Israel Matzav

Obama wants the Iranian revolution to fail?

American President Barack Hussein Obama has used the claim that Iranian challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi is 'no different than Ahmadinejad' as an excuse for not supporting the Iranian uprising against the Islamic regime. But how can he be sure that Mousavi is not different? Maybe Mousavi deserves support anyway? Maybe the movement of which Mousavi is the titular head deserves American support regardless of Mousavi himself?

In an interview on CNBC on June 17, Mr. Obama argued against the U.S. aiding reformers on the basis of the choice between the purported election winner, Ahmadinejad, and protest leader Mousavi. He cautioned that Mousavi is no classical liberal: he had to pass muster with the clerics in Tehran in order even to qualify for the ballot and, as far as foreign policy is concerned, there is no difference. The Administration is correct. But U.S. support for the reform movement need not be centered solely around Mousavi. While he is the fulcrum now of daily protests, the movement he represents is much larger, more complex and has much grander aspirations for change in Iran.

In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power upon the death of his predecessor in the Soviet Union, many Republicans — both Reagan Administration officials and conservative intellectuals — dismissed him as a phony reformer who was only trying to save the Soviet regime. Yet Gorbachev found himself setting in motion processes that he could not control, leading to the rise of Boris Yeltsin, a more radical reformer, and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. No one knows, of course, whether a leader such as Mousavi, who indeed has shared the mullahs hostility toward the U.S., would follow such a pattern. But the record shows that revolutionary change can come through leaders who come to power seeking to prevent it.

As for the notion that American action is unhelpful to reformers, this simply contradicts historical experience. Successful movements to alter authoritarian and totalitarian regimes almost always depend on internal dissent backed by strong international support. Those key factors are often required to get a regime's enablers — including domestic security forces — to lose confidence and eventually succumb.

Time and again and around the world — from as recently as Tibet in 2008, to Egypt in 2005, to Tiananmen in 1989 — the prospects of reform dim considerably without international support. In fact, we know of no modern democratic evolution or revolution that has succeeded without some support and pressure from the west.

The rest of the world seems to want the Iranian students to succeed in overthrowing the Islamic government. The question needs to be asked: Does Obama want them to fail?

Here's the argument for why Obama may want the Iranian students to fail. Obama's top foreign policy goal - indeed the only foreign policy goal he has seriously articulated other than turning the United States into an Islamist-worshiping, nuclear disarmed pussycat - is to force Israel to facilitate the creation of a 'Palestinian' state reichlet on the land that Israel liberated in a defensive war in 1967. The way in which Obama proposes to get there is to force Israel to create that state reichlet by using the leverage of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability in the hands of an apocalyptic regime. In other words, Israel, if you want the United States to act against Iran's nuclear weapons program, you have to create a 'Palestinian state' first. The administration has referred to this as 'linkage.'

If there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program, no Iranian nuclear program, or the Iranian nuclear capability - whether civilian or military (and obviously we'd prefer that it be civilian only, but that's a separate issue) - is in the hands of a rational, western-type government rather than in the hands of an apocalyptic, 12th imam-seeking theocracy, the Obama administration's leverage over Israel to create that 'Palestinian state' disappears into thin air. There is nothing to which to link its creation.

Over-simplified? Far-fetched? I'm waiting for another rational explanation of why the leader of the free world would be so standoffish toward a group of democratic revolutionaries who are trying to overthrow the yoke of a repressive regime. Even if they fail, how would the United States be harmed by having supported them? If the revolutionaries fail, Iran goes right back to where it was internationally.

As to the claim that Obama is hesitant because of the American role in the 1953 coup in Iran (one of many apologies he has delivered over the past few months), I just don't buy it. Obama is not foolish enough to need a lecture like this:

But even if many Iranians are still suspicious of U.S. intentions because of this coup, which happened at a perilous time in the Cold War, Mr. Obama must also consider that more than two-thirds of Iran's population is under thirty years of age and was born after the 1979 revolution. Their whole lives have been lived under this regime, and many correctly credit it with the misery with which they must contend, rather than a coup that occurred decades before they were born.

We do not want to minimize the myriad tactical dilemmas here in addressing a fluid situation. But the minority camp inside the Obama Administration seems to understand that the threshold dilemma must first be met. The job of an American president is not that of a history professor, but an actor in history. As masses march and bullets fly this weekend, a timeless question cannot be avoided. Even if we cannot know or control the outcome, we have a responsibility, through our actions as a nation, to answer clearly the question: whose side are we on?

I fear the answer to the question is that Obama is on the side of the 'Palestinians' (or on whatever side is opposing Israel) and will therefore let the opportunity to bring about regime change in Iran slip by. What a loss for the West!

UPDATE 10:36 AM

Barry Rubin has some pertinent comments here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:01 AM