It’s dismaying that President Obama has been so tepid, so feeble, so flaccid (as Charles Krauthammer put it) in his support of Iran’s brave dissidents. It’s upsetting because it’s not the way an American president should be. But it’s not so surprising, really, when you consider the source.
Obama has many fine qualities, no doubt, but in foreign policy he seems to lack instinct. His default setting is not freedom and its expansion, but caution and politics.
In June, tens of thousands of men and women surged into the streets of Iran’s cities. They denounced the theft of a national election that put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power for a second four-year term. They called for political reforms and deplored corruption among the ruling mullahs.
This was a spectacle that Americans had hoped for decades to see. It’s been the greatest demonstration of Iranian public opinion since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, yet this time it was an outpouring against the clerics and in favor of freedom.
And what did Obama think of it all? Well, he didn’t say. For six days, as Iranian citizens rioted in the streets and shouted “Death to the dictator!” from their rooftops, Obama was muted and circumspect.
A week into the conflict, he formulated a careful response. Iran’s government “must understand the world is watching,” the president said. He quoted Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He said, “We are bearing witness to the Iranian people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
Bearing witness is thin gruel. Iranians being shot dead by masked government goons were offered the scant comfort of knowing that we were watching it happen.
Now even more intensely, the struggle rages across Iran. On Sunday, eight people died in street battles, and police have been arresting and detaining well-known dissidents and their families.
Does Obama have an opinion about this? Hard to tell, really. It is true that finally the administration is preparing “targeted sanctions.”
It’s also true that on Monday, at last, the president deplored the regime’s “iron fist of brutality,” though he quickly subsided back into that meager assurance that “we will continue to bear witness to the extraordinary events that are taking place.”
Yet those who are disappointed cannot really be surprised, because Obama’s passivity in foreign policy was revealed during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Back then, as now, something violent happened in a far-away corner of the world that observers with well-developed guts, as it were, had no difficulty judging. In August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia.
Then-candidate John McCain spoke out immediately against Russia’s aggression, just as an American president could be expected to do. McCain wasn’t reading from a script or acting on focus group findings; he knew instinctively that whatever the extenuating murkiness in that very murky part of the world, Russian tanks ought not be rolling across the Georgian countryside.
Yet with Georgia, as now with Iran, Obama was curiously neutral. He condemned “the outbreak of violence in Georgia,” as if the armed invasion was a spontaneous organic happening, rather than a planned and executed act of belligerence by one party.
Analysts took to the airwaves to explain each party’s grievances, to clarify the Russo-Georgian murkiness, and Democratic commentators used this exposition to defend their man: You see what a complicated situation it is; Senator McCain is a hothead who jumps to conclusions; how much wiser is Obama, who perceives nuance, etc.
Since June, Obama’s defenders have suggested that it is actually his masterly diplomacy that keeps him subdued while Iranian women are picked off in the streets by sharpshooters, anti-government protesters are executed, rioters are beaten and shot in daylight, and the relatives of opposition figures kidnapped and murdered.
This is clever, it is said, because Iran won’t be able to claim that America and its allies are fomenting the rebellion.
But what’s this? It seems that Iran blames the United States anyway. On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad described the opposition to his regime as “a nauseating theatrical performance staged by the U.S. and Israel,” and one of his colleagues in the Tehran government said Britain would “receive a slap in the mouth if it didn’t stop its nonsense.”
Tonight we will all be making our resolutions for 2010. Here’s one for Obama: Even if you have little instinct for it, speak up for those who seek liberty. You may give tyrants like Ahmadinejad rhetorical ammunition, but what of it?
Choose sides. Choose freedom. It is the American way.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
