Now, it looks like Leverett was horribly, abominably, disastrously wrong.  He was about as off-base on the Iranian election results as he was smug in his preaching about it, which is saying a lot.

As liberal blogger Nate Silver notes, there were more votes than voters in several Iranian provinces.

More people “voted” than were eligible to vote — in a lot of places. The interior ministry admits to 50 such instances out of the 300+ jurisdictions in which Iran tallied results. That is widespread, prime facie and admitted-to evidence of fraud, and I don’t see how the Guardian Council expects people to buy the argument that whatever caused the tub to overflow in those 50 cities was not also tainting the results throughout the rest of the country.

Inconvenient truths, to be sure.  Of course, this information came out after Leverett’s Op-Ed.  I think it would behoove a so-called expert to wait until the facts come in before spouting off.  Of course, this is the same guy who espouses the following policy toward Iran:

To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan — a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.

Basically, he wants the Mullahs to have their way with everything.  They get a nuke, an endorsed stranglehold on their country and no repercussions of any kind for support of terrorist groups.   With this kind of outlook, it’s no wonder Leverett couldn’t compute the meaning of it all when thousands of anti-government Iranians took to the streets.  His first instinct, naturally, was to defend and protect the regime. 

I have a feeling we won’t be seeing any “I was wrong about the vote in Iran” Op-Eds coming our way any time soon.

President Obama has finally decided to make the kind of statement on Iran that he should have made all along:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

This is an entirely appropriate statement that should have been made much earlier.  Those who defended Obama for not saying enough earlier on the grounds that it would meddle with Iranian politics will no doubt reverse course and agree that is was proper.   Still, after seeing these images and videos, I wonder if it was tough enough.

Also, to echo a point made  by C. William Chattin, he is still in love with the use of the first person in his speeches (I believe that. The international community believes that…).  He needs to remember that when he speaks, it is on behalf of the American people, not just himself.  Other than that minor quibble, this statement is a step in the right direction.

We’ve heard over and over again how the advent of the Obama Presidency would go a long way toward cleaning up our image around the world.  It was a big selling point during his campaign.

Since his inauguration, Obama has undertaken steps to address those areas in which the Left had found the United States to be lacking image-wise under Bush.  We’ve prohibited torture, introduced habeas corpus for terrorist suspects and begun the process of unraveling the Gitmo detention policy. 

These are all initiatives that are far more popular outside the United States than inside, by the way.  But since world opinion is more important than the opinion of the American people, we do them anyway.   

Unfortunately, Obama seems to believe World Opinion is a monolith comprised of Middle Eastern autocrats and their toadies in Western Europe.  After all, every move to improve the U.S. standing in the world has been designed to placate the very kind of ruler who cares nothing for his own image.  To think that Assad or Mubarak are truly offended by torture is more fuzzy-headed than anything the neo-cons have been accused of.     

Most recently, Obama has been reticent to lend much rhetorical support to the Iranian protesters. He states that he doesn’t want to meddle in Iranian affairs, evoking the 1953 CIA-supported coup of an elected Iranian leader.

In doing so, however, Obama shows great disdain for the rest of world opinion, which seems to be mostly on the side of the protestors.

If Obama is so concerned with world opinion, why is he only worried about the opinion of one part of the world? Furthermore, it’s a part of the world where ‘opinion’ is hard to come by. Indeed, too much of a certain kind of ‘opinion’ can result in getting your head cracked.

When Obama talks about American image, it’s really a code word for “what the Arab and Muslim world thinks of us.” Sort of like how Democrats use the term ‘working people’ to describe blue-collar types, as if a doctor, lawyer or small business owner doesn’t really work.

So when it comes to image, Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, Africa…they don’t really matter. In fact, starting trade wars with these regions, or snubbing their leaders is completely cool.  All that matters is that the Middle East power structure and various Western politicians are on board with us.

You could probably narrow this ‘world opinion’ down to less than 100 people.  It certainly has nothing to do with the ‘Arab Street’, which is a useless term used in lieu of actual polling data. 

In the end, Obama is out to please mainly Mullahs, dictators, thugs and their apologists in Western Europe. 

The rest of the world can just go to hell, I guess.

WWBSD?

This, of course, stands for “What would Brent Scowcroft do?”  It is undoubtedly emblazoned on a knit bracelet around Obama’s wrist, a reminder of the President’s cynical approach to foreign policy.

How long before Obama takes after his new-found bedfellow and is in Tehran toasting the mullahs?  I’m sure the champagne is already on ice.

From the NY Times editorial page, April 17, 1990 (remember, back then Scowcroft was bad because he worked for Bush I.  Now, he’s good because he opposed Bush II):

Just days after Beijing used tanks and rifles against student democracy demonstrators, Mr. Bush announced the following guidelines for American policy: Because China was home to more than a billion people, Washington would make every effort to keep open essential channels of communication

The sort of thing that truly offends people was Mr. Scowcroft’s televised toast to the butchers of Beijing and Mr. Bush’s acquiescing in China’s demand that he veto a bill extending the U.S. visas of Chinese students.

Here is Scowcroft’s toast to the Butchers of Beijing.  It sounds a lot like the attitude Obama is taking toward Iran, does it not?

“In both  our societies, there  are voices  of  those  who seek  to  redirect or frustrate our  cooperation.  We both  must take  bold measures to overcome these  negative forces.’”

This is the policy that the Left is now endorsing.  Nixon would be so proud of such realpolitick (We are all Scowcroftians now!)

 And where, oh where, is Jimmy Carter these days?

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.

*          *          *

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.

*          *          *

[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.”

I’m not sure why the Right is surprised at Obama’s lack of response to the Iranian election crisis.  So far, his statements and actions have been completely in line with the so-called ‘realist’ mentality of the Brent Scowcroft school of foreign policy. 

This mentality believes that, above all, stability is the key to dealing with nation states.  So, Obama would much prefer to negotiate with a group of powerful Mullahs than face the uncertainty of the results of Iranian unrest.

It has become a popular position on the Left, which used to favor human rights above all in foreign policy, but turned to the once-loathed Scowcroftianism once they realized it was a useful tool to oppose George W. Bush’s supposed adventurism.

I think human rights activists around the world are in for a long four years.

Below are pertinent portions of the comments made yesterday by President Obama addressed the goings-on in Iran.  Does anyone else notice the odd perspective from which these comments appear to emanate?

I am deeply troubled by the violence that I’ve been seeing on television.  I think that the democratic process — free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all those are universal values and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they’re, rightfully, troubled.

My understanding is, is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place. We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can’t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election.

But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

Now, with respect to the United States and our interactions with Iran, I’ve always believed that as odious as I consider some of President Ahmadinejad’s statements, as deep as the differences that exist between the United States and Iran on a range of core issues, that the use of tough, hard-headed diplomacy — diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries — is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon; making sure that Iran is not exporting terrorist activity. Those are core interests not just to the United States but I think to a peaceful world in general.

We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we’ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days.

And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.

And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.

Is President Obama speaking for himself as an individual, or is he speaking on behalf of the United States government and, by proxy, the American people (and even the people of the free world)?  I count more than 15 references to his own feelings, observations, thoughts, etc. in brief, under-600-word comments.  The frequency in reference to himself provides at least some support to notions that Obama is arrogant, if not a narcissistic. 

n.1. Incidentally,  it’s worth noting that President Obama made these comments without the assistance of a teleprompter.

n.2. Various people, including my old law professor, Jim Lingren, have raised issues about the lack of moral clarity voiced by the President.  For now, I’m giving the President the benefit of the doubt that being too vocal may be used as ammunition for the Mullahs.  However, I would have at least liked to have heard the President say, “America stands by the proud people of Iran.  The will of the Iranian people should prevail.”

Graf lifted from Hot Air concerning the drama and upheaval in Iran and the White House’s strange CNN-like, near-silence on the issue:

Fun fact: Whereas The One was “shocked and outraged” by the murder of George Tiller, the most he can muster here for mass beatings and cold-blooded killings across Iran is that he’s “troubled.” Make of it what you will.

* * * * *

I remember during the lead-up to the election thinking at times that Mr. Obama detested all this world politics stuff.  He treated it just seriously enough during the debates but was far more interested in driving discussion back to domestic issues (like the current health care proposal), very much in line with his organizing roots.

That sentiment is hardly unique among Presidential aspirants, but unlike recent Presidential predecessors it looks like with this first international crisis he’s stubbornly trying to avoid dignifying the situation with a more robust response.  This points to one of his internal tensions, charismatic and drawn to the highest office but ideologically more suited to something more nuts and bolts like congressional work putting together legislation.  Like it or not he signed up for all that comes with the job and ought be more Presidential here.

Hopefully he wakes up from that fantasy of a Presidency unencumbered by a distressed world, and can show a little more interest, agility and skill in what seems like a fairly critical juncture in U.S./Iranian relations and the shaping of the Middle East.