A Weak American President

[incarcerated]

.

A Weak American President

Anne Bayefsky, 06.23.09, 07:38 PM EDT
Behold Obama on Iran.

President Obama has staked his reputation on being a human rights guru to people around the world. But his remarks at Tuesday's news conference and behavior since taking office have instead exposed a different persona--that of human rights charlatan.

On June 15, three days after the phony Iranian elections and the same day that seven Iranian demonstrators were murdered, Obama's UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, made a speech in Vienna promoting the Saint Obama vision: "The responsibility to protect is a duty that I feel deeply. … We must prepare for the likelihood that we will again face the worst impulses of human nature run riot, perhaps as soon as in days to come. And we must be ready. … We all know the greatest obstacle to swift action in the face of sudden atrocity is, ultimately, political will. … It requires above all the courage and compassion to act. Together, let us all help one other to have and to act upon the courage of our convictions."

A week later there were multiple casualties, injuries and threats, and 46 million voters wrenched away from that doorway to freedom that had opened--if only a crack. But when the president was asked Tuesday: "Is there any red line that your administration won't cross where that offer [to talk to Iran's leaders] will be shut off?" He answered: "We're still waiting to see how it plays itself out."

And when asked again, "If you do accept the election of Ahmadinejad … without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?" He answered: "We can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places."

And asked again: "Why won't you spell out the consequences that the Iranian people…" He answered: "Because I think that we don't know yet how this thing is going to play out."

And yet again: "Shouldn't the present regime know that there are consequences?" He answered: "We don't yet know how this is going to play out."

This is a man who embodies the opposite of the courage to act. His appalling ignorance of history prompted him to claim at his press conference that "the Iranian people … aren't paying a lot of attention to what's being said … here." On the contrary, from their jail cells in the Gulag, Soviet dissidents took heart from what was being said here--as all dissidents dream that the leader of the free world will be prepared to speak and act in their defense.

The president's storyline that we don't know what has transpired in Iran is an insult to the intelligence of both Americans and Iranians. Our absence from the polling booths doesn't mean the results are a mystery. The rules of the election were quite clear. Candidates for president must be approved by the 12-member Council of Guardians. As reported by the BBC, more than 450 Iranians registered as prospective candidates while four contenders were accepted. All 42 women who attempted to run were rejected. So exactly what part of rigged does President Obama not understand?

Instead of denouncing the fake election, President Obama now tells Iranians who are dying for the real thing "the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Whose sovereignty is that? The Hobbesian sovereign thugs running the place? Sovereignty to do what? To deny rights and freedoms to their own people? In a state so bereft of minimal protections for human dignity, why should the sovereignty of such a government be paramount?

But President Obama didn't want to dwell on the daily reality of sovereign Iran: A criminal code that permits stoning women to death for alleged adultery and hanging homosexuals for the crime of existing. Instead, he repeatedly invoked "respect" for "their traditions and their culture."

This is the same mantra he espoused to the Islamic world in Cairo when three times he spoke of the "rights" of Muslim women to cover up their bodies. Knowing full well that women in the Muslim world face the contrary problem of surviving after refusing to cover up their bodies, he never once dared to mention that this was also a human right. What part of cultural relativism and traditional oppression does President Obama not know how it plays out?

In his scripted remarks, the president gave the impression of talking tough: "The Iranian government … must respect those rights [to assembly and free speech]. … It must govern through consent and not coercion." But with the "or else" pointedly missing from his lines, he made it plain that he continues to have high hopes of partnering with this current Iranian theocracy. "I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people."

This Iranian government has told us in deeds, as well as in words, exactly what path it has chosen. President Obama has told us his path also: pandering to Islamic radicals and empty posturing. Ironically, the rest of the world claimed they wanted a weak American president whose foreign policy would read "apologize, capitulate and stand down." Now that they have what they asked for, real human rights victims are being forced to pay the piper.

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor and director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust in New York.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/23/oba...-bayefsky.html

I guess the POTUS has not seen the video, like I have, of the 'tortured' student. A young woman who stated her protest behavior was influenced by the Voice of America and the BBC.

There are so many other things I would like to say. But they all leave me spitting in anger at both our country's leaders who have kept silent and at a country that had a small, slim chance to change its historical course. RIP Neda.

[Sigaba]

FWIW, I share the sense of disappointment expressed in many quarters about the president's noncommittal comments regarding the protests in Iran during yesterday's press conference.

If the Iranian government is going to distort what the president says anyways, he can state more clearly his position.

Instead, as he did on the issue of the Armenian genocide, the president sought to have it both ways.

If the president is pursuing other measures that will remain unknown and those measures prove effective, then historians will vindicate him. (I think a balanced appraisal of his presidency will be a long time coming given the fact that folks seemed ready to put him on Mount Rushmore before he even won the office.)

But in terms of political leadership in the here and now, I think he could (and should) do better on this issue. At the very least, he could act like he gives a damn.

(Later tonight, I'll howl at the moon.)

[Richard]

I just saw on the news where he's just dis-invited the Iranian ambassador to the White House Fourth of July activities - if that doesn't show the Iranian government we mean business, I don't know what will.

Richard's $.02

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Richard

I just saw on the news where he's just dis-invited the Iranian ambassador to the White House Fourth of July activities - if that doesn't show the Iranian government we mean business, I don't know what will.

Richard's $.02

I don't know, boycotting the Olympics, maybe?

TR

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Richard

I just saw on the news where he's just dis-invited the Iranian ambassador to the White House Fourth of July activities - if that doesn't show the Iranian government we mean business, I don't know what will.

It is interesting how the folks at The Huffington Post are presenting the president's handling of events in Iran. Jennifer Loven offers this account of the president's comments during yesterday's press conference. The original story is here, below is the first portion. (The rest is equally bilious.)

Obama condemns violence against Iran protesters

JENNIFER LOVEN | June 24, 2009 12:13 AM EST | AP

WASHINGTON — Dramatically hardening the U.S. reaction to Iran's disputed elections and bloody aftermath, President Barack Obama condemned the violence against protesters Tuesday and lent his strongest support yet to their accusations the hardline victory was a fraud.

Obama, who has been accused by some Republicans of being too timid in his response to events in Iran, declared himself "appalled and outraged" by the deaths and intimidation in Tehran's streets _ and scoffed at suggestions he was toughening his rhetoric in response to the criticism.

He suggested Iran's leaders will face consequences if they continue "the threats, the beatings and imprisonments" against protesters. But he repeatedly declined to say what actions the U.S. might take, retaining _ for now _ the option of pursuing diplomatic engagement with Iran's leaders over its suspected nuclear weapons program.

"We don't know yet how this thing is going to play out," the president said. "It is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it."

Obama borrowed language from struggles throughout history against oppressive governments to condemn the efforts by Iran's rulers to crush dissent in the wake of June 12 presidential elections. Citing the searing video circulated worldwide of the apparent shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan, a 26-year-old young woman who bled to death in a Tehran street and now is a powerful symbol for the demonstrators, Obama said flatly that human rights violations were taking place.

"No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice," he said during a nearly hourlong White House news conference dominated by the unrest in Iran. "Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history."

In regards to the rescinded invitation, what is the sound of a hand patting its owner on the back? Source is here.

No Iranian diplomat had accepted an invitation from U.S. diplomatic posts abroad to attend embassy Fourth of July parties, according to the State Department.

Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters that... no Iranians have accepted, and he indicated that the U.S. saw little reason for them to, given the political crisis over their disputed presidential election.

Way to show 'em, Mr. President. That'll learn 'em.

Next thing you know, the president will cut off Iran's access to America's Got Talent and Gossip Girl.

But I'm not bitter.

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

It is interesting how the folks at The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post, isn't that an internet "blog"? I know it makes the NYT's look conservative.....

The things people read.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

The Huffington Post, isn't that an internet "blog"? I know it makes the NYT's look conservative.....

And even more freightening, HuffPo makes the NYT seem competent.

The things people read.

Just researching the opposition and some Seinfeldian self-annoyance.

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Just researching the opposition and some Seinfeldian self-annoyance.

Sounds painful. (I do some of that also and it pains me to admit it. I don't view it as opposition, I think of it as attempting to understand the lesser intellectually gifted individuals...)

Didn't I just read that a Huff reporter was given an all access pass to interview the "Community Organizer" and a front seat at the media room?

[Blitzzz (RIP)]

He's like a stalk of wheat blowing in the wind of popular opinion. He is ignorant to dealing with International situations and is prone to react and then to retract as the populace "suggests" some sort of disaproval to his simi-actions.

[Razor]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Next thing you know, the president will cut off Iran's access to America's Got Talent and Gossip Girl.

LOL!

[Soak60]

I really, really wish the POTUS would take a stronger stance on this issue, but I'm expecting nothing. At the most I can see us "staying the course" (to use an earlier phrase...) in our current conflicts; it's beyond my imagination or expectation to see a true support of democracy in Iran, especially at a "tipping point" like this where an obviously significant part of the population is no longer in favor of a theocracy which has little concern for modern human rights or democratic procedures.

All that I can do is hope (what a weak word) that Iran produces a set of modern day "founding fathers" that can somehow align a modernized Islam with democracy, set the fire of freedom in the people's hearts, and win freedom from the theocratic rule.

Anyone care to give odds?

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by armymom1228

I guess the POTUS has not seen the video, like I have, of the 'tortured' student. A young woman who stated her protest behavior was influenced by the Voice of America and the BBC.

AM,
I haven’t seen that video, but I am skeptical about this sort of thing. For the Iranian regime, damage control will primarily consist of blaming the disturbances on foreign influences. British columnist Christopher Hitchens called this one on Monday:


Persian Paranoia

Iranian leaders will always believe Anglo-Saxons are plotting against them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 22, 2009, at 12:43 PM ET

I have twice had the privilege of sitting, poorly shaved, on the floor and attending the Friday prayers that the Iranian theocracy sponsors each week on the campus of Tehran University. As everybody knows, this dreary, nasty ceremony is occasionally enlivened when the scrofulous preacher leads the crowd in a robotic chant of Marg Bar Amrika!—"Death to America!" As nobody will be surprised to learn, this is generally followed by a cry of Marg Bar Israel! And it's by no means unknown for the three-beat bleat of this two-minute hate to have yet a third version: Marg Bar Ingilis!

Some commentators noticed that as "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei viciously slammed the door on all possibilities of reform at last Friday's prayers, he laid his greatest emphasis on the third of these incantations. "The most evil of them all," he droned, "is the British government." But the real significance of his weird accusation has generally been missed.
One of the signs of Iran's underdevelopment is the culture of rumor and paranoia that attributes all ills to the manipulation of various demons and satans. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons—more than the CIA, more even than the Jews—who are the puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the "creation" of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad's novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the afterword by the author himself, who says:
In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ... [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.
Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:
1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."
That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a noninterventionist position? All right, then, take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)
There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with perfect clarity. Why can't we?

http://www.slate.com/id/2221020/?from=rss

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by Soak60

I really, really wish the POTUS would take a stronger stance on this issue....

I do too. But he can’t. POTUS is committed to a strategy based on a policy of conciliation towards Islam. Making nice. Everything else seems to be flowing from this: our conduct of the WOT (it’s no longer the WOT); gaining cooperation from Pakistan (permission for continued drone strikes in their country, advisers, as well as their offensives into Swat and Waziristan) (there is no avoiding a significant effort to preserve the Paki government); the dismantling of the Surge in Iraq (reduced troop levels, no combat outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods and cities, no combat patrols, call us if you need us); the ratcheting up of tensions with North Korea; and a limp response to the Iranian regime. It all seems to be about taking a less provocative stance towards what he has repeatedly referred to as the Islamic World. They’re calling it ‘soft power’ in the press.

A large part of this strategy of conciliation is BHO’s campaign to show us that Islam is something that we can live with. Something that we can live with and which must be respected. This has been his personal example every step since inauguration day.
The Iranian street disorder has thrown an uncomfortable curve at BHO and a wrench into Islam’s public image. To condemn the regime for repression would run counter to his larger strategy of conciliation. So he did the best he could: he waited until the disturbances were essentially over and fizzling out (ten days after the first reported protester deaths) before speaking out, harshly, but not with real condemnation:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1245...mostcommentart
“…."In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to the peaceful pursuit of justice," Mr. Obama said. "The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost."….”

I suspect that beforehand, BHO back-channeled the Iranian leadership to tell them that these remarks (which sounded, at first glance, so much like George W. Bush) were for domestic consumption only (a practice widely used in the Middle East), and that in no way did they represent a break with the dialogue and process of moving towards improved relations with Iran. No disrespect meant; simply responding to opposition political pressure. Goodies to follow.

Because public remarks are so often intended for domestic consumption in the Middle East, we use the rule of thumb: ‘ignore what they say, watch what they do.’ I expect no significant actions (or even sanctions) against the Iranian regime from BHO, and no significant support for the protesters. Look for POTUS to get things back on track with Iran (if in no other way than by simply allowing this issue to pass and fade away), and a resumption of tensions with North Korea.

A policy of conciliation is, by definition, a policy of weakness. BHO can counterbalance weakness in the Middle East by saber rattling towards NK. North Korea is not Muslim, and does not operate a significant global terror network. And they have a lot of buttons that are easy to push to get them to say shrill, hostile, crazy things:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...F7R9wD9912KIO0
"...."If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will ... wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all," the official Korean Central News Agency said...."

Moving this Axis of Evil member very loudly and publicly into the national security threat spotlight helps get Islam off the hook. I believe he wants to move Iraq, Iran, and someday Pakistan, out of that spotlight. It’s a shell game.

[Sawman]

A man with no character takes on the characteristics of his surroundings. So, he looks round if he's in a round glass, red if he's in a red glass, etc. If you pour him on the floor to stand on his own, he has no color or shape, whatsoever.

A man with real character stands on his own and is unmistakable.