Bravehearts like Rush Limbaugh, Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Krauthammer and others, few of whom have ever fired a gun in anger, or even held one in basic training, begin figuratively beating their chests and demanding "action" against Iran or North Korea or China or whoever is in the news — particularly when a Democrat is in the White House.
They don't seem to care, and the Lords of Television always fail to remember, that the United States rarely does anything but rant and rave when a dictatorial regime cracks down on its own people. It doesn't matter if the president is Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter — or the conservative saint, Ronald Reagan.
We talked tough but did nothing about Hungary and Czechoslovakia when the Soviets crushed them. We allowed China to slaughter the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. North Korea thumbs its nose at us. We've condemned and threatened but that just bounced off regimes like the Soviet Union until the people in those nations took to the streets and demanded change. And it will be the same in Iran.
President Obama is catching conservative flak for not jumping up and down condemning the crumbling theocracy in Iran, even though caution
One would think that with the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan still staring us in the face, and the larger lesson of Vietnam a little over 30 years old, that Americans would finally understand the ultimate costs and futility of intervention in another nation's affairs — even a small nation, and Iran is anything but small and unimportant in the Persian Gulf.
The president's strategy of approaching and engaging hostile regimes and their citizens whenever possible is being labeled weak by politically motivated pundits and pols, but isn't it already moving us toward our desired goal — a democratic Iran and Middle East? A lot closer than the Bush administration's blundering military interventions have taken us.
This is how: By reaching out to Muslims, President Obama is weakening the hardline Iranian leaders, who are far from popular with millions of their citizens, and encouraging the opposition to act. The dictatorial clerics have continually made the case that the United States is an evil manipulator bent on setting up another puppet government there to control the oil trade.
Without the U.S. as the Great Satan, the heavy handed clerics start to look like what they are — a throwback to the 12th century and an anchor on Iran's future prospects.
Where would the Iranians get such a notion about us? Maybe because used the CIA to put the former Shah of Iran into power over an elected president we didn't like — who was less than friendly toward Big Oil. This is the same shah the current government ousted in 1979 after years of bloody repression that made millions of Iranians hate the United States.
If Mr. Obama is treading lightly it is only because he has a more intelligent understanding of the situation than some others — emphasis on intelligent. In this case, the less intense our pontificating the better. It is the Iranians' show, not ours.
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