After failing utterly to speak out against the mullahs and call for freedom for the people of Iran (ideally, freedom from Sharia, or if that is too much for Obama, and clearly at is, he could at least have called for respect for international human rights norms), now Obama’s advisers are taking credit for the uprising in Iran — attributing it to the aftereffects of the platitudinous and naive Obama speech in Cairo.
“Chutzpah Alert: Iran Unrest Reveals Split In U.S. on Its Role Abroad,” by Scott Wilson for the Washington Post, June 23 (thanks to Benedict):
[…] “A direct parallel is now being drawn between the fight for freedom from Islamist tyranny in Iran and across the Middle East and the fight decades earlier for freedom from Soviet tyranny,” said Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“It’s almost as if the president lacks confidence in the greatness of his own nation,” he added. “He seems unwilling to aggressively project American global power, as if it were something to be ashamed of.”
Yep.
But Obama’s shades-of-gray approach rejects comparison to an era when Communist bloc dissidents had virtually no access to the Western media and the world was more neatly divided between a pair of superpowers, not complicated by the set of ambitious regional powers such as Iran that the Obama administration is seeking to manage.
Since taking office, Obama has argued that reclaiming America’s moral authority by ending torture and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay provides essential diplomatic leverage to influence events in such strategic parts of the world as the Middle East and Central Asia. The speech he delivered to the Islamic world in Cairo eights days before the June 12 Iranian election sought to do that by providing what the president saw as an unvarnished accounting of U.S. policy in Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We’re trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves,” said a senior administration official who, like others, declined to be identified, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Obama’s approach to Iran, including his assertion that the unrest there represents a debate among Iranians unrelated to the United States, is an acknowledgment that a U.S. president’s words have a limited ability to alter foreign events in real time and could do more harm than good. But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic’s Islamic authority in its 30-year history.
One senior administration official with experience in the Middle East said, “There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities,” adding that “I was struck in the aftermath of the president’s speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach.”
The adviser said that “there is something particularly authentic about those who are carrying out these demonstrations,” citing the fact that some are carrying symbols of the 1979 Iranian revolution as they march for new elections, including photos of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“The more you keep this in Iranian terms, the better the chances of change,” the adviser said….