While Thousands of people are in the streets of Tehran, a few people seem to be Missing: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Barack Hussein Obama
Not Missing: Mir Hossein Mousavi
Nile Gardiner:
Ten days on from the fraudulent Iranian election, President Obama still looks like a deer in the headlights without a coherent strategy.
His response has been weak-kneed and utterly lacking in conviction. When faced with his first real test as a world leader Barack Obama decided to press the snooze button rather than take decisive action.
It is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan sitting on the fence while a revolution took place before the eyes of the world against one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet.
Obama finally issued a half-hearted statement over the weekend calling on Tehran to "stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people" only after coming under intense criticism from critics at home for his softly softly approach.
By that time dozens of demonstrators had been murdered by the barbaric "security forces" and their proxy militias and thousands of protesters, including women had been brutally beaten.
Obama did not though question the legitimacy of the Iranian election result, directly criticize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or outline any change in America’s policy towards Iran.
As far as the Obama team is concerned, the demonstrations are an annoying inconvenience getting in the way of the new policy of "engagement" with rogue regimes, also known more commonly as "appeasement."
Every impression is given that the Obama White House is largely indifferent to the plight of the Iranian people and their suffering. The most powerful man in the world is acting as though he were the leader of a small neutral nation, rather than the head of a global superpower.
Barack Obama has a clear choice between siding with millions of Iranians who are clamoring for greater freedom, or aligning himself through passive acquiescence with a brutal Islamist tyranny.
Just as the United States openly sided with Russian and East European dissidents who spoke out against Communist oppression decades ago, today it must voice its support for those who are fighting for liberty in Iran.
The United States cannot remain neutral in the face of totalitarianism -- it has to take a stand and be on the right side of history. It must also seek to isolate Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs that back him rather than continue a fatally flawed strategy of engagement.
Ultimately, short of military action, the West’s best hope in heading off the prospect of an aggressively hostile Iran armed with nuclear weapons is to back a change of regime.
As a world leader Obama is already looking like the Jimmy Carter of the 21st Century, passive in the face of an array of adversaries, and actively weakening America’s defenses by cutting defense spending while adopting an apologetic tone for his country’s past.
In his first six months Obama cannot point to a single foreign policy success. He should though acknowledge that the Obama doctrine of reaching out to America’s enemies, including Iran and North Korea, has been a spectacular failure.H/T: The Obama File
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