Good News For Obama!
And his anti-nuke foreign policy plans! NYT reports despair in Tehran as the anti-regime protests that threatened Obama’s peace plans sputter out, thanks to violence, arrests, tortured confessions and the threat of executions. Victorious Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by showering Obama with insults, has signaled that the terms under which he is open to a partnership for peace have not changed!
Former Spanish PM Aznar at WSJ: silence, inaction have consequences. You remember Aznar. He believed in facing down evil, and stood with the United States in same, prior to Spanish voters narrowly voting in some easily cowed socialist.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. via Gateway: Iran detains embassy personnel.
Here’s some O admin logic, via Doyle McManus at the LA Times:
… a top Obama foreign policy advisor told me the president still wants negotiations as soon as possible. “We do not believe that talking is a reward for good behavior, or that not talking is a good punishment for bad behavior,” he said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “We’ve seen what comes from not talking. In 2001, Iran had zero [nuclear enrichment] centrifuges; now they have more than 5,000, and maybe more than 7,000. Not talking wasn’t a particularly useful thing.”
Yeah, well, talking to North Korea, as Clinton did the 1990s and Bush did in this decade, wasn’t a particularly useful thing either time. That’s the problem with idle chatter when dealing with tyrannical regimes. They take advantage of it. Saddam, on the other hand, no longer the WMD threat that was most certainly was. It is noteworthy that the brief halt in the Iranian nuke program immediately followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
McManus adds:
Of course, Obama should never mute U.S. condemnation of internal repression in Iran or U.S. support for human rights as a price for nuclear talks — and he will not, aides say.
Too late, he already did! Though going forward the Iranians undoubtedly can expect to find themselves on the receiving end of some stern, carefully parsed lip pro-democracy service.
Indeed, the trick will be maintaining clear moral support for Iran’s democrats — plus any other aid that’s useful, including keeping Iranians’ lines of communication open, from Western broadcasts to cellphones to Twitter — in the face of Iranian negotiators’ inevitable complaints.
But in skillful hands, negotiations need not strengthen a dying regime. Instead, if the mullahs can be talked into abandoning some of the ideological pillars that have sustained their revolution for three decades, negotiations could undermine their rule in the long run.
And that’s not a new challenge for American diplomacy. Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan sought nuclear arms deals with Moscow even as he denounced the Soviet Union as “an evil empire.” Reagan aimed to undermine Soviet communism, but he also negotiated with its leaders — and he succeeded at both.
I’ve heard that Reagan-Soviet Union thing a few times in recent weeks. Very popular with the lefties. But the analogy overlooks some key facts. Reagan believed the American way is better and was its active proponent in the world. Obama doesn’t, and isn’t. Reagan also believed that building up U.S. forces and actively supporting the forces of freedom around the world was key. Obama doesn’t. Obama believes America needs to apologize for promoting its values, defending freedom and combating terrorism in the world, and wants to disengage as quickly as possible.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:44 am on Sunday, June 28, 2009
6 Responses to “Good News For Obama!”
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June 28th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
[...] Posted by taoist in Iran. Tags: Democracy, Embassies, Freedom, Obama, Protests, Riots trackback Is it dying down? Or rather, being killed? Interesting to see Iranian embassies being sieged…that must be a [...]
June 28th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Quoting your quote of McManus:
It’s almost as if the Europeans don’t exist and their failed multilateral carrot-flavored negotiations never happened, isn’t it?
You know — the same Europeans who we outsourced official Iranian contact to. The guys who were acting in our behalf . . .
June 28th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
But the analogy overlooks some key facts.
One of which is, the Soviets were pragmatic and largely cynical about their own communist philosophy. Islamists are true believers, who count on an afterlife in paradise, and see jihad as their God-derived duty to convert or kill all nonbelievers. I don’t know why this is so frickin’ hard to understand in light of nineteen Muslims who were willing to kill themselves and 3,000 other people to satisfy this impulse (not to mention the too-many-to-mention suicide bombers, jihadi warriors, sadistic head-loppers, etc. that have acted, and continue to act today).
June 28th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
…not talking…
Bush and Clinton both had ambassador level talks with Iran at least a dozen times.
The Bush diplomatic strategy was to let the Euros do the diplomacy since their objectives were the same and the Mullahs were singing “Death to America” all the time and not “Death to Europe”. Plain diplomacy.
The Iranians never complained about this arrangement with the Euros nor did they ask for direct US involvement in the talks.
June 28th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
RebeccaH, remember one thing, they love death more than we love life! I’m a caring individual and want to help them.
June 29th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Gotta love the comparisons to Reagan. Hey, if Obama wants to do it the Reagan way, I’m all for it. Denounce Iran and their recent actions in the strongest terms possible. Strengthen America’s military might and leave no doubt about our resolve. Then continue to negotiate with Iran’s leaders, with the threat of what we might do if the negotiations do not go well hanging over their heads. That’s the Reagan way.