Voting Present on Iran

Victor Davis Hanson tosses in his two cents as the world cringes.

"For the probable majority of Iranians who voted against Ahmadinejad, the idea that the US was reaching out to him, despite his subsidies to terrorist killers in Lebanon and Iraq, and his brutality at home, was not necessarily a sign of American good will."

Apparently the Obama administration is quietly watching the situation, serially voting present, and unwilling to say much until the final outcome is certain. Meanwhile, debate here centers around whether Bush’s past “Axis of Evil” approach to Iran’s theocracy, or Obama’s “We are sorry for what we did in the past” lamentation is the better course for dealing with a thug like Ahmadinejad. Some thoughts:

1. Conventional wisdom insisted that we had “empowered” Iran by removing Saddam and allowing the Shiites to gain democratic majorities in Iraq. It is at least as possible that we are destabilizing the autocracy in Iran by promoting Iraqi democracy that is no longer just a warning about civil chaos, but a positive view of a Shiite-majority democratic society unknown in Iran. The notion of two large contiguous oil producing democracies in the Middle East is unacceptable to the radical Islamists and most of the Sunni Arab dictatorships as well.

2. When one apologizes to a contemporary terrorist-sponsoring regime for events that occurred 60 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and does so without context of the past, then naturally one is self-censored, and will be reluctant to comment on contemporary events in Iran — relegated to a bystander watching the flow of events, predicating the response on who wins.

3. We are seeing in Washington that the multiculturalism impulse — one does not use Western paradigms to judge others — is far stronger than the supposedly classical liberal idea that human freedom is a universal concept that trumps culture. In other words, multicultural foreign policy is a sophisticated and politically-correct version of the old, far more intellectually honest realist notion that we let the bastards do what they want to their own people, and then deal with the thug that emerges in the real world of mutual self-interest. (more...)