Soccer Dad

Not feeling the optimism

In Hope and Change but not for Iran, Charles Krauthammer writes:

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

I understand Krauthammer's point, but he assumes that President Obama accepts the same premise that he does: that a change in Iran is desirable. As Robert Kagan suggested the other day, in Obama siding with the regime.

Obama's policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government. This will be difficult as long as opposition protests continue and the government appears to be either unsettled or too brutal to do business with. What Obama needs is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it. And that, by and large, is what he has been doing.

Krauthammer also, is quite hopeful about a best case scenario.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt -- was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception -- Iraq and Lebanon -- becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

This is a vision similar to the one expressed by Michael Totten.

A more liberal Iran could also transform the region by kneecapping terrorist armies created and funded by the current regime.

Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt understands very well that his country's Hezbollah problem can only be resolved, at least in the short term, by Iran. "The solution is not in Lebanon," he told me. "The solution is in Tehran."

Nothing like this will happen while Khamenei and Ahmadinejad rule, and it might not happen if Mir Hossein Mousavi ends up in the saddle. The Khomeinist regime spent years and millions of dollars to acquire its hard power assets in the Middle East, and it's on the brink of acquiring the greatest hard power asset of all - a nuclear weapon. Offers of economic incentives and normal relations with this gang in return for their voluntary amputation of overseas instruments of power like Hezbollah is, I'm sorry to say, wishful thinking. For thirty years they have made it abundantly clear that they would rather rule a poor but powerful, confrontational, and ideological nation than a prosperous and moderate one.

Clearly President Obama does not share Krauthammer's (or Totten's) optimism. (And he may be in disagreement via Instapundit - with some others in his administration.)