On June 20, after a week of post-Iranian-election presidential mealy-mouthing, and a day after both houses of Congress had passed resolutions condemning the behavior of the Iranian regime, the White House put out a statement from President Obama. It began:
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.
It ended:
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 people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.
Leave aside the questionable notion that the “international community” believes the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Focus on what is truly startling: The president of the United States apparently believes the government of Iran needed to hear from him that “the world is watching.” Why did he suppose the regime was busy shutting down websites and expelling foreign journalists or restricting them to their hotels in Tehran? What the Iranian regime cared about–what the Iranian regime was worried about–was what, if anything, the world would do.
The answer, the American president told them, was that the world would do nothing.
Almost a half-century before, a young Democratic president had said this:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Once an American president had promised we would bear any burden. Our current president promises “we will continue to bear witness.” It’s quite an evolution.
To be fair, sometimes the point of bearing witness is to rouse men to action. Barack Obama, though, seems to take pride in bearing witness for the sake of . . . bearing witness. Unlike Martin Luther King, whom he invokes, but like the 1968 Democratic convention protesters whose chant he echoes (“The whole world is watching”), it’s all about demonstrating one’s moral superiority to the agents of injustice. It’s not about correcting the injustice. As (former?) Obamaphile Leon Wieseltier recently noted, “Obama seems to think that there is some force in the admonition that the world is watching; but history plentifully demonstrates that when the world is watching, all the world does is watch.”
One does hope that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. But sometimes the moral universe could use a helping hand, and the American president is uniquely situated to be of assistance.
Unfortunately, action that might actually weaken the Iranian regime seems to be the last thing Obama wants to undertake. Since June 12, he’s done nothing to help those Iranians who have been seeking, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”
Last week, three of Iran’s opposition leaders boldly denounced Ahmadinejad’s government as illegitimate, a day after the regime forbade further challenges to the election result. Mir-Hussein Mousavi posted this on his website: “It’s not yet too late. It is our historic responsibility to continue our protests to defend the rights of the people” and oppose a police state in Iran. But Obama refused to take their side. “The political situation in Iran is for the Iranians to work out internally,” said Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice. So much for standing with the Iranian people who are fighting to vindicate (Jefferson again) “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”
Hillary Clinton–remember her? Barack Obama’s increasingly marginalized secretary of state–said a couple of months ago, “Let’s put ideology aside; that is so yesterday.” Well, it’s increasingly clear that John F. Kennedy’s Democratic party–the one that stood for freedom, that acted on behalf of freedom–is so yesterday, too. But the fact is, as Wieseltier succinctly put it, “there is nothing more sweepingly in the interest of the United States in the Middle East than the withering away of the theocracy in Iran.” That’s not so yesterday. That’s a truth of today. For all of his talk of bearing witness, it’s a simple truth Obama will not open his eyes to see. Because if he saw the truth, it would require action. And acting on behalf of justice–as opposed to talking about it–is hard.
–William Kristol
