Why it is time for Obama to speak out

David Ignatius argues today that, while Obama might have been right to have delayed much comment on the situation in Iran, it is now time to speak out.

The regime must be frightened of the forces it has unleashed. The more it attacks its own people, the more vulnerable it becomes.

If you take a step back, you can see a similar process of ferment across the Muslim world these days. Muslim parties and their allies have suffered election setbacks over the past several years in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco and Pakistan. The most extreme group of all, al-Qaeda, has alienated former supporters everywhere it has tried to put down roots.

The reasons for these political setbacks vary from place to place. In some countries, Muslim radicals have overreached and created a public backlash; in others, they have been seen as timid and corrupt. But there's a common theme: "The Muslim parties have failed to convince the public that they have any more answers than anyone else," says Marina Ottaway, the director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

President Obama was right to speak carefully about the events in Iran during the first week of protest. But it's time for him to express his solidarity with the Iranians who are so bravely taking to the streets each day. He can do that without seeming to meddle if he chooses his words wisely.

Obama should invoke the Iranian yearning for justice -- which was a powerful theme of the revolution. He should cite Iran's own rich history of political reform, going back to Cyrus the Great, whose declaration on good governance was chiseled in the Cyrus Cylinder in 539 B.C. He should cite the Iranian constitution of 1906, which established elections and basic freedoms. Democracy is not an American imposition but an Iranian tradition.

"We clearly have to be on the right side of history here," says Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment and an informal adviser to the White House. But he cautions that "if we try to insert ourselves into the momentous internal Iranian drama that's unfolding, we may unwittingly undermine those whom we're trying to strengthen."

Obama's agenda of "engagement" with Iran must be on hold for now. He shouldn't renounce his offer of talks, but allow it to sit. Let the Iranians chase the West for a while; they're the ones who need legitimacy.

The biggest gift the West can give the Iranian people is to keep open the lines of communication. The regime wants to turn off not just foreign press coverage but also Internet traffic. America and its allies can counter that blackout. We can push broadband access into Iran via satellites, or via Internet relays along the Iraq-Iran border, from Basra to Sulaymaniyah. If the world keeps watching, the protesters will be emboldened, and the mullahs will be checked.

Today the regime's nightmare is coming true. For the past few years, Iran's leaders have worried about a "color revolution," on the model of Georgia or Ukraine. Guess what? It's happening. The mullahs face a dilemma: If they make concessions, they look weak; if they try to crack down, they may inflame the movement even more. It's precisely the choice that the shah and his secret police faced in 1978 and '79.

The simple fact is that Iran's repressive rulers have overplayed their hand. By manipulating the election results, they have created a popular backlash. Iranians now are voting with their feet and with their blood. The regime blames Western meddling; it should be so lucky. This is real.

I hope that we're doing everything behind the scenes to boost the Iranian students' ability to access the internet and keep posting the pictures and news reports that have become an organizing essential to their protests.

This is not the time to hold back because there is some fantasy in the administration's mind that engagement with the present regime would get us anything that we want when it comes to their nuclear program or their sponsoring of terrorist groups throughout the Mideast and funding of subversive forces in Lebanon or Iraq. As Rich Lowry writes,

In a perverse irony, we are witnessing the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic since its establishment, at the same time the first American president explicitly to accept the regime’s legitimacy happens to be in office. Whatever credibility the mullahs have lost in the street, they have picked up in the Oval Office, where the president bizarrely seems less enthusiastic about a change in dispensation in Iran than much of Tehran’s population.

Obama says he wants to avoid stoking a nationalist backlash. A legitimate, but overblown, concern. Iranians surely can understand the difference between the U.S. sending CIA operatives into the country to help stage an anti-democratic coup — as Obama constantly reminds the world we did in the 1950s — and speaking up against repression. Without undue “meddling,” Obama could note that governments in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan honor election results, and exhort Iran to lead the democratic wave rather than resist it.

Obama’s timidity speaks to a guilty conscience. At some level, he buys the post-colonial critique of the West as the root of the developing world’s troubles, and thinks we lack the moral standing to judge non-Western governments that resent and envy us. Obama is perfectly capable of launching moralistic broadsides — just at his own country, especially under his predecessor. Who are we to condemn the abuse of peaceful demonstrators when we waterboarded three terrorists?

And Obama is so dead-set on negotiating with the current regime, he doesn’t want to invest much in the hope of changing it. Obama is often compared to Jimmy Carter, but his approach in Iran is the opposite of Carter’s. Carter was deeply moved by human rights and put the possibility of promoting them above other priorities, such as stability and maintaining an ally in Tehran. Obama is putting human rights behind stability, in the ultimate cause of a prospective bargain with the mullahs.

This isn’t really “realism,” but a stubborn commitment to an illusory belief in the power of talks with an ill-intentioned, reform-resistant dictatorship. Beneath the veneer of its hardheaded distancing from the protesters, Obama’s policy has a goopy, naïve heart.

Whatever wan hope there was that we could talk the Iranian regime out of its nuclear-weapons program is diminishing. The regime doesn’t appear to be in a compromising mood, and Obama’s free pass for the crackdown is likely only to broadcast our weakness and pliability. If there is no cost to violating international norms in crushing flesh-and-blood protesters, why will there be a cost to defying the parchment strictures of the International Atomic Energy Agency?