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Jewish World Review
June 23, 2009 / 1 Tamuz 5769
The Obama Effect?
By
Mona Charen
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It's become almost a parlor game to watch Obamaphiles spin the
president's response to events in Iran. Uninfatuated observers have noticed
that the president displayed a tepid and unsatisfying neutrality to events
in the streets of Iran following the sham election just as he had done
last summer when the Russians staged an invasion of Georgia. His first
instinct was to preserve his bona fides for negotiating with the mullahs
bona fides that he has been at pains to demonstrate over the past several
months. Starting last January, President Obama put doubts about the nature
of the regime in Tehran to one side and offered blandishments to the
leadership of what he was careful to call "the Islamic Republic." In his
Cairo speech, the president begged forgiveness for the U.S. role in a 1953
coup. U.S. embassies worldwide were instructed to invite Iranian diplomats
to July 4 parties. By so doing President Obama granted legitimacy to the
mullahs and suggested that the U.S. under new enlightened leadership
was now a worthy interlocutor. At just that moment, the people of Iran told
the world how thoroughly detestable and illegitimate the Islamofascist
regime is. This must surely have been one of the worst cases of presidential
timing in living memory.
Yet Obama's ardent supporters stand ready to interpret any world
event as evidence of Obama's messianic effect. Matthew Stannard, in the San
Francisco Chronicle, noted that unnamed "Analysts suggested that President
Obama's rhetoric of extending an open hand to old rivals, culminating in his
widely watched speech to the Islamic world from Egypt on June 4, may have
pushed reform-minded voters to the polls in Iran." The New York Times asked,
"Could there be something to all the talk of an Obama effect, after all? A
stealth effect, perhaps?"
Isn't this a kind of arrogance? Isn't it further the kind of
arrogance an overweening emphasis on the importance of the United
States that the left usually attributes to conservatives?
There is no more evidence that the revolt under way in Iran (if
it succeeds, it will be called a revolution) is attributable to the "Obama
effect" than there is that it is the result of a George W. Bush effect. How
could Bush be involved? Well, you could make an argument that all of those
purple fingers in neighboring Iraq aroused a certain longing for democracy
among Iranians.
But it is far more likely that purely internal factors are at
work. David Frum catalogues the economic misery
Ahmadinejad has delivered. The unemployment rate, already at 10.5 percent
four years ago, has shot up to 17 percent. The inflation rate is 25 percent,
destroying savings and driving down living standards. Despite Iran's immense
oil wealth and the rise in oil prices in recent years, the standard of
living for the typical Iranian is no better now than it was in 1975. Because
Iran has not built oil refineries, this oil-rich nation must import 40
percent of its gasoline. Moreover, the corruption of the clerical elite is
widespread and universally detested.
Michael Ledeen points to the galvanizing effect the presence of
Mir Hossein Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has had on women in Iran.
Rahnavard is the half of the couple with all the charisma and the spirit.
While Mousavi is a soft-spoken, even dull former apparatchik, his wife is a
noted artist and university professor known for her reformist views who
directly called Ahmadinejad a liar and a disgrace during the presidential
campaign. She is personally religious and wears a hijab, but she favors
choice in these matters a profoundly subversive idea in the Islamic
Republic. Brave women have been out in force since before the election. They
marched carrying pictures of Mousavi and displaying their green colors. When
the regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner, young women poured into the
streets along with men. CNN covered one young demonstrator explaining how
the women collect rocks to give to the men to throw at the Basij militia, as
the women cannot throw as far. But they are on the front lines, body and
soul, defying the Basij militia and sometimes, as in the now iconic case of
Neda Soltani, paying with their lives. Neda, a young woman clad in blue
jeans and sneakers, has become an instant martyr to a very great cause
the cause of freedom.
President Obama needs to fall out of love with the image of
himself as the ultimate mediator. Events have overtaken that strategy and
revealed its hollowness.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment on JWR contributor Mona Charen's column by clicking here.
Mona Charen Archives
© 2006, Creators Syndicate
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