Post-American Presidency (21 page)

But Barack Obama didn’t help them. Quite the contrary. The leader of the free world was too busy extending his hand to those same mullahs.

As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory in the June 2009 Iranian elections, riots broke out in Tehran. Iran was spinning out of control.
The government tried to clamp down—opposition candidates were placed under house arrest and then released—but the unrest did not die down for weeks, and flared up again on November 4 during the celebrations of the storming of the embassy: crowds that shouted “Death to America” faced competition from others who shouted “Death to the dictator”—Khamenei—instead.
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From the beginning of the unrest, the CIA should have been at work inside Iran, helping the dissidents and reformers, and strategizing about the removal of the country’s nuclear weapons. And the president of the United States should have spoken out strongly in favor of the demonstrators, and freedom. But instead, Obama said that “it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” and that he was “deeply troubled by the violence” in Iran.
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In a press conference on June 23, Obama said: “I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs.”
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Obama offered only the most lukewarm criticism of the regime’s bloody crackdown: “I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent—all of those are universal values, and need to be respected.” (I hope he will remember to respect them in the United States.) “And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they’re, rightfully, troubled.”
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All right, so he was “troubled.” Or the American people were. Many were not only troubled, but horrified at the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young woman who was shot dead by the mullahs’ thugs on a street in Tehran. But in fact there were many Neda Agha-Soltans. The most visible feature of the Iranian protest movement was the leadership role of the women in Iran. They were the heart, soul, and fuel of that defiance in the face of crushing repression.

But Barack Obama did not stand with Neda Agha-Soltan. He did not stand with any of the Iranian women who put their lives on the line for freedom during that first summer of his presidency.

What did Obama choose to do when he became “troubled” by the ferocious crackdown on political dissent in Iran? Give his public support to the democracy movement? Call for restraint from the mullahs in dealing with the protesters, and justice in the Iranian election?

Barack Hussein Obama chose to do none of those things.

Instead, he reiterated his desire to talk with the Iranian leaders who were coordinating the bloody crackdown against their own people: “We will continue to pursue a tough direct dialogue between our two countries.”
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And those terrified, courageous souls marched through Tehran, acting out in hope that it might effect any change. They were engaged in an exercise in futility, courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama. It was an opportunity missed.

Not that the Iranian elections really would have changed anything in and of themselves. The allegations of fixed elections came after polls showed that half of the electorate wanted Ahmadinejad. But if half of the electorate wanted this bloodthirsty jihadi annihilationist, then what led to all the unrest? Hundreds of thousands of people turned out at rallies
for
Ahmadinejad before the election. The election was a ruse. As Christopher Booker wrote in
The Telegraph
, “The reality is that this was a completely sham battle between rival factions of a regime as ruthless as any in the world, in which the real power is exercised by the gang of hard-line mullahs round the ‘Supreme Leader’, Ali Khamenei. In an election riddled with fraud (six million more ballot papers were printed than there are Iranians eligible to vote), all four regime-approved candidates had long been personally involved in the regime’s murderous reign of terror.”
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Opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi, although he had always
been a faithful servant of the mullahcracy, positioned himself as a reformer. It was shaping up to be a first-class piece of political theater: the “reformer” would win, and would con the UN and the president while finishing their extensive, comprehensive nuclear-weapons program. Not one nuke, not two nukes. Many nukes. The world wanted so desperately to be fooled. And so the “new” Iranian president would “engage” in a “new era,” “new dialogue,” and “diplomacy,” to Obama’s delight.

Many people (including Barack Obama) pointed out that Mousavi was in reality scarcely different from Ahmadinejad. After his numerous overtures to the mullahs, it wasn’t hard to know why Obama appeared to be hoping the opposition would be crushed.

But there were numerous signs that many of the Iranian protesters were not fighting for Mir Hussein Mousavi.

The resistance to the Iranian regime that the world witnessed in the summer and fall of 2009, with young people risking torture and death, was not about installing Mousavi as president. The Iranians were given four choices; it was not as if they could write in Ronald Reagan’s name. But what might a regime change, or even a modification of the regime with someone like Mousavi as president, have meant to Iran’s nuclear program? If the Iranian demonstrators had not been crushed, it is anyone’s guess how many of the strictures of the Islamic Republic they might ultimately have thrown off—after all, Iran was a relatively secular state until 1979.

Clearly a significant number of the protesters have been fighting for freedom from the Islamic Republic and the stifling restrictions of Sharia itself. Some attitudes are entrenched in people and cultures, but I do not believe that people fight bullets with rocks and bricks for more of the same. They already had Sharia rule, without the suffering and horror that came with the demonstrations. Even Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hizbullah, the jihad terror group that
is Iran’s client in Lebanon, noticed that. “What is going on in Iran,” he said in June 2009, “is not a simple protest against the results of the presidential election. There are riots and attacks in the streets that are orchestrated from the outside in a bid to destabilize the country’s Islamic regime.”
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Would people who are fighting simply to install a different president in a strict Sharia state that is viciously hostile to Israel appeal for help from the country they hate the most? Yet Iranian dissident Arash Irandoost asked for help from… Israel: “Dear Israeli Brothers and Sisters, Iran needs your help more than ever now.” He argued that Israel and the Iranian freedom fighters faced a common foe: “The unjust treatment and brutal massacre of the brave Iranians in the hands of the mullahs’ paid terrorist Hamas and Hizbullah gangs are not seen by the majority of the Iranians.”
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The Iranian people were dying for their aspirations. As Arash Irandoost’s appeal suggests, those aspirations do not include the destruction of America or Israel. The freedom fighters were trying to travel an uphill road against a cruel, vicious theocracy and a huge fundamentalist peasantry. They fought and they died tragically—and magnificently and bravely, trying to better their society.

It is a stain on America’s great history as a force for good that we elected a president who gave tacit support to murderers and savages, and abandoned those dying for freedom.

If Obama had thrown his support to the demonstrators and the Islamic regime had been toppled, the new president would need the West as a bulwark in his defenses against a resurgence of Islamic supremacism. He might have bowed to pressure from the Iranian people for a relaxation of Sharia rule and a return to something like the way Iranian society was under the shah. This could have led him to moderate Iran’s foreign adventures also: no bomb, and perhaps no Syria, Hizbullah, and Abbas as proxies by which to wage terrorism.

A moderate Iran could have been an enormously stabilizing force in the region. This was why Obama’s failure to seize the moment was so shortsighted and stupid.

The Green Revolution, like the Cedar Revolution (Lebanon), the Rose Revolution (Georgia), and all those purple fingers were the manifestation of an idea, an idea that men yearned for: liberty and freedom. And while not everyone wants freedom, those who do ought to be given their inalienable human rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Iranians who were taking bullets, axe blows, and the crushing blows of batons were those very people. And these courageous and desperately isolated people deserved the wholehearted support of all free people.

CHANGE, BUT NO HOPE: ENDING FUNDING FOR IRANIAN FREEDOM

According to “Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses,” a Congressional Research Service report dated May 19, 2009, Barack Obama hung the Iranian democracy protesters out to dry in the 2010 budget.
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The report detailed $67 million that was set aside during the Bush administration to promote democracy in Iran. “Of that, as of October 2008,” according to the report, “$42.7 million has been obligated, and $20.8 million disbursed.” It adds that more money had also been “appropriated for cultural exchanges, public diplomacy, and broadcasting to Iran.”

But all that changed when Barack Obama became president: “However, the Obama Administration did not request funding for democracy promotion in Iran in its FY2010 budget request, an indication that the new Administration views this effort as inconsistent with its belief in dialogue with Iran.”
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Could the mullahs have asked for a better friend?

Obama not only passed up a chance to speak up for the brave Iranian citizens who dared to take their lives in their hands and protest the Iranian regime. He not only ended funding for the promotion of democracy in Iran. He also abandoned them to their fate by cutting off funding for a watchdog group that monitored human-rights violations inside Iran, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.
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The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center had received over $3 million from the State Department between 2004 and 2009, and used it to document the human-rights abuses—notably the torture of political prisoners and the murder of pro-democracy activists and dissenters—perpetrated by the Islamic Republic. Executive Director Renee Redman had requested $2.7 million to fund the group’s work for two more years, only to find the request summarily and inexplicably denied.

Redman was shocked, since the denial came just as the whole world had seen the Iranian regime’s brutality and ruthlessness in dealing with the election protesters. “If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,” said Redman. “I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.”

But with no funding, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was set to shut its doors in May 2010.

The Obama administration also cut off funds to at least three other Iranian organizations that opposed the Islamic Republic and had received funding during the Bush administration. Roya Boroumand of the Boroumand Foundation, an anti–death penalty group, articulated why the Obama approach was so spectacularly wrong: “If the rationale is that we are going to stop funding human rights–related work in Iran because we don’t want to provoke the government, it is absolutely the wrong message to send. That means that we don’t really believe in human rights, that the American government just looks into it when it is convenient.”
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Indeed. And for whatever reason, Barack Obama never seemed to find it convenient to confront Iran’s Islamic regime about its miserable human-rights record.

IRAN’S MAN IN WASHINGTON

In November 2009, Obama appointed John Limbert as deputy assistant secretary for Iran in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. According to a report at Politico, an unnamed State Department official with twenty years of service in the department said that before Limbert’s appointment, “we’ve never had a DAS for Iran.” Limbert, he said, would be “the most senior official at State who deals exclusively with Iran.”
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At first glance it seemed like a savvy appointment. Limbert was a hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, and a fluent Farsi speaker. There is video of Limbert discussing the hostages’ plight with the future Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. A career diplomat, Limbert has received the highest award that the State Department gives out, the Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of a book entitled
Negotiating with Iran: Wrestling with the Ghosts of History
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Who, then, would be better to navigate the twists and turns of dealing with the mullahs for a president who is intent on negotiating with them, and will not be dissuaded from this goal?

There was just one catch: Limbert was a member of the advisory board of the George Soros–funded National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a powerful Iranian lobbying group in Washington that boasts of its connections in high places: “Throughout the recent crisis,” the NIAC announced in July 2009, at the height of the bloody crackdown on the demonstrators in Tehran, “NIAC has been in contact with the White House almost daily to convey the views of our community, and policymakers have been listening.” It “strongly condemned the
crackdown” in Iran “and called for new elections as the best way to end the violence.” It has also called upon the mullahs to “immediately release opposition figures, human rights defenders, and all other persons arrested for contesting the election results,” as well as “immediately halt state-sanctioned violence against the Iranian people.”
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The NIAC’s boasting was not misplaced. As the organization itself put it, “since its inception in 2002, NIAC has grown to become the largest Iranian-American grassroots organization in the country, with supporters in all 50 states.”
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