are as anti-American as they were in 1979. And they’re still rounding up, killing, and torturing dissidents in the same manner that they used to consolidate power after the fall of the Shah.
In addition, our belated, tepid criticism of the repressive Iranian government may not translate into goodwill from Iranian advocates for freedom — given our painful silence in the early days of the demonstrations, when achieving global support was critical.
And what about other pro-democracy dissidents abroad — whether in Cuba, the Arab world, or Venezuela? Will they still trust that the U.S. supports their efforts to obtain a free society?
Meanwhile, authoritarians in China, North Korea, Russia, the Middle East, and South America may draw two unfair and unfortunate conclusions. One, the United States does not care much what other regimes do to their own people. Two, a new America will overlook almost anything in order just to get along with these authoritarians.
But is the U.S. at least consistent in its promises not to meddle?
Not all the time.
When Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel, the Obama administration made its distaste clear. It also has tried to find ways to isolate Hamid Karzai’s elected government in Afghanistan — and was initially not happy about the prospects of its reelection.
Most recently, the U.S. condemned the Honduran military’s arrest of Pres. Manuel Zelaya. The nation’s supreme court had found his efforts to extend his presidential tenure in violation of its constitution, once Zelaya tried to finesse an illegal third term.
In other words, the U.S. pressures other nations as it pleases — though strangely now more to lean on friends than to criticize rivals and enemies.
In contrast, had President Obama voiced early, consistent, and sharp criticism of the Iranian crackdown, the theocracy would have worried that the president’s stature could have galvanized global boycotts and embargos to isolate the theocracy and aid the dissidents. And the reformers in the streets could have become even more confident with a trademark Obama “hope and change” endorsement.
Internal democratic change in Iran is the only peaceful solution to stopping an Iranian bomb, three decades of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, and a Middle East arms race. When thousands risked their lives for a better Iran, a better Middle East, and a better world, we, the land of the free, simply were not with them.
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I kind of look at Obama like I look at Amnesty International.
You dont see Amnesty attacking Iran or Afghanistan They attack easy targets that dont fight back, like the United States.
Obama doesnt attack Iran he attacks little Honduras.
Easy target , versus hard target.
Bush was at least consistent in his foreign policy. Obama is all over the place from one day to the next. His treatment of Israel is shameful.
Shouldn't this have been "illegal second term"?
0bama is quite consistent.
1. Appease barbarians.
2. Betray allies.
There is, tragically, a clear and obvious lesson in the events of the recent past, in fact in the events up to five minutes ago.
That lesson...freedom loving peoples around the world can no longer hopefully rely on the United States of America for assistance, either material or moral.
In fact, the truth is that the “friends” of the USA will be thrown under the bus in an instant, while those who proudly proclaim their loathing and distaste for America will be “non-meddled with”.
No matter the cruelty or barbarity of your regime, within your own borders, you are secure in power.
It is not only we who are screwed, it is the people of the world.
Of course the U.S. wasn't with them. After all, in Obama's view, the U.S. is the big villain in the Middle East, not terrorist states like Iran or terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. If only we were more sensitive to Islamic sensibilities and more hostile to Israeli "aggression," then we would have earned the respect and love of the Mullahs and the other Islamic crazies in the Middle East.
It's no wonder at all that Obama waited until the Iranian regime had crushed the dissenters to start speaking out against them, that his criticism was too little and too late.
It is clear that Obama, who can't rise above his prejudices against the U. S., whose first instinct is to blame America for the world's problems, is completely unprepared to be at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, that he can't put the interests of this country or the interests of peoples around the world who want to share in the freedoms that we have in this country ahead of his own ideological biases. It is tragic to have an incompetent ideologue like Obama as President because his failures are not only hurting this country and adversely affecting American influence around the world, they are hurting people like the Iranian demonstrators who to look to the U.S. for moral support.
What do you expect from someone who spent his entire adult life associating with those who want to turn this country into a third-world craphole, at best?
He harms not just this country, but the entire civilized world.
He has no business being President.
The country elected an inexperienced, Muslim biased, Kenyan to the Highest office in the land. It should be no surprise he doesnt know what the hell he is doing.
Who Knew They Weren't Democrats, After All? [Victor Davis Hanson]
One of the strangest things about the Iranian tragedy is this spate of mea culpa confessionals from columnists who for the last two years insisted that Bush's decision not to talk to the thuggish Ahmadinejad — e.g., his sending terrorists into Lebanon to destroy democracy; trying to kill Americans in Iraq with lethal IEDs and assassinate Iraqi democrats; subsidies for rocketeers in Gaza; promising to exterminate Israel; violating U.N. non-proliferation accords; rounding up and eliminating journalists, minorities, and dissidents — was at best counterproductive, and at worst proof of his cowboyish know-nothingism.
Now they've had and gone through our callous realpolitik moment, in which we sat on the sidelines as thousands of brave reformers were silenced. Our administration worried that the internationalist Obama would not have his long-awaited chance to show his "this is our moment" post-nationalist stuff, in charming Ahmadinejad and a few theocrats to promise to kill and maim fewer people.
And as a result they seem to be "shocked" that
1) Iran is really not a democracy after all, and that, after 30 years, it still rigs elections, preselects candidates, and kills off opponents, confident that its thin veneer of voting fools Western elites;
2) does not much care whether we talk or not to its clerics, and whether we act nicely or badly toward them;
3) long ago figured that what little downside there was to getting the bomb was far outweighed by the upside (cf. the deference showed to Pakistan post-1998), and nothing was/is going to stop them.
0bama is quite consistent.
1. Appease barbarians.
2. Betray allies.
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I can’t think of a single counter-example, sadly. I’m willing to listen to others’ opinions about the subject.
“0 ... can’t rise above his prejudices against the U. S., whose first instinct is to blame America for the world’s problems, is completely unprepared to be at the helm of U.S. foreign policy”
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On the other hand our “secretary of state” is so inept that she made comments about the Honduras situation simply because she was expected to, and had NO IDEA what she was talking about. One wonders whether there has ever been as group of administrators in a country so misplaced and inept as this crew.
After what we did to the South Vietnamese, I don’t know why anyone would trust us.
At the beginning of Iraq war (I mean 2003 campaign of the war that started in 1991), I argued with those who said “how dare US to invade a sovereign country” that sovereignty rests with the individual people. When people freely delegate their sovereignty to their consensual government, than the state has it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and screen making the life of tyrants easier. A modern state has instruments of power and control that tyrants of the past could only dream of. Its getting more and more difficult to overthrow an oppressive state without any help from outside.
The only thing that needs to concern us is practicality. What CAN we do. We can’t do much with China, for obvious reasons, but on smaller scale - spreading democracy makes our future safer. Democracies don’t make wars with each other.
There used to be a barrage of radio over the European part of Soviet Union in Russian language telling people the truth. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, BBC Russian Services, Radio Liberty, German Wave, Kol Israel. Communists tried to block them with noise, but radio frequencies were constantly shifting, so it was impossible. The West was not squeamish with this propaganda, or call it counter-propaganda, does not matter.
What do we do now for Iran and Middle East? Next to nothing, letting the Al Jazeera and state propaganda to dominate. And this is in time when Internet and satellite TV make information easier to distribute than before, as twitter service became an instrument of the revolution in the last month. Why not dump cheap satellite receivers on the region? Whatever we’d do in the info war is cheaper than a weak of a hot war for sure.
Thanks for the ping.
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