The streets of Tehran are filled with chants and shouts, tear gas, bullets and blood. Citizens and leaders throughout the civilized world raise their voices in support of those beleaguered Iranians demanding their liberty. In only one spot is there silence. That is the Oval Office. Only one man remains unmoved by the wreckage of a people’s hopes for justice, and dreams of change. That man is Barack Obama.
One has to wonder why he remains so reticent. Why can’t our President muster sympathy for those who seemingly seek to replicate his theme of hope and change? Why can’t he tell them he supports them? Is it because they seem to be appropriating his brand, that they have, without his permission, adopted his audacity, his hope, his change?
Wise men and women, realists all, explain Obama’s silence by citing his reluctance to jeopardize the chance to negotiate directly with the Iranian government. If only he can get his foot in the door, they reason, he can sway the Ayatollah with his eloquence, his kindness, his wisdom, his nuance. But if he supports the concept of freedom, they will never sit down with him.
One hates to be the bearer of bad news, but they will never sit down with him. Obama may be the anti-Bush, but he remains the Great Satan, and only by submitting his nation to Sharia will he earn the Supreme Leader’s affection. It is unlikely he will do that, especially since he passed up a golden opportunity to do so when he addressed “The Muslim World” from a podium in Cairo. While he denied any Christian underpinnings to his own nation, and boasted that America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” while he morally equated the Holocaust with Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, while he endorsed a woman’s right to wear the hijab while declining to support her right to bare her head, while he spoke of his Muslim roots with a forthrightness which got McCain supporters fired before the election, he did not, in the end, surrender American sovereignty.
The metronomic cadence of what passes for his oratory failed to put the defenders of the Islamic Revolution to sleep, as it has so many of his subjects. Instead, they were merely bored. They yawned, then turned around and stole an election. How do we know they stole the election? Perhaps the most telling sign was Khamnei’s warning to Mousavi’s supporters, the day before the people went to the polls, not to take to the streets to protest the results. They knew what they were going to do, they told the world they were going to do it, and then they did it.
Yet our President doesn’t want to rock the boat. He really would like the world to remain quiescent while he executes his plan to transform America into a European-style social democracy. Nasty little foreign conflicts tend to distract one’s attention when one is the leader of the most powerful country in the world. No amount of apologies on foreign soil, no amount of acts of obeisance to foreign despots, no amount of playing the ostrich can change the fact that the world is a messy place, and the United States has interests all over it. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t go to the White House with the world you want, you go to the White House with the world you have.
Still, neither reluctance nor timidity can explain Obama’s silence. The theocratic dictatorship in Iran has never shown any signs of a desire to improve relations. The opposite inclination prevails. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran has American blood on his hands. He has the blood of Christians, Jews, and even Muslims, he has the blood of his own people on his hands. He is the one who leads the people in chants of “Death to America.”
Yet recently the Iranian people have taken to their roofs to chant a different slogan. Now they cry “Death to the Dictator,” and “Death to Khamanei.” This is an act tantamount to the forfeiture of their very lives. Yet they continue to do so. Why on earth would an American President decline the opportunity to show even a hint of support to those who are rising in rebellion against the sworn enemy of the American people? What could possibly motivate him? Why does he desire a meeting with the Supreme Leader so greatly that he will do nothing to jeopardize it? Why would he not support those who wish to overthrow Khamanei, and the theocratic dictatorship over which he presides?