Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Krauthammer’s Take   [NRO Staff]

 

From last night’s “All-Stars.”

 

On Obama’s reaction to the situation in Iran:

 

I find the president's reaction bordering on the bizarre. It's not just little and late, but he had a statement today in which he welcomed the Iranian leader's gesture about redoing some of the vote, as you indicated.

 

And the president has said "I have seen in Iran's initial reaction from the supreme leader." He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution.

 

So he uses that honorific, and then says that this supreme leader — it indicates that he understand that the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election. Deep concerns? There is a revolution in the street.

 

And it is not about elections anymore. It started out about elections. It's about the legitimacy of a regime, this theocratic dictatorship in Iran, which is now at stake. That's the point.

 

What we have here is a regime whose legitimacy is challenged, and this revolution is going to end in one of two ways — suppressed, as was the Tiananmen revolution in China, or it will be a second Iranian revolution that will liberate Iran and change the region and the world.

 

And the president is taking a hands-off attitude. Instead of standing, as Reagan did, in the Polish uprising of 1981, and say we stand with the people in the street who believe in democracy. It is a simple statement. He ought to make it.

 

And it is a disgrace that the United States is not stating it as simply and honestly as that.

 

On North Korea:

 

…What I think is remarkable is that even though over the last 16 years in the Clinton and the Bush administrations we did not succeed in stopping, although we slightly slowed the nuclear program, look what's happened in the six months of the quote, unquote, "smart diplomacy" of the Obama administration?

 

Long-range missile tests, the explosion of a nuclear weapon probably a third the size of Hiroshima, the declaration that the plutonium the Bush administration had frozen will be weaponized entirely, the entire stock, and the declaration that the uranium program which the Bush administration talked about, which Democrats had said was an invention of the Bush administration, the uranium enrichment is going to start up. All of that and the seizure of two Americans.

06/17 10:17 AMShare