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Obama’s cool reaction to Iranian revolt defended
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Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei strongly endorsed the tainted election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his Friday sermon at Tehran University, he demanded that opposition leaders strike their colors and end the demonstrations that have brought hundreds of thousands of Iranians into the streets for almost a week. It would seem that his earlier request that the Council of Guardians review the election returns was a moment of hesitation or confusion that has passed. He now says: “The Islamic state would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people. The legal mechanism for elections would not allow any cheating.”However, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, described as “the most important and senior ayatollah living in Iran,” issued a statement rejecting the election results. In the subdivision of the conflict that could be called “the battle of the mullahs,” Montazeri adds weight, prestige and encouragement to the anti-Ahmadinejad forces: “I ask everybody, particularly our dear youth, to continue claiming their demands with patience and to be careful and alert about keeping the peace and the nation’s security, by avoiding any kind of violence, in order not to provide any excuse to the thugs who wish to distort their lawful demands, thugs that are embedded among the people and by setting fire on people’s property and creating chaos and destruction wish to create a besieged atmosphere in the country.”
In that connection, there are reports that the Basiji—the Brown Shirts of the Islamic Republic— plan to instigate violent confrontations with the demonstrators on June 20. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay criticized the brutality and the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, but no one thinks the rulers of Iran much care about UN Human Rights Commissioners.
A potentially interesting development: Two Iranians presented a letter, the authenticity of which has not been verified, to members of the European Union Parliament. It is supposedly from the Iranian Interior Ministry to Khamenei, revealing the true election returns. It allegedly shows that Mir Hossein Mousavi won over 19 million votes, Mehdi Karroubi following with 13.3 million votes, and Ahmadinejad trailing with only 5.5 million votes.
And as dictatorships automatically do, Iran looked for and found a foreign conspiracy, in this case, an Israeli plot to explode bombs in Iran on election day. There is no indication that Iranians are distracted or fooled by this feeble attempt to drag “the Zionist enemy” into their domestic crisis.
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In Washington, the capital being the way it is, this important foreign policy issue has swiftly decayed into partisan quarreling. Advocates of watching quietly while the Iranian people struggle for freedom, prominent among them President Barack Obama, are feeling the heat from advocates of letting slip which side we prefer.The quiet side struck back on July 17 with a New York Times op-ed by Senator John Kerry. His argument against stronger words is that “our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference.” The demonstrators themselves, Kerry implies, don’t want America to mix in.
The problem with these claims is that they don’t make sense, or are counter-factual.
How would American support for the demonstrators help the mullocracy? Would the protestors think, “Obama is on my side—I must be wrong”? Probably not. Would the pro-Khamenei/Ahmadinejad forces suddenly think, “The demonstrators are the tools of the imperialists”? They already believe that. The clerical establishment does not need, and is not waiting for, external justification for repression. The notion that American expressions of support for democracy would be responsible for a backlash is fanciful. Sure, if the revolt is violently put down, the mullahs will scapegoat America—but that would happen regardless of what America does or says. We’re not the “Great Satan” for nothing.
The “failing economy” argument is hard to follow. The Iranian economy is suffering, and most people understand that Ahmadinejad’s policies are to blame. Therefore, what? The regime would use Obama’s words to distract attention from the economy, which is not after all the focus of the protests? This is incoherent.
The assertion that people will stop wanting what they want if outsiders also want them to have it is bizarre. The strongest version of this argument is that the Iranian people will draw back from demanding liberty for fear that American support presages an American attempt to control Iran. Well, maybe. But if reports that Iranians are the most pro-American people in the Middle East are correct, unlikely. In any event, Obama could easily make plain that America supports the right of the Iranian people to freely chart their own destiny. Nothing scary there.
As for Kerry’s claim that “this is an Iranian moment, not an American one,” as Michael Goldfarb trenchantly asks, if the protesters don’t want American support, why are their signs in English? Plainly, at least some Iranians yearn for outside support:
I talked to a few students in Tehran (Monday morning Tehran time). They confirmed that the attack on their dormitory was brutal, destructive, and the authorities may have taken as many as 100 students with them. In Tehran, one faculty told me, the security forces had thrown some student off a building. . . .In my exchanges with them, I can't help but be affected by their words. A question that I have heard several times is this simple one: Do the Americans know what is happening here? They don't complain, but they want to know if the silence is politics or indifference or . . . One said, I hope the diplomats in Europe don't sell us cheap. One comment made by a couple of them, and this is directed at people inside and outside Iran, is tough to take: "it seems that we are all alone."
Maybe the Iranians will take back their freedom without Obama in the cheering section. The larger, sadder problem here is that it should not be that hard for Obama and large parts of the Democratic Party to take the side of the Iranian people against their oppressors. We have turned away from solidarity, and the belief that democracy is a universal value. We’ve become the “realists,” and have ceded to the Republicans the valuable foreign policy real estate of democracy promotion. Perhaps the intraparty debate (both houses of the Democratic-controlled Congress have passed resolutions supporting democracy in Iran) will lead to better days, pro-democracy days, in the Democratic party.
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