And he’s missing an incredible opportunity to dramatically alter the face of the Middle East by making dictators the exception and democracies the rule, but he’s blowing it:
Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.
Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.
This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East.
This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.
The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.
What a shame Barack Obama so seems enamored with dictatorial leaders of Islamic nations. As a result, the freedom loving people in Iran are more likely to suffer with Obama as president of the United States than if Bush were.
Update: Richard Baehr at the American Thinker has a theory as to why Obama is walking softly and not carrying a stick:
So what have we learned about the Obama administration’s views on Iran and Israel this week?
With Iran: speak softly and carry no stick. We dare not offend, or look like we are an actor in internal Iranian politics.
With Israel: demand that Israel give up its sovereignty as a nation, and accede to Obama demands to stop having babies in West Bank settlements, then to abandon the settlements, and open up Gaza to any and all things the Hamas leaders in Gaza might want to bring into the strip…
At some point, it seems fair to ask why Obama is taking this approach. There is more and more evidence to suggest that, alone among the non-lunatic nations of the world (North Korea thereby excepted), Obama has problems with only one: Israel. Obama has for all practical purposes, become the salesman for the Saudi “peace plan”, designed to drive Israel back to the pre 67 war borders.
As for the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel (and others), the Obama approach can best be described as “not a problem”, or “mañana”.
The question that really needs to be asked is whether Obama’s shilling for the Saudi peace plan, and the non-stop fawning attention to the Muslim world since his inauguration represents something deeper, as Daniel Pipes has suggested. Have Americans unknowingly elected a pro-Islamist President?
