So where is the leader of the free world? President Obama has picked out a place for himself among the spectator seats. From there, speaking of and to Iran, he comments that "The world is watching." But while he has "deep concerns," especially about the violence he's been observing on television, he sees no gain in "meddling in Iranian elections."
A cynic might infer that Obama is simply waiting for the protesters to be cleared out of the way so he can carry on with his dreams of extending a hand to cut deals with the dissent-crushing, terror-drunk, uranium-loving godfathers of Tehran. More generously, one might wonder if Obama really believes Iran's people have the best chance of defanging their own despots if unarmed protesters and armed state security forces are left to hash out among themselves who's in charge.
As it is, Obama's administration has been downplaying even the minor meddling in which--to his credit--it has engaged. Earlier this week, the State Department asked the social networking site Twitter to briefly postpone scheduled maintenance in order to keep open lines of communication for the Iranian protesters. The State Department then tried to shrug off the deed, offering the self-contradictory explanation that the idea was simply to keep information flowing, not to interfere in Iranian politics.
But whatever Obama's reasons for casting himself as U.S. Couch-Potato-in-Chief while protesters bleed in the streets of Iran, he's making a horrific mistake in choosing that role. In matters vital to American security, he's passing up a prime chance to start filling those big shoes he won in America's presidential race by promising "hope" and "change."
More broadly, Obama is underscoring a sorry message to democratic dissidents living under tyrannies everywhere, Iran included: That America is no longer all that engaged with their cause. Washington is more interested in engaging with, and thus shoring up, their rulers.
Contrary to Obama's current line, Iran's politics are not a strictly internal affair. Iran is run by a malignant and murderous regime, which since its inception in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 has been in the business not only of ruling by terror at home, but of exporting its despotic creed and tactics abroad.
The full record extends across the decades, from the taking of U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1979 to bombings in Beirut, Argentina, and beyond. But for a handy summary of the problem in very recent times--and this is before we even get to the matter of Iran's pursuit of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons--Obama could turn to the latest report of his own State Department on "State Sponsors of Terrorism."
There, one finds not only that Iran in 2008 "remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism," but that "Iran's involvement in the planning and financial support of terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia had a direct impact on international efforts to promote peace, threatened economic stability in the Gulf, and undermined the growth of democracy."
The same State Department report notes that Iran has been bankrolling, training and arming Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, "that are implacably opposed to the Middle East peace process." Further, the report states, in 2008, Iran provided the terrorist group Hezbollah with over $200 million in funding and trained over 3,000 Hezbollah fighters at camps in Iran.
The report also cites aid provided by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force to the Taliban in Afghanistan, including training, and the provision to "select Taliban members," over the past two years alone, of small arms, "rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107-mm rockets, and plastic explosives." Plus, there's Iran's responsibility for a long series of lethal terrorist attacks in Iraq.
And then there's Iran's special relationship with al-Qaida, in which "State Sponsors of Terrorism" reports the fascinating nugget that "Iran also continued to fail to control the activities of some [al-Qaida] members who fled to Iran following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan."
For America, the core threat from Iran is not the dubiously "re-elected" President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, per se. Nor is his rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a redeemer in waiting. The problem is the regime under which both have risen to prominence. In this system, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (heir to Khomeini) and his self-referential Guardian Council vet all comers; this precludes any genuinely open competition well before popular votes are cast.
The balloting last Friday in Iran was not an election pitting "hard-liner" Ahmadinejad against "reformist" Mousavi. It would be more accurate to call it, as Middle East expert Daniel Pipes has suggested, a "selection." This was a contest pitting two competing centers of interest against each other, overseen by the self-serving rulers of a brutal despotism. It had more in common with the promotion rituals of organized crime than with democratic politics.
Except that many of Iran's citizens took the opportunity to rally, debate and cast ballots, and many of those voters are now defying the rigged rituals of the regime to demand that those ballots actually count--and be accounted for. That is a move toward the end of the Tehran tyranny, and a step along the road toward democracy, which is the only real hope of defusing Iran.
The immediate danger is that these protesters, already being beaten, arrested and shot, will be brutalized into submission--possibly through the wholesale use of direct force now known, to the shame of China's regime, as "the Tiananmen solution."
For America, there are vital security interests at play. With the whole world watching, and Iran's regime caught off balance, Obama has a wide-open opportunity to provide some support and cover to the protesters, by extending a hand to them, while pressing America's own grievances with the Iranian regime.
He could use his speech-making gifts to clarify and explain--to Iranians, to Americans and to the world at large--why the U.S. also has its differences with an Iranian government that robs its own citizens to further the appetites and global ambitions of Tehran's ruling gang.
This would be an excellent moment to review the costs not only to Iranians, but to any civilized world order, of the Iranian regime's lavish missile and nuclear bomb projects, as well as its terrorist networks and beachheads set up abroad to expand the reach of the same brutal system Iran's protesters are openly denouncing as a dictatorship.
This would be a good time for Obama to highlight not the pseudo "respect" from America which he keeps offering the mullahs, but the true respect and welcome that would be available to a genuinely democratic Iran.
Sanctions as orchestrated so far have done little to dent the power of the Iran regime. One way to ratchet up their effect would be for Obama to launch an effort to cut off Iran's flow of imported gasoline. Iran's government, which lacks the refining capacity to meet domestic demand, imports some 40% of the gasoline used inside the country; this comes via a handful of suppliers.
The entire setup has long been one of Iran's most vulnerable points. Proposals to lean on these suppliers to scrap their Iran business have been kicking around Congress in recent months, generating bipartisan interest. But serious traction waits on Obama. What is he now waiting for?
With his gift of gab, Obama could also offer the Iranian protest movement a tad more support in the form of a name--if not something for the Iranians themselves, then at least something Americans could latch on to. The Wall Street Journal has been calling it the Iranian Rebellion.
Monday, I asked a reporter for Radio Farda, the U.S. government's Persian-language broadcasting service, if the Iranians have a name yet for their rebellion. She said no--"the color is green, but there is no name." We've witnessed the rose, orange and cedar revolutions, in Georgia, Ukraine and Lebanon. Why not the Green Rebellion in Iran?
Obama could also step up to the microphone to summarize, for both Americans and the world public, the astounding extent to which Iran's regime has been expanding its networks and spilling Iran's resources on shady projects around the globe. These items bubble through the daily news, but there has been little recent attempt from the U.S. bully pulpit to drive home just how pervasive these networks are.
In America alone, there has been a whack-a-mole game going on for years, in which American officials--at the Treasury, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, and so on--have been chasing down an astounding array of Iranian-related suppliers, front companies, money-laundering operations, and sanction-busting sales to Iran's weapons programs, including its U.N.-sanctions-defying nuclear ventures.
The labyrinthine list of cases--some capped with convictions, some still under active investigation--have involved everything from a number of major banks stripping tell-tale Iranian fingerprints out of transactions to a rash of illicit dealers in items related to weapons systems; broadcasting inside the U.S. by Iranian-backed Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station; and funds allegedly remitted to Iran via the U.S. and U.N.-sanctioned Iranian Bank Melli.
In a series of recent cases, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has been exposing what he described in testimony to Congress last month as "Iran's shopping list for weapons of mass destruction." This has included the indictment in New York two months ago of a Chinese national accused of setting up front companies as a cover for sales of millions of dollars worth of nuclear-related materials to Iran.
All of the above are matters which President Obama, in his beginner's zeal to reach out to Iran's predatory regime, has done little to highlight. Like it or not, they are highly relevant to the security interests of American voters, and for Obama to give them a well-packaged public airing right now could provide Tehran's tyrants with worries and distractions enough to give the protesters more room to maneuver.
Obama likes to speak of the hour "for which we were born." Iran's dissidents are providing silver-tongued Obama with a chance to rise to such an occasion. Mr. President, please stop expressing "deep concerns" and give us the meddling, the resolve and the rock-'em, sock-'em speech this hour in Iran demands.
