Tuesday, June 23, 2009

We Meant to Do That   [Jonah Goldberg]

I had thought about writing a column about Chuck Todd's comment on Meet the Press last Sunday. He reported that Obama officials are "frustrated that they're not getting credit for what's going on in Iran.…they think that Cairo speech did help supporters of Mousavi sort of see light at the end of the tunnel in their country. And so they would — they want a little more credit here for . . . helping to spark the enthusiasm that you're seeing in…seeing some sort of change in Iran.”

I held off doing the column because I thought it was too thin a reed based solely on Chuck's comment.

Well, by Gosh and Begora, here's a front-page story in the Washington Post — "Iran Unrest Reveals Split In U.S. on Its Role Abroad" —  just full of vexsome nuggets along these and other lines. An excerpt:

Obama's approach to Iran, including his assertion that the unrest there represents a debate among Iranians unrelated to the United States, is an acknowledgment that a U.S. president's words have a limited ability to alter foreign events in real time and could do more harm than good. But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic's Islamic authority in its 30-year history.

One senior administration official with experience in the Middle East said, "There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities," adding that "I was struck in the aftermath of the president's speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach."

The adviser said that "there is something particularly authentic about those who are carrying out these demonstrations," citing the fact that some are carrying symbols of the 1979 Iranian revolution as they march for new elections, including photos of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"The more you keep this in Iranian terms, the better the chances of change," the adviser said.

The administration's only direct intervention in Iran's post-election unrest was to persuade Twitter to delay planned maintenance that would have taken down the social-networking service during the prime organizing hours of Iran's opposition....[snip]

Obama has condemned the violence as "unjust" and endorsed the "universal principle" of peaceful protest, an approach informed by a sense that America's troubled place in Iranian history would undermine the demonstrators by coloring their cause as a U.S. interest.

His Cairo speech sought to clear the air — in Iran's case, by acknowledging the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Translated into Farsi, the speech was delivered to Iranians in real time through a State Department-sponsored text-messaging service.

Obama's advisers say the outreach may have contributed to the defeat in Lebanese elections a few days later of a coalition led by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed party, that had been predicted to win. In recent days, administration officials have pointed to the Iranian demonstrations as further evidence of Obama's possible influence in the region.

Asked Friday whether the administration believes Obama's outreach to Iran and the Muslim world is affecting events on the ground, press secretary Robert Gibbs said, "You're witnessing something that many people might not have presumed or imagined . . . just a few — even a few weeks or a few days ago."

Obama's supporters on Capitol Hill have argued that the Iranian demonstrators, some of whom do not favor a change in the Islamic nature of the government, should have no doubt the administration supports their cause.

Where to begin? First, there's an odd discontinuity to the piece. It keeps going back and forth between the idea that this is all about Iran, but that the president's words are responsible for what's going on in Iran. You might think that's the "split" referred to in the headline, but it's not. That split is between the supple, worldly, calibrated Obama administration and the frozen-in-amber Cold Warriors of the Republican party. Except there is a split between the two competing explanations the White House offers, and it's called "having it both ways." Obama wants to claim that he deserves some credit for everything good that is happening in Iran, but anything bad is merely the sad consequence of the limitations of American power. (We saw a preview of a version of the Obama Is Always Right approach in E. J. Dionne's Iran column yesterday, by the way).

So, if Obama deserves "credit" for what's happened in Iran, there are several possibilities. The first is that he intended for something like this to happen. He gave his speech in the heart of the Muslin and Arab world, knowing full well the glorious inspirational power of his words.

Or, he didn't intend for his words to specifically inspire the Iranians, but he's glad the shrapnel from his wisdom grenade generated so much collateral hope and change.

So, if it's option one, if the Cairo speech was intended to spark this protest movement, why was the administration caught so off guard? Why did Obama try to minimize the differences between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad? Why did he spend a week tamping down, rather than encouraging the protestors? I mean, if the Cairo speech was intended to inpsire such a movement, shouldn't have their been some follow-through? Some Plan A or even Plan B?

Or if the protests in Iran were the unintended-but-happy-consequence of his Cairo speech, one has to ask whether the administration is really as deft and "calibrated" as so many claim. I mean, this is a pretty big shift in the geopolitical landscape, and if Obama's speech is the Prime Mover, shouldn't he have been more careful about arousing such passions without any concrete plan about what to do once those passions have been aroused?

Last, does the Obama administration really want credit for how this is playing out? By their own version of events, Obama inspired millions to risk their lives — and some to lose their lives — in a cause that is far from certain to succeed. If the reform movement is crushed and tyranny endures for another generation in Iran, will Obama still want "credit" for what happened?

06/23 11:42 AMShare