Quiet On Iran

If you’ve staked out a position on Iran that’s roughly midway between Jonah Goldberg and Ayatollah Khamenei, then you’re probably on the right track.

And that’s pretty much where President Barack Obama stands.

Obama’s reaction to the “results” of Iran’s June 12th election and the subsequent uprising have been judicious: “We in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people, and their voices, should be heard and respected.”

But critics like the National Review’s Goldberg have ripped Obama for putting “a fresh coat of whitewash on Iran’s sham ‘democracy.’”

Can we get a side order of “Freedom Fries” with that?

Obama will likely continue to engage whatever regime eventually holds or takes power, and while it’s unclear what will happen next, there are (at least) five good reasons that he should hold back for now:

Your lying eyes?

Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are sticking to the line that the election was legitimate, and that they managed to get a record 85% voter turnout to vote almost two to one in favor of the status quo: not a very plausible scenario—just look at 538’s assessment of the Iranian vote by region—the tally doesn’t pass the smell test.

But Ahmadinejad, while appearing cartoonish to us, has popular support in different Iranian sectors—among rural voters and religious conservatives—and so it’s also possible that there’s a Mark Furman scenario here, whereby the regime framed a guilty man—ham-handedly planting the “bloody glove” of electoral fraud when perhaps Ahmadinejad would have won the election anyway, just with a narrower margin.

‘Hussein’ in the membrane.

Even though Obama says publicly that he wants to avoid “meddling” in this family feud, he already has. He went over the heads of the Iranian establishment with his Spring Nowruz video message and again when he spoke in Cairo about expanding dialogue between the U.S. and the Muslim world—including Iran—and that was the right time to do it. Not now when Iranians have a reform momentum of their own, and any attempt by Obama to decry their ruling establishment will be fodder for accusations that challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi is a tool of the West.

So with Ahmadinejad already hemorrhaging credibility—at one point Iran’s Guardian Council was considering a Sopranos-style sit down with Mousavi—there’s no need for Obama to say more than he has, because the world can see what's going on, and Iranians know that we’re listening. As Peggy Noonan observes, they “trust us to be for change and advance their cause, and they’re right to trust us.”

Talk is cheap.

Bush administration deputy national security advisor Elliot Abrams complains that “The Europeans are ahead of us, making tougher statements” than Obama in condemning the Khamenei regime.

But while German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have derided Iran’s election results as “an atrocity,” what’s the down side for them? If you turn on CNN, you won’t see footage of French or German soldiers in a firefight in Iraq or Afghanistan, and if Israelis and Palestinians ever get to the bargaining table, it will be because of us, not them. European leaders can afford to down talk the Iranians because they don’t have a whole lot of skin in the game.

And you're who, again?

Arguing that Sarkozy’s position, in contrast to Obama’s, is a geopolitical role reversal, the Wall Street Journal notes that Obama didn’t “have anything to say the first two days after polls closed in Iran.” They apparently haven’t figured out yet that Obama never says anything in the first two days of anything, and instead engages in something commonly known as “thinking.”

Meanwhile 99 percent of Americans didn’t even know who Mousavi was a month ago—a former Prime Minister and a protégé of Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet some conservatives have already seized upon him as the return of Lech Walesa, even though he could easily turn out to be a rerun of Pervez Musharraf.

The real Y2K bug.

And Americans love a roiling freedom protest—except when it’s in our own country.

It wasn’t too long ago that we had our own disputed presidential election, but the House of Representatives still voted 405-1 to condemn the Iranian regime. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) led the charge, saying Obama failed to advance the “American cause of freedom.”

But if you were Khamenei, wouldn’t a sarcastic reference to Bush v. Gore be your ace in the hole?

Though it's not wrong to offer moral support to the Iranian reform movement, to think that a resolution to the crisis hinges primarily on what Obama says is evidence of a myopic worldview.

The expressions of disappointment in Obama's response from Senator John McCain and others ring hollow because of their track record: If Obama had forcefully denounced the Iranian regime, then his critics would’ve instead labeled Obama as “naïve.”

Iran’s crisis is about its relationship with the West, but also the Iranian constitutional system, their economy, their ethnic minorities, their gender politics, and ultimately about bitter old men hanging onto power.

Since taking office, Obama has consistently sought to add a missing ingredient to U.S. foreign policy mix—respect. It may be lost on his critics, but just as he offered respect to Iranians in his previous speeches and messages, now he’s offering it again by tempering his comments with regard to their political turmoil.

Obama had his say—now, hopefully, Iranians will have theirs. We support, they decide.

David Swerdlick is a regular contributor to The Root.