Obama's Persian Tutorial

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

By FOUAD AJAMI

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.

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.

Your Silence is Deafening, Mr. President

by Donald Lambro

WASHINGTON -- President Obama, known for his soaring oratory, has been having a hard time finding the right words to respond to the Iranians' struggle for political change and freedom in a repressive society.

The reason: He has so much invested in his let-us-sit-down-and-settle-our-differences diplomatic approach to Iran that it has all but turned into a "see no evil, hear no evil" policy toward that nation.

The headline in the Washington Post late last week seemed to capture Obama's inability to fully respond to the massive protests in the wake of Iran's apparently rigged elections that have disenfranchised millions of Iranians. It read: "U.S. Struggling for Right Response to Iran," with a subhead that said, "Obama Seeks Way to Acknowledge Protesters Without Alienating Ayatollah." One week after the Iranian elections, Obama and other administration officials were still engaged in opaque verbal gymnastics to avoid offending the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, while all but dismissing what has become -- let's face it -- the denial of basic human rights.

At the beginning of last week, Vice President Joe Biden responded weakly for the White House, saying the administration was taking a "wait and see" position. Then, even as the protests mounted into a sea of anger, the administration still seemed incapable of identifying with the pro-democracy demonstrators.

By Tuesday, Obama was stuck in the same benign position of his earlier statements that this was a dispute that was "ultimately for the Iranian people to decide."

But there was no direct sympathy for the Iranian people, who believed that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi had been denied the election by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government -- only this generic bromide: "But I stand strongly with the universal principle that people's voices should be heard and not suppressed," Obama said.

"A reporter shouted a question about whether he stood with the people of Iran, but Mr. Obama had already turned and left the stage," White House correspondent Jon Ward reported in The Washington Times.

Everyone in the room got the point.

As thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of Tehran to protest the election amid wide charges of vote fraud, the pictures of repression and state retaliation were flashed around the world. Basij paramilitary gangs, allied with the Iranian regime, were seen beating and harassing protesters. As many as eight or more were shot by government security forces. Others were rounded up and jailed.

Eventually, the communication networks were shut down by the government, and the foreign and Iranian press were barred by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance from covering, recording or photographing the street protests. Earlier, there was an attempt to shut down access to Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

But the White House wasn't budging from its pro-engagement position toward Iran's militant regime. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton summed up that position by midweek: "We are obviously waiting to see the outcome of the internal Iranian processes, but our intent is to pursue whatever opportunities might exist in the future with Iran."