If the president is so big on change (and hope) here, why is he so seemingly averse to it in Iran? And why was he so quick to declare the Honduran regime illegitimate, but remains unwilling to do so for the Tehran tyrants?
Does anyone imagine that regime change in Iran would give us something worse? Other than, of course, the president won’t get to continue to futilely show his diplomatic chops by naively negotiating with this one?
He’s not averse to it. He just doesn’t give a crap. Foreign policy is a big yawn to the Chicago Southside organizer. It might as well be happening on the Moon.
Although…actually, he probably is averse to it. The Iranian regime is a known quantity. He can repeat the usual Cold War detente platitudes about “mutual understanding” and other mush without turning on any brain cells. If, on the other hand, a new unpredictable democratic regime were to emerge there — well, they might, like France, do anything at all, might be friends one moment and obnoxious thorns another. Far less predictable. He’d have to detail portions of his brain to work on them, and assign people and resources on his staff to work on them. Big waste of resources.
Or it could even just be a sympatico thing. Obama is not a true democrat. He doesn’t revel in elections, in the free-for-all of democratic government. I think Bill Clinton (for all you hate him) did — he relished the combat, and was good at it. Reagan and Bush the Younger, Truman and FDR were like that, too. They enjoyed the melee, swam in it. Bush the Elder, Nixon, didn’t. They were never really comfortable with the uncertainty and cross-currents. I think Obama fits in this vein. He’s very comfortable with a stable heirarchy, like you find in academia, where doing the right thing steadily takes you higher in the Politburo. This business of elections, where the hoi polloi can suddenly upend everything and scatter all your plans, is something I think he hates. So he’s probably naturally more in sympathy with the Iranian hierocrats than their insurgent democrat foes.
Just for the record, I don’t hate Bill Clinton. I just think that he’s objectively a douchebag.
I don’t have anything against douchebags. I just don’t think they should be commanders-in-chief.
As I said, I just found it interesting that after his campaign based on “change,” he seems so averse to it. He’s actually (like most so-called “progressives”) very conservative. Or rather, he only likes change that he can control…
Well, Rand, douchebags and hyenas and bastards can be very useful, on the appropriate leash. What kind of leash Clinton needed is left as an intellectual exercise, but I think his talent could have been extraordinarily useful had he had one.
If nothing else, if the Clinton version of the Democratic Party hadn’t nauseated so many young folks, there would never have been the Obama phenomenon, in the same way that the dissipations and follies of the Shah led straight to the Islamic Revolution, and the criminality of the Tsars led straight to Lenin. We would not now be racked by an absurd ideological conflict, since Clinton pushed the Democratic Party of McGovern so far back towards the center that, had the Clinton of 1996 run in 2008, he would have been the most small-government, individual liberty candidate (barring Sarah Palin). We might now be enjoying a vigorous but responsible debate about means and methods between a center-left and center-right party, having broadly agreed in the mid 90s that the foundations of the Republic are individual liberty and private enterprise.
But Clinton pissed away his opportunties, spread spooge over everyone who sacrificed for him, and made the entire younger generation sick and restless, looking for a pure holy man to lead them anew, and here we are, painfully learning the lessons of the 1970s (if not, God forbid, the 30s) all over again, with a sick and doomed messianic movement thrashing its painful way across the landscape.
Anyway, in your final paragraph you’re looking for intellectual consistency where it is utterly absent. Candidate Obama simply lied, that’s all. Indeed, almost everything he said on the campaign trail was grotesquely false in only the way an Alinskyite sociopath can pull off.
Listen, what do you want to bet Obama puts Tiger Woods to shame in a certain department? But you’ll never see a trace of that dishonesty except in the angry set of Michelle’s shoulders, because it comes so naturally to him. No one can fake sincerity quite as perfectly as the man without any true conscience at all. Consider Ted Kennedy as a broader example.
The best way to doom Iranian dissidents would be for the U.S. president to publicly praise and encourage them. The best way to encourage military coups in the Americas would be for the U.S. president to welcome them.
Are these things really so hard to understand?
Are these things really so hard to understand?
Your theory is not hard to understand, Jim. It’s only hard to believe. The problem is that we have actual evidence about whether your theory is right or not, in the form of what dissidents in the Soviet Union, and those who brought down the Soviet regime in Easter Europe in the 80s and 90s, told us afterwards. Read Natan Sharansky, for example. Or Solzhenitsyn. Or read up on the history of samizdat.
What the historical evidence tells us is that, unequivocally, the support, if only moral, of the United States leadership is one of the main things that kept them going, and that the regime feared the influence of American leadership — even if purely symbolic — so much that they took extraordinary steps to stop it, including, as you’ll recall, jamming VoA broadcasts, criminalizing conversation with foreigners, and suppressing the publication or distribution of materials from the West. When you are in the prison, fighting to get out, the fact that people on the outside are at least cheering you on is enormously important. The question of it enhancing the brutality of the prison-keepers is specious: they are already as brutal as they can be, for their own reasons.
Even Jimmy Carter did his part. His strong and outspoken support for civil rights in South and Central America is generally credited as signifcantly influential in the replacements of many of the dictatorships with democracies in the early 80s. Even Amnesty International subscribes to the principle that exposure and public criticism enhances and does not detract from the probability that the cause of dissidents and refuseniks will prevail. I used to write letters for them 20 years ago, before they went off the rails, and they had many stories of success.
In short, your theory, while on the surface plausible, utterly fails the test of history.
The problem is that we have actual evidence about whether your theory is right or not, in the form of what dissidents in the Soviet Union, and those who brought down the Soviet regime in Easter Europe in the 80s and 90s, told us afterwards.
We also saw that strategy play out in Iran earlier in the year. After one of the young leaders was shot dead on the street, and the US (and other western leaders) said nothing. The dissidence ended rather quickly.
I go with Carl on this one. The “we’ll damn them by praising them” argument is really just cover for not doing anything. Iran is developing nuclear weapons and killing its people in the streets. We’re doing nothing to stop the problem that is developing.
Is it so hard to understand that Iran is not the Soviet Union? In Iran, we have a long history of meddling and supporting dictators, something we didn’t do to the Soviets.
Is it so hard to understand that Iran is not the Soviet Union? In Iran, we have a long history of meddling and supporting dictators, something we didn’t do to the Soviets.
Heh, sounds like someone doesn’t know about the Russian Civil War. We meddled quite a bit before the Bolsheviks won that war. And of course, after the Second World War, we meddled like crazy with the foreign affairs of the USSR, just as they did with us.
In other words, so what if Iran is not identical to the USSR or that the US made serious mistakes in the country before? Now is always a good time to stop making mistakes. We can do that by support democratic reforms in Iran.
And Chris, the problem isn’t “understanding” it’s “believing”.
Nuance and pussyfooting only beget more nuance and pussyfooting. Sometimes you need to stand in front of the world and unequivocally challenge an oppressor to “Tear Down This Wall” in no uncertain terms. And you know what by golly, that wall fell.
I’ve been against the Obama Misadministration offering support to Iranian dissidents because the Obama Misadministration would, as it has done on all things, screw it up — and in this case with lethal results.
But unlike certain others, I’m saying this because Obama is a screw-up, not because America supposedly is (except inasmuch as 53% of America’s voters in Nov. 2008 elected him).
Jim,
What, the Iranian government will oppress these people more if we voice our support? Do you think the government needs us to speak to know which side we favor?
What, the Iranian government will oppress these people more if we voice our support?
No, these people will lose support from, and influence with, the broad middle of the Iranian public if they are seen as tools of U.S. foreign policy. Again, is it really hard to understand that being seen as helping advance U.S. interests is a liability in some countries?
Presume for a moment we have a ‘group in power’ that hates us, and a ‘group not in power’ that also hates us.
Choice one: side with the group in power.
There really isn’t a whole lot we’ll ever manage to do to convince the group in power that we don’t hate them. Because too many of the things we don’t particularly like (nukes everywhere, terrorist “life insurance policies”) are things we had better not be appeasing them on. (Yet we’re trying even that.) So anything we do actually do will come down to “just words.” And money. So now “Power” both hates us and thinks we’re gullible fools.
Choice two: side with neither. Power still hates us. The Oppressed still hate us.
Choice three: side with both. See choice two.
Choice four: Side with the Oppressed – with just words. Or money and words. Let’s see, Power hates us, the Oppressed might feel some slight inspiration – but they’ll see us as a paper tiger when they do manage to make it to power. And not feel any particular gratitude – since we didn’t do much.
None of the choices to this point cause any real feeling of respect, admiration, gratitude or any sense of partnership. Any “Beacon of Freedom” would be seen as more of a taunt than anything useful.
If, on the other hand, you are using a definition of “Diplomacy” that is completely antithetical to our current approach, you might actually end up somewhere. Diplomacy doesn’t mean endless jabbering just to say you said the right damn thing. Diplomacy is war by other means. Whoopi would say it isn’t war war.
President Obama is demonstrating how to lose there too.
Jim@December 29th, 2009 at 1:54 am
“The best way to encourage military coups in the Americas would be for the U.S. president to welcome them.”
But, that is precisely what Obama did. Fortunately, the stealth coup in Honduras by a Hugo wannabe was thwarted by the Honduran military.
the broad middle of the Iranian public if they are seen as tools of U.S. foreign policy.
And do have anything to support that assertion?
The concept of people as “tools of U.S. foreign policy” is something one would expect to encounter in a Marxist academic, not a member of the Iranian middle class.
Not everyone hates this country as much as Jim appears to. I doubt seriously if that would be the first reaction of any member of the Iranian “broad middle,” and would welcome any evidence to the contrary.
Also, how is the US going to reduce this “hate”, if it continues to do things that are convenient for the people in power?