Roger Pilon makes some very important points about how the Obama Administration ought to respond to the situation in Iran:
President Obama should have taken as his model Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. Instead, he looked to George H.W. Bush, whose August 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech, although aimed at Yugoslavia, was read by his Ukrainian audience as undercutting their own efforts at independence, even as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
To be sure, we should not be seen as promising more to the Iranian opposition than we’re prepared to deliver, or to be taking actions that will enable their oppressors to claim credibly that America is fomenting these protests. But Obama’s initial reaction – that Mousavi’s policies would prove little better than Ahmadineijad’s, and that we needed to be careful not to undermine prospects for a “grand nuclear bargain” – reflected a breathtaking naïveté about the way the world works. It is as if the president had no familiarity with the writings of Solzhenytzin, Sharansky, or Valladares, who told us repeatedly how important it was that we knew what they were suffering. The signs in the streets of Tehran were in English, after all.
