"This Is the Moment"? Why Obama Should at Last Speak Out on Iran [Victor Davis Hanson]

pajamasmedia.com ^ | June 20, 2009 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Tolik]

Let Me Count the Ways Why Obama Should at Last Speak Out

( — I write this at around noon on Saturday, and suspect the pressure of public outrage will soon get to Obama, and he soon will recant and start sounding Reaganesque)

(As in something like this:

“Hundreds of thousands of gallant Iranians are now engaged in a non-violent moral struggle against tyranny in Iran-one of the great examples of bravery in our times. All free peoples of the world watch their ordeal, and can only wish them success, while owing them a great deal of gratitude for risking their lives for the innate and shared notion of human freedom and dignity. We in the United States ask the government of Iran—as well as its military and security forces — to recognize the universal appeal of freedom that flourishes among its own remarkable people, to stand down and renounce its serial use of violence and coercion-and to ensure a truly free election where the voices of all can be at last fully heard, so that  Iran can once more properly reenter  the family of law-biding nations”.)

So why speak out louder?

(Does not Obama see that the world has been given a rare chance, thanks to brave Iranians—as if the German people had risen up in 1938 in fear of what was on the horizon)

1)   It is the moral and right thing to do to support the brave and idealistic (the Congressional Democrats mostly get this. And, after a week of embarrassment, the “I worship whoever runs the White House” pundits are not far behind and scrambling to retract and revise last week’s obsequious columns.). The dissidents in fact can win in this new age of private instant communications, in which global news is not predicated on elite correspondents and news desks editors, but can flow globally and instantaneously, unfiltered, with unforeseen consequences.)

2)   The theocracy is a fiendish regime that hides behind third-world victimhood while it murders and promotes terror abroad. When it totters, the world sighs relief from Iraq to Lebanon; when it chest-thumps, thousands die at home and abroad.

3)   Of the three ways to stop a nuclear theocracy-(regime change, preemption, embargo), supporting the opponents of the regime is the most logical, peaceful, and cost-effective-and has the best chance of success. (Ask the worried surrounding Arab frontline countries).

4)    There is a long bipartisan American history of supporting dissidents who were fighting for election fairness abroad in Poland, Serbia, Latin America, and South Africa. (Does Obama think Mandela did not wish words of support from America? Why then would he think the Iranians being shot at in the streets would not wish moral clarity from the prophet of Cairo?). The Europeans (and even the Arab world) are way ahead of us.

5)   Obama’s realpolitik is flawed:

1) if the mullahs win, they will have greater contempt for our timidity;

2) if the dissidents win, they will not forget our realistic fence-sitting;

3) you can never believe (ever) anything the mullahs say or do. Negotiating with them is like signing a pact with Hitler. They are afraid of US voiced support for the dissidents, not the dissidents themselves who ask for our solidarity. If anything, the theocrats grasp that their own do not want a nuclear confrontation with Israel in which the people would be sacrificial pawns. Again and again, the dissidents have repeated that they are tired of being hated in the world as Ahmadinejad’s Iranians, not that they wanted Obama’s America to be less critical of Ahmadinejad

 

…. And Why He Has Not:

1)   Our President has always been a trimmer-voting present serially in Illinois; proclaiming broad new positions on the campaign trail only to disown them while President; rhetorically always splitting the difference with ‘on the one hand, on the other’, ’some, they, others say’, ‘I don’t accept false choices…’ etc. So now he waits to see who wins. And then will provide the soaring rhetoric postfacto to suggest that he was either the careful realist all along who foresaw the dissidents’ failure-or the enthusiastic moralist who always really did cheer on the mullahs’ demise. Robert Gibbs has both scripts already fed into the bookend A and B teleprompters.

OR

2)   It’s a personal thing that interferes with Obama’s ego, and messianic personal diplomacy.  Obama himself is not comfortable with those abroad who emulate American values and seek to have the freedoms and rights we take for granted. The post-colonial industry mandates that the Other is a perpetual victim of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and racism with justified grievances. Only elite American intellectuals of singular insight and empathy understand the calculus of the oppressed, and so, through apologies, accommodations, and concessions, they alone on our behalf can deal with an Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Ortega, Castro, Morales, Nasrallah, etc. But when we see a purple-finger election, a statue of liberty at Tiananmen, or the current Levi-clad, cell-phoning, English-placard-carrying Iranian grassroots resistance, all the above is rendered null and void. Obama wants to rise above his country; but when his country is not held in disrepute (as is true among the Iranian people), he is an actor without a role.

People abroad really do prefer freedom and true constitutional government to autocratic grievance mongers who loot their country and brutalize the free. In such conditions, old-fashioned Americans, often inarticulate and perhaps clumsy, but honest in their belief in the universal appeal of human freedom, do better than all the nuanced Kennedy School intellectuals (e.g. They laughed at the reductionist  “Tear Down This Wall” and “Evil Empire” and apparently preferred “No Inordinate Fear of Communism”). So a deer-in-the-headlights Obama wonders, ‘Wait, why aren’t they shouting the boilerplate ‘Death to America!’ and invoking, like I did, 1953 and the CIA crimes? Don’t they know the things that we did to them and I apologized for? Don’t they see that I am as separate from the US of the 1950s as they are? What’s this grass-roots rejection of an anti-Western, anti-colonialist indigenous Iranian government all about? (cf. his moral equivalent comparison of Mousavi to Ahmadinejad as equally anti-American).

OR

3)   Obama is clueless. Hillary knows more, but not that much more (Bill knows less as his 2005 Davos disastrous encomium of Iran proved). Biden, well, is Biden. The brighter like Holbrooke serve on the second tier.  In short, no one knows now to whom do you apologize? And if to no one, what then do you do? We’re back to sorta, sorta not shoot the pirates, kinda, kinda not stop the Koreans, maybe, maybe not keep renditions, tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, and drone attacks-or why didn’t someone brief me on the problems with closing Guantanamo before I promised the world at end to our American Gulag?

OR

4)   He’s addicted to the ossified Iraqi paradigm of “Bush intervened and caused a mess” (Free Iraq is apparently still equivalent to Saddam’s Iraq), so “I don’t want to follow his lead” (as if vocal support now is the same as shock and awe then). Somewhere in stone a lie is chiseled “Iraq made Iran stronger”. He doesn’t see the footnote: “But if Iraqi democracy survives, it fuels emulation in neighboring Iran and does more to undermine the theocracy than all the F-22s in the world”. Who knows-if Iranian freedom spreads, some nut might praise Bush’s commitment to Middle East freedom in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and not Obama’s apologetics at Cairo? (Free Shiites in Iraq are far better for Iran than either oppressed minorities under Saddam, or Saddam’s opportunistic dictatorship). Bottom line again: Obama needs to forget Ahmadinejad and talk daily with Maliki.

OR

5) His entire anti-Bush foreign policy is then in trouble. We’ve heard for eight years a cheap slur of “neo-cons” did it, not that in the dangerous world abroad there are no good choices, but supporting freedom is usually the better alternative if one must choose. If a peaceful democratic revolution succeeds in Iran, then what happens with “outreach” to Putin, Chavez, and Hamas? The new liberal realpolitik insisted that we don’t offer moral judgment, and was framed instead by winning the hearts and minds of tyrants through humbling ourselves and meae culpae. But if these democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and an Iran (?) were to succeed, then what? You would not go to Chavez and promise first to talk about shared colonial racist oppression, but rather say to the Venezuelan people, “We stand with you in your struggle to achieve freedom and dignity and to join the other democracies of Latin America”? That is not just in the cards, and so Iran, is well, a monkey-wrench.

For now, watch the Iranian army and police. If one battalion bolts, then . . .

[Tolik]

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index:

What Do these First Six Months Mean? Where Are We Going?

The New Orwellianism

Obama’s New Liberal Realism: abandoned Wilsonianism just to avoid supporting Iranian democracy

Obamaworld

Voting Present on Iran. Thugophilia Isn't Moral. The New Old Realism

Reflections on the Iranian Enigma. The World Turned Upside Down

Still a Boor and a Coward [Victor Davis Hanson on Letterman, Wright + Thoughts on a Creepy Culture]

Just Make Stuff Up. President Obama’s war on the truth

A Boor and a Coward [Victor Davis Hanson tears apart the creep, a.k.a David Letterman]

Our Historically Challenged President. A list of distortions

I No Longer Quite Believe ... [Victor Davis Hanson on Orwellian media & science, race relations]

It's Better When You Wake Up Body-Snatched . . .

The Reckoning. Obama Versus the Way of the Universe

The Age of Middle East Atonement. Therapeutic efforts to disguise the truth never really work

Is It Going to Be Race and Resentment — All the Time?

Multiculturalism Trumps Freedom?

Sotomayor’s Mistake. The diversity mess

The Affirmative-Action Aristocracy?

Lost in the Labyrinth of Race

President Palin’s First 100 Days. Imagine if Sarah Palin had Obama’s record

Americans Want It Both Ways Our Have-It-Both-Ways Generation

Our Jekyll and Hyde President. More radical than Jimmy Carter v smoother centrist than Bill Clinton?

Crazy Times — Crazier Times to Follow - when nonsense is passed off as wisdom

Confessions of a Contrarian [deconstructing Obama, the Left and more]

 President Obama’s First 70 Days. It really does all make sense

Thoughts About Depressed Americans

Bush Did It. What a difference an election makes [Brilliant Parody]

 Our Battered American [gets angrier - Must Read Rant]

Just a partial list. More at the link:  http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index

[Tolik]

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out.

Links:    FR Index of his articles:  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
                His website: http://victorhanson.com/
                NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
                Pajamasmedia:   http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/

[Jeff Head]

George Bush's legacy and fight endures in the Mid East, despite, and in spite of Obama, and THAT is Obama's real dilema.

It was George Bush's policy of direct engagement and support of liberty that has led to the people of Iran seeing the measure of freedom now established on both sides of them in Iraq and Afghjanistan...and desiring it for themselves.

Obama cannot possibly go too far in recognizing that, or he absolutely repudiates himself and his entire foreign policy.

...but the fight in Iran is far from over, and is getting brutal.

---

WARNING:GRAPHIC:

Young Woman (Neda) shot to death in Terhran. 6/20/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fVyGo7rZUI

Crowd Hunting Basij, Man shot. 6/20/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYaL4mA-bSY

---

RUNNING BATTLES IN TEHRAN

URGENT: HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT IRANIAN PROTESTORS RIGHT NOW...ON TWITTER

AMERICANS SUPPORTING IRAN LIBERTY

AMERICANS DON'T NEED OBAMA SPEAKING FOR THEM, WE'RE FREE AND CAN SPEAK FOR OURSELVES

POEM FOR THE ROOFTOPS OF IRAN - INCREDIBLY MOVING

You can follow me on twitter if you want.http://www.twitter.com/Jeff_Head

[nuconvert]

Clerics among the protesters

http://tinyurl.com/lubmoe

[Tolik]

Again, Why the Diffidence?   [Victor Davis Hanson]

Obama—the Manichean?

Of all the puzzling reasons one can adduce both for Barack Obama recent serial apologies abroad, and now his strange silence about human rights abuses from Venezuela to Iran, I think one of the most likely is his Manichean notion of world affairs—one also reflected in most of the curricula of our major universities.

The binary oppressor/victim narrative goes something like this: the United States for the last half-century—through its embrace of neocolonialism and imperialism, and then again through its birthing of globalized capitalism—is at fault for most of the mess outside the West.

We as the bad guys impose, dictate, exploit, ignore, and manipulate the more noble Other to such a degree that he is forced to lash out in understandable, though often dangerous ways.

 This is a sort of all-inclusive worldview that in postmodern fashion pits those with “power” against those without it. And in such a simplistic bipolar world, only a few gifted Western elite intellectuals, of superior intelligence, empathy, and insight, can reach across the divide, understand the Other, and find common ground, by accommodating the West to alternate paradigms of politics, culture, and economic and social life—different of course, albeit not intrinsically in any sense inferior.

Then something messy comes along that doesn't fit the neat paradigm like the purple-finger elections in Iraq, Tiananmen Square, or the most recent democracy demonstrations in Iran that confound that easy calculus. Just when you are singularly prepared, in bold face-to-face diplomacy, to understand the historic grievances of an unshaved, Nehru-coated Ahmadinejad, and to make the necessary apologies and accommodations, thousands of Iranians hit the street in Levis, with English-lettered protest signs, hitting their cell-phones and chanting Western-like protests again indigenous Iranian theocratic fascism.  

So how can it be, that anyone would wish to model their politics after Western-style free speech and consensual government, given our culpability for so many global pathologies? The even weirder result that follows is that we become skeptical of the pro-Western Columbian, Israeli, Iraqi—and Iranian—as somehow less “authentic” by the very fact of his good will to, and admiration of, us (contrary to everything one has been taught in post-colonial classes).

In that vein, Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained), and whose estrangement alone offers opportunity for Obama’s sophisticated multicultural insight and singular narcissistic magnanimity.

06/20 12:38 PM

[fortunate sun]

Obama has already been shown to be irrelevant.

[Tolik]

Our Hope-and-Change Policy Toward Iran   [Victor Davis Hanson]

In an odd way, I think Obama is playing out the clock and hopes the marchers are crushed, before the embarrassment of condoning — sometimes by his silence and sometimes by his morally equivalent banalities — the thuggish Iranian theocracy becomes too much even for him to bear. As it is, it becomes a little more reprehensible each day. Consider:

1. Speaking out is really a no-brainer: In moral terms, the protestors wish free and fair elections, and have shown both great courage and restraint in expressing their displeasure with a regime that has been as terrible to them as it has to the world at large;
2. The liberal wing of the Democratic party, eons ago it now seems, used to stand for a morality in foreign policy that put it at odds with the present mere calculation of realpolitik;
3. Obama's realist calculations are in fact sorely mistaken (e.g., if he doesn't show moral vertebrae soon and the protestors are crushed, we will regret a lost opportunity to show a shared humanity for a long time to come [and does anyone think Ahmadinejad will one day call Obama up and say, "Thanks, Barack for that silence, now let's talk about those nukes"?]); if the protestors prevail, they will have a long memory of how we forsook them in their hour of need; meanwhile, a theocratic elite will negotiate or not with us only on the basis of their selfish interests (do they shun Russian aid because Putin slaughtered Muslims in Grozny, or do they abhor the Chinese because of their oppression of Muslims?); the government, far more so than the dissidents, is fearful of U.S. public support for human rights.
4. There are ample examples from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations that speaking out against tyranny abroad enhances U.S. prestige, while keeping silent does not. Our present course suggests that even we have lost confidence in our moral voice and have ceded it to the theocracy — as if our verbal support for democracy is wrong, but Iranian guns to destroy it in Iraq are understandable.
5. 1953, Iraq, George Bush — all these red flags are not applicable. No one is calling for the 101st or Raptors from the sky, simply some moral encouragement not to urge people to go out on the streets and then to leave them hanging in their hour of need (as in Hungary or the Shiites in Baghdad in 1991), but instead to praise those who on their own have already made that dangerous decision and deserve our admiration in terms far more forceful than we have yet seen from the White House.

This fear of offending terrorist-supporting and quite murderous theocrats is all very bewildering at first glance: A hope-and-change president is proving himself both weak and cynical at a critical juncture when the world's unsavory types from North Korea to Venezuela are looking keenly at, and learning from, the U.S. reaction. I think we are getting the foreign-policy version of a government without lobbyists, a publicly financed campaign, renditions/tribunals/wiretaps, intercepts, etc. posted on the barn wall as bad, then amended again as only sometimes bad, etc.

06/19 12:02 PM

[stentorian conservative]

bflr

[Tolik]

The money quote from the article:

Obama wants to rise above his country; but when his country is not held in disrepute (as is true among the Iranian people), he is an actor without a role.

[Tolik]

I am ashamed to ask: what is bflr?

[bray]

Great post and exactly his dilemma of not wanting to give Bush credit for freeing Iraq. That and he is a tyrant.

Pray for America and Iran’s Freedom

[listenhillary]

Worth reading the full article ping.

[kabar]

Chavez was the first regime to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his victory.

[stentorian conservative]

No shame my FRiend.

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It’s my way of making myself feel like I am getting off this derned computer and accomplishing something today!

[Stepan12]

I saw Ann Coulter on Geraldo yesterday and she was the only one of the group, including Dr. Krauthammer, that was talking real sense on Iran.

As Ann stated, if we don't say and/or do the right thing, the Mullahs will blame us for Svengali behavior anyway and if the revolution suceeds the freedom fighters will remember how the U.S. chickened out. All because of Barack Hussein Obama.

[Tolik]

YES.

As Hanson said:

Somewhere in stone a lie is chiseled “Iraq made Iran stronger”. He doesn’t see the footnote: “But if Iraqi democracy survives, it fuels emulation in neighboring Iran and does more to undermine the theocracy than all the F-22s in the world”. Who knows-if Iranian freedom spreads, some nut might praise Bush’s commitment to Middle East freedom in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and not Obama’s apologetics at Cairo?

[Tolik]

got it
thanks!

[drpix]

”So why speak out louder? …. And Why He Has Not:”

In listing the reasons Obama chose the later, VDH omitted one that I believe he also thought of but elected to omit.

Obama doesn’t share the world view, sympathies and aspiration of the westernized sector of Iran who are risking their lives on the streets of Iran. The sector of the Middle East he is determined to reach out to is the anti-west, anti-american elements - Amedinejad & his supporters, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc..

I’ll offer some photos that appeared on FR to make my point.

Iranians in Tehran sympathetic to the West/US defy the Mullahs to show support after 9/11.

Obama’s Reverend (Wright) delivers his “chickens come home to roast” sermon after 9/11.

[SamuraiScot]

Bush is a genius. Taking down Iran by taking down Iraq. And in turn, Lebanon, Syria, and Hamas, when the Iranian money disappears.

Freedom. What a nightmare for Obama.