How tough should Obama talk about Iran?
In Dissent, Michael Walzer writes that it is citizens who should be expressing resolute solidarity with the Iranian protesters: union members, human-rights activists, professors, students. But President Obama? He is doubtful:
Right now, the most important task of the U.S. government with regard to Iran is not regime change. The most important task is to persuade or coerce the Iranian government to give up the effort to produce nuclear weapons. Doing that will require some mix of toughness and conciliation -- and that necessary mix will still be necessary whoever actually won and whoever finally wins the Iranian election. What Obama says must be guided by what he has to do.The rest of us are much freer.
Leon Wieseltier, however, in the New Republic, laments Walzer's "exemption of the president from moral leadership in the midst of one of the greatest explosions of democratic energy in our time." And he dismisses in a parenthetical the argument that for an American president to ally himself with the protesters might, in fact, be to do them a disfavor:
(I am not an Iran expert, unlike almost everyone I meet, but I find it hard to imagine that the young men and women suffering the blows of the Basij would not welcome our support, that they are in the streets with angry thoughts of Mossadegh. If these events have shown anything, it is that their enemy and our enemy are the same.)
But, of course, Walzer wishes to give them "our" support. And history did not stop with the toppling of Mossadegh. It continued on, as it tends to do, through the 1979 revolution, America's backing of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, and that notorious John McCain ditty "Bomb, bomb, bomb / bomb, bomb Iran."
Is it really self-evident within Iran that the interests of Iranian dissidents and those of official Washington are aligned? I wonder.
UPDATE: Would the dissidents applaud this Op-ed piece, for example, written by someone who declares himself to be an ally of theirs? (It asks, or declares, "Time for an Israeli Strike?")
