We Can't Help

Rich Lowry has an astonishingly dumb piece criticizing the President's stance towards Iran. Read:

If only the Obama administration considered motorcycle-riding thugs beating demonstrators in Iran an offense on par with Israel’s West Bank settlements.

Then it could speak with moral passion. It could unmistakably denounce the killings, and relieve its State Department spokesman of the trouble of dancing around the word “condemn.” It could say that our relationship with the Iranian government depends on the unconditional end of its thuggery. It could explain that only if Iran stops the crackdown can we “move forward” in the Middle East.

But Iran is not an ally of the United States. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gets a rhetorical pass that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t. As hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters march for democracy, in defiance of a government that is our committed enemy, Pres. Barack Obama resorts to lawyerly equivocations. He labors to avoid saying anything denoting untoward disapproval of the baton-wielding shock troops of Iran’s theocracy.

Lowry seems unaware of his invidious comparison. The two situations are not the same in any way. Israel has been allowed to have its way with the Palestinian people for decades with little or specious criticism from the United States. If a two state solution is ever to be had, the settlements have to stop. But, that's Israel. It's not Iran. The situations are completely different. Israel has to deal with US because we give them more foreign aid than anyone else in the world. The current Iranian regime gains legitimacy by opposing the United States. And while the beating and shooting of peaceful protesters is horrifying and wrong, foreign policy is not the arena of morality. There are US interests at stake in Iran that are different than US interests in Israel. These two different situations require two different strategies, not one moral bludgeon.

In a perverse irony, we are witnessing the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic since its establishment, at the same time the first American president explicitly to accept the regime’s legitimacy happens to be in office. Whatever credibility the mullahs have lost in the street, they have picked up in the Oval Office, where the president bizarrely seems less enthusiastic about a change in dispensation in Iran than much of Tehran’s population.

Obama says he wants to avoid stoking a nationalist backlash. A legitimate, but overblown, concern. Iranians surely can understand the difference between the U.S. sending CIA operatives into the country to help stage an anti-democratic coup — as Obama constantly reminds the world we did in the 1950s — and speaking up against repression. Without undue “meddling,” Obama could note that governments in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan honor election results, and exhort Iran to lead the democratic wave rather than resist it.

Somehow Lowry doesn't see the contradiction in this. He, without qualification, states that the Iranian people know the difference between rhetorical support and CIA meddling and then tells the President to laud Iraqi and Afghan democracy. 'Cause we never meddled in Iraq or Afghanistan. No, that civil war in Iraq happened all on its own and those drone attacks in Afghanistan are pure myth. We have sent thousands of troops into Iran's neighbors and meddled directly with their government, resulting in unrest and death. Yet, Lowry looks at Iraq and Afghanistan and thinks Iranians will appreciate being compared to them or will ignore US intervention in their affairs. I'm afraid neocons simply cannot divorce themselves from the simplistic structures they establish to practice foreign policy. They need bogeymen, so they wish for Ahmadinejad to win the election so that we won't have the wool pulled over our eyes. Then protesters come out in the street and they demand the President support anti-Ahmadinjad groups. The world is not as simple as "democracy good, tyranny bad." You cannot conduct a foreign policy upon "you're with us or against us." It's been tried, quite recently in fact, and it failed miserably.

And Obama is so dead-set on negotiating with the current regime, he doesn’t want to invest much in the hope of changing it. Obama is often compared to Jimmy Carter, but his approach in Iran is the opposite of Carter’s. Carter was deeply moved by human rights and put the possibility of promoting them above other priorities, such as stability and maintaining an ally in Tehran. Obama is putting human rights behind stability, in the ultimate cause of a prospective bargain with the mullahs.

This isn’t really “realism,” but a stubborn commitment to an illusory belief in the power of talks with an ill-intentioned, reform-resistant dictatorship. Beneath the veneer of its hardheaded distancing from the protesters, Obama’s policy has a goopy, naïve heart.

Here's where we hit the truly bizarre. Robert Kagan previously argued that the President's realism had driven him into the arms of the current Iranian regime. Lowry is saying that Kagan was wrong: the President has been driven into the arms of the current Iranian regime by his idealism. Not the idealism of human rights, but the idealism that a peaceful method of engagement can affect Iran's behavior. It's quite stupid when you think about it. Here's the calculation, if you can call it that: President Obama has not said a word in support of anybody in Iran, not the regime, the protesters, any of the candidates, no one, so this means he must want to talk with the current Iranian regime, because he is not committed to ends in Iran, he's committed to means.

Whatever wan hope there was that we could talk the Iranian regime out of its nuclear-weapons program is diminishing. The regime doesn’t appear to be in a compromising mood, and Obama’s free pass for the crackdown is likely only to broadcast our weakness and pliability. If there is no cost to violating international norms in crushing flesh-and-blood protesters, why will there be a cost to defying the parchment strictures of the International Atomic Energy Agency?

I have a fun little hypothetical question for all neocons. What if the Iranian people tear down their current government and establish a pro-Western democracy that's not driven by religious figures (the best of all possible outcomes, right?) and yet still develops a nuke? What then? Are they still run by a suicide state? Is rule by the people an illegitimate government? Democracies are not necessarily peace loving and this revolution, if it truly is that, probably won't end in a pro-Western democracy. These protesters are invoking the language and images of the last revolution. The protesters are religious fervor. Let's say the President supports them and the bring about a new Islamic government that seeks nukes, how are the neocons going to oppose that? Better yet, how is the President? Never does it occur to them that the wise course is not to buy into any side in a moment of unrest. The wise course is to not act, to not involve ourselves in a situation we don't understand.