Sure enough, the inevitable 3 a.m. phone call came early in Barack Obama’s tenure. But, as we should have known, there would be the unexpected twist. When the call came, it wasn’t just Obama’s phone that was ringing.
The Iranian clerics were getting their own wake-up calls.
It was their streets that were suddenly filled with protesters. While Obama is hearing protests from PETA about his fly-catching techniques, the clerics were hearing from hundreds of thousands of Iranians about an election that seems to have been rigged. And before they knew it, the world was getting YouTube and Twitpic images from the streets of Tehran, where the news was both astonishing and terrifying.
What’s so compelling about the Iran story is, of course, where it’s happening and when it’s happening and also the role of new technology in bringing the story to the rest of the world.
What’s terrifying is that the dawn of a revolution and the dawn of a vicious crackdown can look, in the early morning light, remarkably similar.
For Obama, there’s an entirely different problem, which is how little he can actually do, but how he almost certainly will have to figure out a way to do more.
Depending on which version you read, Obama is either being admirably restrained or in danger of being Jimmy Carter, circa 1979.
Forget what you hear from the John McCain/neocon crowd — who spend most of their time hoping to invade Iran — about Obama not supporting the protesters strongly enough. Everyone understands the American rooting interest here. Nobody wants a hostile Iran on its way to being a nuclear power.
Sure, the Wall Street Journal editorial page can write about “Obama’s Iran Abdication,” and McCain — he of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” karaoke fame — can talk about the need for Obama to “make sure the world knows that America leads.” If the sound is familiar, that’s because it’s the same people who were doing the talking as we headed into Iraq.
Obama is not George W. Bush. He’s clearly not from the “bring ’em on” school of foreign policy. And he has a fairly good grasp on the notion that words matter.
It has been pointed out by Obama critics that one day he was “troubled” by the crackdowns, and the next he had moved only as far as “deep concerns.” But he did make it clear that “the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it’s the U.S. that is encouraging those reformers.”
This is not a hard thing to understand. You don’t allow the Iranian government to say the protesters are in league with the Great Satan.
You remember that the story is about Iran and those people in the streets and about their future and not about say-it-if-it-feels-good diplomacy.
Read Thomas Ricks’ piece on titled “My worry: Budapest ’56, Tehran ’09.” Ricks worries that Americans such as McCain will push Iranian protesters the way we did Hungarian anti-Soviet protesters in 1956, which ended with Soviet tanks in Budapest streets and Americans well on the sidelines.
And yet.
The New York Times had a story the other day about the pressure on Obama to say more. The story said that Joe Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton both advised a stronger message in favor of the protesters.
Obama does understand something about the sweep of history. If it’s important to show that America is, as he said, “not meddling” in Iranian politics, it’s also important to acknowledge that something dramatic is happening. Obama hasn’t yet figured out how to do both.
In Obama’s Cairo speech earlier this month, he spoke directly to the Muslim people while also saying he was willing to engage with governments like Iran’s. But Obama is facing a different world than he faced just a few weeks ago, now that hundreds of thousands are in the streets saying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election was a fraud.
No one knows what will happen next — it isn’t as if there was a real pro-democracy candidate in the field — only that the situation will soon hit a crisis point.
As I’m writing this, I’m looking at Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Facebook page. I got there on a link from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog, which also sent me to YouTube for a video of a stunningly peaceful rally of hundreds of thousands at Imam Khomeini square in Tehran.
From the New York Times’ The Lede blog, I linked to mousavi1388’s photostream, which showed Moussavi speaking from atop his car at the Tehran rally, and then linked to a (London) Guardian report of rallies in six Iranian cities that included Twitpics.
It’s dizzying to watch. Protesters have been beaten and shot and killed. The media has been restricted from covering the rallies. And the pictures go out anyway. Whatever else happens, they are pictures that can’t be ignored.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
