The Biden administration is failing those Iranians who are courageously demanding better governance.
The latest protests began in September when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s notorious morality police after a disagreement over her head covering. Iran then attempted to cover up this murder, only inflaming popular tensions even more.
Considering all of the Biden administration’s rhetoric about gay rights and police brutality, you might have expected the president to react with outrage at Amini’s brutal killing. After all, this young woman’s life was taken by police simply because she did not submit quickly enough to a sexist geriatric autocracy.
Alas, President Joe Biden has dashed any expectation of credible U.S. leadership. Instead, echoing the Obama administration’s pathetic response to the 2009 Green Revolution protests in Iran, the Biden administration is doing the absolute minimum it can to persuade its media allies that it is doing anything at all. The administration is spinelessly regurgitating former President Barack Obama’s rationale that a nuclear accord with Iran must trump all other concerns, including this atrocity and the popular uprising it has generated.
NBC News’s Chuck Todd asked on Sunday whether Biden wasn’t repeating Obama’s mistakes. National security adviser Jake Sullivan offered an unabashed defense, not only of the current administration’s policy but also of Obama’s. Sullivan suggested that the Obama administration’s refusal to give even basic rhetorical support in 2009 was not out of fear of offending Tehran but rather out of concern that “it would undermine the protesters, not aid them.”
It’s a very weak excuse — one that arrogantly presupposes that the legitimacy of the 2009 protest movement rested on American silence and not on an outpouring of popular Iranian anger. Iran lacks such modesty. Its foreign minister on Monday told Al-Monitor, “Some of these pictures [of the protests] have been fabricated. … You have to respond to riots in a powerful, mighty way.”
Sullivan claimed that Biden’s address to the United Nations made clear “that the United States stands with the citizens of Iran, the women of Iran, as they demand their rights and their dignity and a better future in Iran.”
Biden’s actual remarks were less soaring: “We stand with the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights.”
And that was it. Biden made no call for global condemnation of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime. He offered no pledge of actual support to Iran’s people, nor did he call for other world powers to join with it. He provided no moral contrast between the democratic rule of law and Iran’s warped Islamic theocracy. Indeed, as in 2009, what Biden did not say is far more instructive than what he did say.
Sullivan wasn’t done, however. “We have taken tangible steps to sanction the morality police who caused this young woman’s death,” he said. “And we’ve taken steps to make it easier for the Iranian people to get access to the internet and to communicate with one another and with the world.”
This might sound good, but it carries little functional weight. Not one of the high-ranking Iranian officials ordering the brutal repression of their people has been sanctioned during this crisis. And Biden helping Iranians access the internet pales in comparison to the far bolder Trump administration’s covert action program, which helped Iranians evade internet censorship by the regime. Indeed, certain elements of that covert program were suspended by the Biden administration when Biden took office for fear that — you guessed it — Iran might not want to talk about nuclear weapons.
In other words, Biden’s response is one of hesitant virtue-signaling. Were Biden serious about standing with “the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights,” he would not be so scared about the future of his weak nuclear agreement as to avoid taking far more robust action. He should, rather, be suspending talks over the restoration of the nuclear deal. He should be sanctioning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Hossein Salami, the ideological guardian of this evil regime. He would level new financial sanctions to show Khamenei that his access to wealth goes hand in hand with his regime’s treatment of the Iranian people.
Innocent people are being brutalized for daring to demand the most basic rights. If Biden actually supported the Iranian people, he would be doing a heck of a lot more than this.
