Monday, June 22, 2009

The Man who Would Be God

Burt Prelutsky :: Townhall.com Columnist
by Burt Prelutsky



A while back, I heard Obama bragging about his first few months in the White House. When he claimed he had done as much in that period as any president in history, my initial thought was that for the first time in his life he was being modest. Frankly, I think he’s done more, much more, and I only wish that some of it had been good for America.



He’s taken over car companies, banks and lending institutions. He’s printed so much currency that he’s the envy of counterfeiters and con men everywhere. He’s buried the nation in so much debt that children born 40 years down the road will be greeted with a slap on the butt and a lien on future earnings. For good measure, the Community Organizer in Chief has created more czars than the Romanovs.


Still, we’re told, a majority of Americans like Obama. That would absolutely confound me if I wasn’t already aware that a lot of people think David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are funny.


But liberals are always, in the words of the Siamese king, a puzzlement. For instance, when I was five years old, my family still lived in Chicago. One day, I recall, a cousin came running up the stairs and pounded on the door to breathlessly announce that President Roosevelt was dead. The way my parents and older brothers reacted, you’d have thought the Nazis had just stormed ashore at Lake Michigan. My parents were grief-stricken. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. I remember thinking how odd it was that my family was so sad over the death of someone who’d never even visited our apartment.


Well, of course that’s the way a child would think. But the truth is, I’m now 69 years old and I still can’t figure it out. To this day, FDR holds a warm spot in the hearts of most Jews for reasons I can’t begin to imagine. There is nothing in FDR’s record that shows he had positive feelings about Jews. Some people have even suggested that, with his patrician background, he probably had a negative attitude. But the fact remains that he refused to let the Jews aboard the St. Louis disembark, and instead forced the ship and its passengers to return to Europe, back into the hands of the Nazis. For good measure, FDR, although urged by many, also refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the concentration camps.


Although FDR’s apologists like to point out that there were a great many isolationists in and out of Congress who opposed our entry into World War II, the fact remains that in the end Hitler declared war on us and not the other way around.

Obama's Persian Tutorial

The president has to choose between the Iranian regime and the people in the streets.



President Barack Obama did not "lose" Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America's 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.


Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to "unclench" its fist.


[Obama's Persian Tutorial]

Getty Images


Iranians continue to protest.


It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the "diplomacy of freedom" that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to "engage" them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.


But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran's rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.


Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: "Good will begets good will," he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America's role in the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.


Iran's rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination. The drama of Barack Obama's election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a son of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary order, a man from the brigades of the regime, austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks -- was up for re-election.


The upper orders of his country loathed him and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad's message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country's nuclear quest is a "closed file," settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.


On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country's identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome. We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.


That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama's statement that "the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised" put on cruel display the administration's incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history's burden: "Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons." No Wilsonianism on offer here.

International Bailout Brings Us Closer to Economic Collapse

Last week Congress passed the war supplemental appropriations bill. In an affront to all those who thought they voted for a peace candidate, the current president will be sending another $106 billion we don’t have to continue the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a hint of a plan to bring our troops home. Many of my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration seem to have changed their tune. I maintain that a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war.