The Washington Post editors timidly suggest:
The most momentous international event of 2009 was the uprising in Iran, and though the regime’s collapse is not imminent, it is hardly unthinkable. President Obama is prudent to pursue a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But in doing so, he must not diminish the prospect that Iran’s people might ultimately deliver both themselves and the world from the menace.
“He must not diminish the prospect. . . “? Hard to fathom what the editors mean precisely as they twist and turn, evading the glaring failure of the Obami’s Iran engagement policy. Does that opaque phrase mean that Obama should not undermine the cause of the democracy protesters any further — after defunding them and negotiating agreeably with the thugocracy that murders, imprisons, and abducts them in the middle of the night? Or does it mean that Obama now should actually do something to promote regime change, as the only logical response to a brutal regime not amenable to negotiation and very possibly not likely to be sanctioned by a fainthearted “international community”? Or maybe they mean that it might be a good idea to stop and assess whether “engagement” has done more harm than good. Hard to say.
Nevertheless, the editors hint at the fact that those Obama spinners who are quietly embarrassed by Obama’s passivity would rather ignore: if there is to be regime change in Iran, it will be in spite of and no thanks to the Obami. Whether one assesses the situation from a human-rights perspective or from that of cagey “realism,” it is a sobering conclusion and will, one suspects, remain as a blot on the administration’s foreign-policy record.
Next time Hillary Clinton or Obama start flying the banner of human rights and touting their witness-bearing skills (which, one supposes, is not unlike a mute bystander dutifully taking a video of a traffic accident — only with many more bodies maimed) someone should ask them why they have done so little to aid the most significant political popular uprising in our time.
