In an odd way, I think Obama is playing out the clock and hopes the marchers are crushed, before the embarrassment of condoning — sometimes by his silence and sometimes by his morally equivalent banalities — the thuggish Iranian theocracy becomes too much even for him to bear. As it is, it becomes a little more rephrensible each day. Consider:

  1. Speaking out is really a no-brainer: In moral terms, the protestors wish free and fair elections, and have shown both great courage and restraint in expressing their displeasure with a regime that has been as terrible to them as it has to the world at large;
  2. The liberal wing of the Democratic party, eons ago it now seems, used to stand for a morality in foreign policy that put it at odds with the present mere calculation of realpolitik;
  3. Obama’s realist calculations are in fact sorely mistaken (e.g., if he doesn’t show moral vertebrae soon and the protestors are crushed, we will regret a lost opportunity to show a shared humanity for a long time to come [and does anyone think Ahmadinejad will one day call Obama up and say, “Thanks, Barack for that silence, now let’s talk about those nukes”?]); if the protestors prevail, they will have a long memory of how we forsook them in their hour of need; meanwhile, a theocratic elite will negotiate or not with us only on the basis of their selfish interests (do they shun Russian aid because Putin slaughtered Muslims in Grozny, or do they abhor the Chinese because of their oppression of Muslims?); the government, far more so than the dissidents, is fearful of U.S. public support for human rights.
  4. There are ample examples from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations that speaking out against tyranny abroad enhances U.S. prestige, while keeping silent does not. Our present course suggests that even we have lost confidence in our moral voice and have ceded it to the theocracy — as if our verbal support for democracy is wrong, but Iranian guns to destroy it in Iraq are understandable.
  5. 1953, Iraq, George Bush — all these red flags are not applicable. No one is calling for the 101st or Raptors from the sky, simply some moral encouragement not to urge people to go out on the streets and then to leave them hanging in their hour of need (as in Hungary or the Shiites in Baghdad in 1991), but instead to praise those who on their own have already made that dangerous decision and deserve our admiration in terms far more forceful than we have yet seen from the White House.

This fear of offending terrorist-supporting and quite murderous theocrats is all very bewildering at first glance: A hope-and-change president is proving himself both weak and cynical at a critical juncture when the world’s unsavory types from North Korea to Venezuela are looking keenly at, and learning from, the U.S. reaction. I think we are getting the foreign-policy version of a government without lobbyists, a publicly financed campaign, renditions/tribunals/wiretaps, intercepts, etc. posted on the barn wall as bad, then amended again as only sometimes bad, etc.