Obama and Iran: Did he fail the protest movement?

Just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama addressed the Muslim world about America’s belief in universal human rights, and “the freedom to live as you choose,” said Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard. So why, now that Iranians are demanding—and literally dying for—that freedom, has the president suddenly lost his voice? Since Iran erupted in reaction to the stolen June 12 presidential election, Obama has “bent over backwards” to avoid offending its theocratic rulers, insisting that “meddling” would serve no purpose. Not until Tuesday, more than a week after protesters first filled Tehran’s streets, did Obama declare himself “appalled and outraged” by the Iranian government’s violent crackdown and praise the Iranian people’s “courage and dignity.” Let me get this straight, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. Courageous Iranians are trying to overthrow a “tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy” that is an impediment to all the U.S.’s goals for the Mideast. “And where is our president? Afraid to take sides.”

Cheering on the protesters would do the Iranian people no good, said Leslie H. Gelb in TheDailybeast.com. In fact, aggressive rooting by the U.S. president would simply bolster the regime’s insistence that the uprising was a foreign-inspired conspiracy. And let’s not forget what happened when President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. Saddam slaughtered them by the tens of thousands, while the U.S. did nothing. The same thing happened in Hungary in 1956, said Paul Saunders in The Washington Post, when Washington urged Hungary’s freedom fighters to overthrow their communist oppressors. If the U.S. isn’t ready to provide Tehran’s protesters with everything “up to and including military force to ensure that they win,” urging them to fight and die would be “profoundly immoral.” Unlike his belligerent critics, Obama understands this, which is why he’s strategically calibrating his rhetoric.

Obama’s critics don’t really care what happens to the Iranian people, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. They’re the same neoconservative hawks who have been insisting that the only way to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions is to bomb at least 1,500 targets there, including many in populated areas. That would undoubtedly lead to a full-scale war, with tens of thousands of Iranian dead. Now these same hawks suddenly love the Iranian people? Please. What the far right is secretly rooting for, actually, is for the Islamic hard-liners and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to fend off the reformers, said Leslie Savan in The Nation. With a hard-line bogeyman in charge, the neocons can continue calling for a pre-emptive strike—“which is what they wanted in the first place.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What’s really required of the U.S. now, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer, is neither bombs nor angry rhetoric. It’s patience. “We can’t fight Iranians’ battles for them,” nor can we command “regime change” from afar. That will have to come from within. Meanwhile, Obama’s old Iran policy is dead, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. He insisted that it was possible to negotiate with Ahmadinejad and the mullahs over their nuclear program, despite their contempt for the civilized world, their Holocaust denial, and their vigorous support of terrorism. As recent events have proved, Obama was wrong about Iran, and conservatives were right: “Anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his own hands.”