Mark Steyn pummels "Bystander In Chief" Obama; others join in ...

A ton of good discussion regarding Obama's flawed thinking, statements, actions toward's Iran here ...


http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDlhMmZmY2I1MjI0MTZlNDBhZmI3N2Y3ZDk2ZGZlYjA=&w=MA==

Neutrality Isn’t an Option
You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.
By Mark Steyn

The polite explanation for Barack Obama’s diffidence on Iran is that he doesn’t want to give the mullahs the excuse to say the Great Satan is meddling in Tehran’s affairs. So the president’s official position is that he’s modestly encouraged by the regime’s supposed interest in investigating some of the allegations of fraud. Also, he’s heartened to hear that OJ is looking for the real killers. “You've seen in Iran,” explained President Obama, “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election . . . ”

“Supreme Leader”? I thought that was official house style for Barack Obama at Newsweek and MSNBC. But no. It’s also the title held by Ayatollah Khamenei for the last couple of decades. If it sounds odd from the lips of an American president, that’s because none has ever been as deferential in observing the Islamic republic’s dictatorial protocol. Like President Obama’s deep, ostentatious bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, it signals a fresh start in our relations with the Muslim world, “mutually respectful” and unilaterally fawning.

And how did it go down? At Friday prayers in Tehran, Ayotollah Khamenei attacked “dirty Zionists” and “bad British radio” (presumably a reference to the BBC’s Farsi news service rather than the non-stop Herman’s Hermits marathon on Supergold Oldies FM). “The most evil of them all is the British government,” added the supreme leader, warming to his theme. The crowd, including President Ahmadinelandslide and his cabinet, chanted, “Death to the U.K.”

Her Majesty’s Government brought this on themselves by allowing their shoot-from-the-lip prime minister to issue saber-rattling threats like: “The regime must address the serious questions which have been asked about the conduct of the Iranian elections.”

Fortunately, President Obama was far more judicious. And in return, instead of denouncing him as “evil” and deploring the quality of his radio programming, Ayatollah Khamenei said Obama’s “agents” had been behind the protests: “They started to cause riots in the street, they caused destruction, they burnt houses.” But that wasn’t all the Great Satin did. “What is the worst thing to me in all this,” sighed the supreme leader, “are comments made in the name of human rights and freedom and liberty by American officials . . . What? Are you serious? Do you know what human rights are?”

And then he got into specifics: “During the time of the Democrats, the time of Clinton, 80 people were burned alive in Waco. Now you are talking about human rights?”

It’s unclear whether the “Death to the U.K.” chanters switched at this point to “Democrats lied, people fried.” But you get the gist. The President of the United States can make nice to His Hunkalicious Munificence the Supremely Supreme Leader of Leaders (Peace Be Upon Him) all he wants, but it isn’t going to be reciprocated.

There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder. As Osama bin Laden put it:

The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that two million Muslims were killed.

How come a catalogue of imperial interventions wound up with that bit of scrupulous non-imperial non-intervention? Because great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims. They swarmed to the Balkans to support their coreligionists and ran into a bunch of Wahhabi imams moving into the neighborhood with lots of Saudi money and anxious to fill their Rolodex with useful contacts in the west. Among the alumni of that conflict was the hitherto impeccably assimilated English public (ie, private) schoolboy and London School of Economics student who went on to behead the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.

For the Obama administration, this presents a particular challenge — because the president’s preferred rhetorical tic is to stake out the two sides and present himself as a dispassionate, disinterested soul of moderation: “There are those who would argue . . . ” on the one hand, whereas “there are those who insist . . . ” on the other, whereas he is beyond such petty dogmatic positions. That was pretty much his shtick on abortion at Notre Dame.

Of course, such studied moderation is usually a crock: Obama is an abortion absolutist, supporting partial-birth infanticide, and even laws that prevent any baby so inconsiderate as to survive the abortion from receiving medical treatment.So in his recent speech in Cairo he applied the same technique. Among his many unique qualities, the 44th president is the first to give the impression that the job is beneath him — that he is too big and too gifted to be confined to the humdrum interests of one nation state. As my former National Review colleague David Frum put it, the Obama address offered “the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies.”

What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International? Maybe you’d know that, on domestic policy, Obama uses the veneer of disinterested arbiter as a feint. Or maybe you’d just figure that no serious world leader can ever be neutral on vital issues. So you’d start combing the speech for what lies underneath the usual Obama straw men — and women: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.” Very brave of you, I’m sure. But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up as the victims of honor killings in Germany and Scandinavia and Toronto and Dallas? Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery masquerading as such.

And so, when the analysts had finished combing the speech, they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.

The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity. Blaming his “agents” for the protests is merely a bonus: Offered the world’s biggest carrot, Khamenei took it and used it as a stick.

He won’t be the last to read Obama this way.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.


Obama Gives the Regime What It Always Wanted [Rich Lowry]

Every time Obama’s statements get tougher on Iran, I wait for our friends on the left to denounce him for making this about the U.S., for meddling in Iranian affairs, for giving the Iranian government a powerful propaganda tool, for all the parade of horribles we were told would occur if Obama spoke with some moral clarity about this crisis. By their logic, Obama has given the regime just what it wanted (denunciations of its conduct it can use for its purposes) at the very moment it’s cracking down hardest. They should be appalled and dismayed — if, that is, so many of them weren’t committed to praising whatever Obama says and does, ranging from nothing to his increasingly clear statements of the last few days.


'Even as the mullahs who have been at war with the United States for 30 years are engaged in a Tiananmen-style crackdown, President Obama is neck-deep in terrorist-for-hostages negotiations with Iran-backed killers who have American blood on their hands.' [Andy McCarthy]

My column today details the Obama administration's shocking negotiations with Iran's terror network in Iraq. As the result of this policy, President Obama has freed outright a terrorist responsible for the murders of five U.S. soldiers in Karbala, in the process abandoning America's longstanding, life-saving policy against trading terrorist prisoners for hostages kidnapped by terrorists. The administration has thus encouraged terrorists that their methods will work and that they will win valuable concessions by abducting Americans and allied personnel (and, as I elaborate, even by killing them). It is impossible to overstate how dangerously irresponsible this is.


Dear Your Eminence, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei . . . (America-Hating Lunatic) [Andy McCarthy]

The Washington Times reports that President Obama wrote a "let's get engaged" letter to Iran's top mullah before the election. As anyone who has been paying attention for the last three decades might have predicted, the "Supreme Leader" ridiculed the gesture.

. . . Which reminds me of a great point made by Caroline Glick (flagged in NRO's web briefing — and Caroline's point was also noted by Powerline's Scott Johnson): What would the American people really think of all this twaddle about engagement with implacable enemies of the United States if we had a responsible media that actually reported on what a five-alarm whack-job Khamenei is:

THE MOST IMPORTANT repercussion of the US media's propagandistic reporting is that the American public is denied the ability to understand events as they unfold. Take for instance The New York Times' write-up of Khamenei's sermon this past Friday in which he effectively declared war on the protesters. As Russell Berman pointed out in the Telos blog on Saturday, the Times' write-up was misleadingly selective.

The Times did not mention that Khamenei ascribed world events to a Zionist conspiracy which he believes controls the US. It similarly failed to mention his long rant against the US for the FBI's 1993 raid on David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Had the Times - and other major media outlets - properly reported Khamenei's speech, they would have made clear to their readers that he is not a rational thinker. His view of world events is deeply distorted by his hatreds and prejudices and paranoia.But then, if Times readers were permitted to know just how demented Khamenei's views of the world are, they might come to the conclusion that Obama's intense desire to sit down with him, and his constant pandering to Iran's "supreme leader" are ill-advised and counterproductive. They might come to the conclusion that it is impossible to achieve a meeting of the minds with a man who calls Americans "morons" and leads his subordinate government officials in chants of "Death to America," "Death to Britain" and "Death to Israel."

And if they came to these conclusions, how could Obama be expected to affect anything?


Sure, There May Be a 'Problem' Here and There, But Nothing We Can't Get Beyond? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Barbara Slavin:
Prior to this month's disputed presidential election in Iran, the Obama administration sent a letter to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for an improvement in relations, according to interviews and the leader himself.

Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the letter toward the end of a lengthy sermon last week, in which he accused the United States of fomenting protests in his country in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 presidential election.

U.S. officials declined to discuss the letter on Tuesday, a day in which President Obama gave his strongest condemnation yet of the Iranian crackdown against protesters.


Re: The Bystander-in-Chief [Mark Steyn]

Kathryn, what's striking about the Bystander-in-Chief is that the more he does nothing, the more credit he gets for everything. In the New York Times, Helene Cooper attributes events in Iran to the Obama "stealth effect." The fellows in the street shouting "Death to the dictator!" were apparently inspired to rise up by Obama's outreach to the, er, dictator:

He directed his comments not just to the Iranian people but to Iran’s leaders, and referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic,” further flagging a willingness to deal with the clerical government. He even went so far as to quote from the vaunted Persian poet Saadi, dead for 700 years now.

So the people's demonstrations against the leaders are a direct result of Obama's willingness to do business with the leaders. Gotcha. What's more, this Moussavi learned everything he knows from Barack:

In his campaign, Mr. Moussavi used many tactics that echoed Mr. Obama’s. He pledged to re-engage politically with the United States; he used posters of himself and his wife side by side, and he hired a young chief strategist who said he looked to the Obama campaign for ideas.
He uses posters of himself and his wife! If that doesn't testify to Obama's decisive impact on global affairs, I don't know what does.

My old pal Boris Johnson, mayor of London, is smoking what Helene's smoking. Reflecting on the Supreme Leader's decision to use Friday prayers for a mass chantalong of "Death to Britain!", Boris's crack geopolitical analysis immediately discerns that this is because, under Obama, America is simply too lovable to be plausible any longer as the Great Satan:

There is a good reason why the ayatollah bashed Britain with such singular ferocity, and it is to do with the Iranians' changing view of America. We have been co-opted to play the role of Great Satan, because America is now led by Barack Obama...

Barack is the Carrie Prejean of Iran. He looks hot, but the mullahs have stripped him of his Great Satan title because of his unfortunate remarks:

Barack Obama has shown the Iranian bourgeoisie that America is willing to engage, to treat their country with respect, and it is that sudden hope – of a new role and status for Iran – that is driving the protesters to see if they can be rid of their crazy regime.

What an incredible leader. By seeking to cut a deal with the "crazy regime," he's driven the masses to overthrow the crazy regime. He's an inspiration to both sides — both the protesters taking to the streets and the Revolutionary Guards gunning them down. And I'm sure if some third party emerges Obama will prove to have been the inspiration to them, too. Even if he just stands there looking bewildered:

This is clear both from the initial "caught in the headlights" reaction by Obama as he temporized — albeit with steely skill — and from accounts of diplomatic and other official sources here.

How many other deer caught in the headlights temporize with such steely skill? Thus, the Obama effect: Doe, a deer, a steely deer has led to ray, a drop of golden sun for the people of Iran.


An Inadequate Response to an Illegitimate Regime [Victor Davis Hanson]

Obama's Iran policy has been an ethical and practical embarrassment from the beginning. Moral equivalence? The president put Mousavi — and, by extension, the crowds in the street — and Ahmadinejad on the same moral plain.

Naïveté? For the first few days the administration and its flaks in the media issued pompous "in the know" suggestions to the effect that Ahmadinejad may have "really" won the election.

Straw men? We were supposed to think that those who from the beginning saw the issues at stake and supported the reformers with strong words of encouragement were some sort of interventionist neocons who wanted to do another Iraq-like invasion, or would egg on reluctant demonstrators only to betray them in Hungary-like fashion.
Keep reading this post . .


Krauthammer:

On Obama’s latest statements on Iran:

It had two parts. The use of the emotive words "appalled," "outraged" was new and right. But the policy of engagement remains unchanged.

Major asked him about hotdog diplomacy, meaning the administration weeks ago had said U.S. embassies around the world will be open on the Fourth of July welcoming for the first time in decades Iranian diplomats as a way to symbolizing opening and negotiation.

To do that at a time when the regime is shooting people from rooftops is bizarre. I mean, remember, even the senior Bush, the president who was the most hyperrealist and unsentimental, sent his national security advisor Brent Scowcroft to China after Tiananmen, after the massacre, but at least they waited six months.

This would be the welcoming of Iranians into American embassies to celebrate U.S. independence ten days after the shooting on the streets. That, I think, is disturbing in and of itself.

But secondly, the president speaks about all of these events in an odd way. He says there is a debate happening in Iran about its future. You know, when one senator yields to another in the Congress, that's a debate. Even, if you like, when you're having dueling demonstrations in Tehran, you could call that a debate.

But when you have demonstrators out in the street being shot from rooftops, that is not a debate. That's a massacre or a revolution. And the president refuses to understand or to acknowledge that what's at stake here is the legitimacy of the regime and not just elections.

On the state of the health-care and energy debate:

[Obama] is getting pushback in the Congress, and even appeared to be getting a bit in the press today, which I think is the big story….

[H]is charisma can take him only up to a point—and that point is at which reality asserts itself. The two issues in which he is in trouble in the Congress, on health care reform and on energy, he is up against the contradictions of the policy.

On health care, it is the idea that it is going to pay for itself. He repeated that today. There is no way that is going to happen. And the CBO has told us a week ago that his plans, his ambitious plans as translated in the Senate, are going to cost a $1 trillion or a $1.5 trillion.

And on energy, he is persistent in making the case that by insisting on alternative sources, which are more expensive, and taxing and regulating the more efficient and older-style energy like oil and gas and coal, which we have in abundance, he's going to make us more prosperous.

That's an absurd proposition. And, in the end, the absurdity meets reality in Congress, and that's why he's in trouble.


What's Next After Hot-Dog Diplomacy? [Michael Rubin]

President Obama is continuing plans to have Iranian diplomats — representatives of a regime that continues to imprison and kill peaceful protestors — celebrate July 4th, a holiday marking liberty and freedom, at U.S. embassies around the world.

What's next?

Inviting North Korean officials to share cake at a celebration commemorating the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Perhaps inviting the Taliban to a festival celebrating International Women's Day? Maybe we can even invite Zimbabwe to party with the Department of Agriculture, or have Libyan diplomats as guests of honor at a commemoration of human rights?

The White House and the State Department seem completely blind to the optics of this, something strange given the president's campaigning acumen. It is also a dagger in the heart of the imagery of hope and change which the Obama White House hopes to convey. President Obama, there's always next year. This is not neutrality; it is diplomatic malpractice and an insult to the Iranian people who are watching you so intently right now.


Iran, Exposed [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

As people die from the government crackdown, I asked Amir Taheri if any real progress is actually being made in Iran, for Iranians. He’s optimistic:

Yes. The regime has already lost control of the streets. It is now holding them not through “popular masses” but with armored cars and forces of repression.

On Wednesday, the regime was forced to cancel its rent-a-mob demonstration against Britain’s alleged “interventions in Iranian affairs.” Its fear was that the opposition might use the stage-managed event as a cover for its own genuine protest demonstration.

Meanwhile, the taboo of criticizing Khamenei has been broken.Hundreds of poems and songs mocking him, some using his sobriquet “Ali Gedda” (Ali the Beggar), are now in circulation throughout Iran. He has been exposed as the “godfather” of the Khomeinist establishment rather than the arbiter of national interests as he claimed.

People like Zbigniew Brzezinski can no longer go around claiming that the Khomeinist regime is a “vibrant democracy.” Sen. John Kerry cannot pretend, as he did in a recent New York Times oped, that Iran was facing not a popular uprising but a “neco-con plot.”

Even if Ahmadinejad manages to impose himself for four more years, President Obama will not have a remotely credible interlocutor to negotiate with.

The revolution that led to the shah’s fall took a year before it bore fruit.History is not written in advance, and the current revolt in Iran may well fizzle out.However, one thing is now certain:

The oxymoron “Islamic Republic” has been exposed as a sham.

The regime in Iran has become an Islamic emirate, or imamate if you prefer, like the one that existed in Yemen until 1961 and in Afghanistan under the Taliban until 2002.In Iran we have reached a moment of clarity. And, believe me, that is priceless.In my humble way I have fought for three decades to help bring about that clarity, to show my people, and the world at large, the true nature of the regime created by Khomeini, and I am happy.

To be sure, I hope to be even happier a year from now.


Realism and Obama's Response [Michael Rubin]

The conventional wisdom on Obama's refusal to establish a red line beyond which he won't recognize Ahmadinejad's government and his refusal to rescind the July 4 invitations for Iranian diplomats to celebrate freedom and liberty at U.S. embassies is that Obama wants to keep the door open to engagement with regard to Iran's nuclear program.

Two thoughts:

1. The command and control over any military nuclear program would be in the hands of the Office of the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the same groups who are now facing down the Iranian people. In other words, we share a common adversary with the Iranian people. We need to recognize that. The problem has never been the Iranian people — they indeed are far more moderate than their government. We should do nothing to antagonize them (which is why all the talk among some realists of outreach to the Mujahedin a-Khalq or playing an ethnic strategy is wrong, hamfisted, and counterproductive). We need to focus on how to counter and neutralize our common adversary.

2. Realism is about maximizing U.S. interests. Preserving an enemy regime is not realism. It is simply stupid. We should not be throwing a lifeline to the Islamic Republic, the fall of which would enable Iran to emerge as a force for moderation in the region, and allow the Iranian people to take their rightful place among nations.


Kaplan on Iran [Rich Lowry]

Kathryn noted this piece and it's also in the web briefing. Here's the key line: "The Iranian struggle for democracy is now as central to our foreign policy as that for democracy in Eastern Europe in the 1980s." And Kaplan is not a neo-con. As far as I'm concerned, he's exactly what a true realist should be — clear-eyed about the weight of history and culture, free of dogmatic commitments.


'Sources confirm Obama sent a direct message to Iranian leader' [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

(CNN) — U.S. President Barack Obama sent a direct message to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weeks before this month's disputed election, Iranian sources said Wednesday.The letter requested dialogue and engagement between the two nations, the sources said. The sources said Khamenei has yet to reply to the letter, but nonetheless it "had set the negotiating table in order for both sides to sit around it after the election."Khamenei made an indirect reference to the letter in his sermon on Friday at Tehran University."The U.S. President said that we were waiting for a day like this to see people on the street," the Iranian leader said. "Some people attributed these remarks to Obama and then they write letters to say we're ready to have ties; that we respect the Islamic Republic and on the other hand they make such comments. Which one should we believe?"
Keep reading this post .


Timing [Mark Steyn]

Reading Jonah's piece today, it seems to me the president's problem is that he chose as a matter of policy to legitimize the Iranian regime at the very moment they chose to delegitimize themselves — first, by stealing the election to an unprecedented degree and, then, by killing people who objected to them doing so.

That's awfully bad timing, and one sympathizes, as one would if Nixon had gone to China a week before Tiananmen Square. But the fact is it's happened and adjusting to that reality makes more sense than banking on being able to re-legitimize Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.


This just in ... White House Capitulation:

'WH Rescinds July 4 Invites To Iranians' [NRO Staff]
Here.

The White House has rescinded the invitations to Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 celebrations at U.S. embassies around the world.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said nobody from Iran RSVPed to come, and at this point, the invitations are no longer valid.

"Given the events of the past many days, those invitations will no longer be extended," Mr. Gibbs said.