Obama Pundit

by C. William Chattin

Notwithstanding the various pronouncements of Obama-toady Andrew Sullivan that the “neocons” (whatever that term used to mean, Sullivan uses it as a thinly-veiled reference to “pro-Israel, Jewish Republicans”) are “outright hoping for the coup to succeed,” in actuality it appears it is this Administration and President Obama himself — having adopted Scowcraftian, “realist” foriegn policy — that have thrown their lot behind the Mullahs.

As Robert Kagan argues out in his troubling Washington Post column from today:

Obama never meant to spark political upheaval in Iran, much less encourage the Iranian people to take to the streets.  That they are doing so is not good news for the president but, rather, an unwelcome complication in his strategy of engaging and seeking rapprochement with the Iranian government on nuclear issues.

One of the great innovations in the Obama administration’s approach to Iran, after all, was supposed to be its deliberate embrace of the Tehran rulers’ legitimacy.

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The idea was that the United States could hardly expect the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security, such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any encouragement to the government’s opponents.  Obama had to make a choice, and he made it.  This was widely applauded as a “realist” departure from the Bush administration’s quixotic and counterproductive idealism.

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[O]nce Mousavi lost, however fairly or unfairly, Obama objectively had no use for him or his followers.  If Obama appears to lend support to the Iranian opposition in any way, he will appear hostile to the regime, which is precisely what he hoped to avoid.  Obama’s policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government.

How ironic that adopting the foreign policy approach formerly championed by the moderate Right (George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, Gerald Ford, etc.) may leave President Obama (largely perceived as the world’s leading agent for “hope and change”) as an obstruction to democratic liberalization and the progressive Westernization of the Middle East and Islamic world.

n.1. Daniel Pipes, perhaps the leading (what Sullivan would call) “neocon,” stated the Mullah’s hijacking of the election has resulted in the following positive developments:

• Supporters of the opposition candidates have not accepted the results, leading to riots in Tehran. In the description of the Los Angeles Times, “Searing smoke and the smell of burning trash bins and tear gas filled the night sky. Protesters poured into key squares around the capital, burning tires, erecting banners and hurling stones at riot police on motorcycles, who responded with truncheons.”

• [The] sham election may be a turning point, the moment when the much-suffering population found its collective voice against the regime. It bears noting in this regard that the Iranian population in 1978-79 mounted what was perhaps the largest-scale rebellion ever against a government. It could do so again.

Sullivan’s straight-faced interpretation of Pipes’s comments: “Pipes wants Ahmaindejad to succeed” and “Pipes supports Ahmadinejad.”  How ironic that Sullivan uses a quote from George Orwell as the masthead for his blog.

n.2. Various leftwing columnists are vigorously attacking Bob Kagan assertion that Obama actually wants the uprising to fail.  Says Jonathan Chait:

I can’t prove that this is false because I don’t have access to Obama’s inner thoughts. But I strongly suspect it’s false. Moreover, I tend to agree with Obama’s argument that vocally supporting the demonstrators would undermine them.

Says Matthew Yglesias:

[T]oday you’re seeing some rightwing pundits getting mad because Obama is acting like a president rather than like a pundit.

Says Matt Duss:

How then to explain his State Department reaching out to Twitter and asking them to delay their scheduled maintenance, in order to allow the continued use of this technology that has proven so important to enabling communication within and out of Iran? That one gesture neatly encapsulates, I think, the difference between Bush and Obama on “democracy promotion.”

As I stated below, I’m giving the President’s hands-off approach the benefit of the doubt — recognizing that more decisive comments can be used as ammunition by the Mullahs.

However, since his largely self-absorbed comments Monday, President Obama has gone on to recognize the legitimacy to the “recount” process ordered by Ayatollah ali Khamenei, upon whom President Obama bestows the honorific “supreme leader,” and about whom Obama informs us that he is “worried” about the legitimacy of the election.

Contrary to Chait’s, Yglesias’s, Duss’s, and Sullivan’s various assurances that President Obama stands firmly with the Iranian protestors, all tangible indications are that the President stands on the side of stability.  The State Department’s call to Twitter notwithstanding, we’re still awaiting even one comment from Obama to the effect that the Iranian people have the right to self-determination.

n.3. Keeping up with Sullivan’s contortions on the appropriate U.S. response to Iran is truly dizzying.  On the one hand, Sullivan tells us that Obama’s “two-steps behind” approach and his reactions, generally, thus far are “a good thing” and the approach of “some who at last ‘gets it.’”  And, in the next breath, Sullivan scolds Western leaders “not to recognize Ahmadinejad.”  I can’t bend my mind enough to figure out how proclaiming that “the Supreme Leader of Iran is worried about the legitimacy of the election”  reconciles with a non-recognition of Ahmadinejad as the “election winner.”

n.4. Despite every effort to appear as a non-meddler — shock-of-all-shocks, the Iranian Islamic government is accusing the Obama Administration of “meddling in Iran’s election.”