Are You Paying Attention, Barack?

I'm not the only one wondering if our President is paying close attention to what is happening in Iran and applying some lessons learned regarding his presumed impact on the ways of the world. So, too, is Fouad Ajami:

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

Likewise, David Warren also has some concerns:

As Amir Taheri has put it, the opposition candidate who lost the rigged election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is just "a balloon that a section of the Iranian middle class inflated to show its anger not only at Ahmadinejad but also at the entire Khomeinist regime."

Likewise, very naive foreigners, such as Barack Obama of the United States, vested foolish hopes in him as some kind of velvet revolutionary.

But in the course of the last week, events have transformed the issue.

Ayatollah Khamenei's extremely forthright statement to the demonstrators Friday clarified the situation. The regime understands that its very existence is at stake. So do its opponents. You win, or you die.

The demands of the people in the streets -- and there have been quite literally millions of them, turned out in every significant Iranian town, invisible to western media holed up under house arrest in Tehran, but quite apparent through the Internet -- are unambiguous.

They want "regime change." They do not want an amelioration, but an end, to the morality laws, the thugs who enforce them, the secret prisons, the international brinkmanship, the terror networks, and the rest of the regime's infrastructure of power.

They explicitly want an end to the "Islamic Republic of Iran," which, as Taheri and others have long been explaining, is a triple oxymoron (it isn't Islamic in any orthodox sense, it isn't a Republic in any political sense, and it does not recognize Iran as a nation).

Now, Barack, the real testing begins. The intrusion of foreign affairs, perpetrated by people who give less than a damn about you and your presumed election as "President of the World," has only just begun. Many, many of our adversaries wait for just such a moment to make moves on the international scene. And no amount of wishing or hoping or chants of YES WE CAN! is going to change this fact.

Time for the unseriousness to go away. Time to see your skill set(s) placed in action. I pray that you are ready but, true to your blind leftist world view, you've already blinked on Iran in the early going. If President Obama allows this opening to pass withought firm leadership from him in support of freedom for the Iranaian people we'll be subjected to an odd historical fact: the left will have been indifferent to the aspirations of freedom in both Iraq and Iran.

That's noteworthy, don't you think?

Are you paying attention, President Obama?

Comments

[gadfly]

"Time for the unseriousness to go away. Time to see your skill set(s) placed in action."

Date night and visits to the ice cream shop are the personally demonstrated actions of our president in times of trouble. How is that for sweeping away "unseriousness?"

How many times did we hear from Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, et al that GWB would not pull himself away from his grade school visit on the morning of 9/11?

[Ree]

Most Famous Community Organizer EVAH.

I am playing around with ACORN’s new name Change to COI you know our President is the most famous community organizer in history, I believe? COI – ACORN’S new acronym, no problem.

http://youhavetobethistalltogoonthisride.blogspot.com/2009/06/acorn-changes-name-to-coi-alrighty-then.html