Ajami: The education of Mr. Obama; Update: Hot dogs still on the barbie for July 4th, Iran!

Fauod Ajami witnessed the real reception Obama got in Islam, not the propaganda version that the MSM reported.

President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region….It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Iran’s rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination.

The drama of Barack Obama’s election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. The upper orders of his country loathed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad’s message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country’s nuclear quest is a “closed file,” settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian [Islamic] revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country’s identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome.

We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators. That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. Mr. Obama’s statement that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised” put on cruel display the administration’s incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history’s burden: “Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.” No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the “foreignness” of foreign lands. But [Obama's] claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon’s politics. That contest was settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.

Mr. Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. I was in Saudi Arabia when Mr. Obama traveled to Riyadh and Cairo. The earth did not move, life went on as usual. There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America’s relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution — and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its “inordinate fear of communism,” and to put aside its concern with “traditional issues of war and peace” in favor of “new global issues of justice, equity and human rights.” We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water.” The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Not to mention the Iranian answer to Carter’s brave new world. 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American embassy with the support of the Islamic Revolution Iranian government.

maverick muse on June 22, 2009 at 4:27 PM

USS Indifference, used for navigating shallow foreign waters and negotiating with Iran’s tyrants.

– Navy Ships Named for Obama

Loxodonta on June 22, 2009 at 4:25 PM

USS Antipathy part of Obama’s fleet

maverick muse on June 22, 2009 at 4:30 PM

Obama’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.
So when did Golf become a foreign policy?

ronsfi on June 22, 2009 at 4:21 PM

For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history’s burden: “Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.”–Ajami

Tennis match? Ahmadinejad:Mousavi

The frightening reality Ajami makes prominent is that anyone in Iran dissenting from Ahmadinejad will be mercilessly cut to pieces. The sideline “rah-rah” from the West needs to provide dissenters with aid, or remind them as Obama is that they are on their own.

Russia wants Iran so bad, they ache. There is no way that America can intervene without Russian accomplices doing likewise. Russia AND China are pre-empting all the world oil reserves they can get their hands on. Russia means to grip all of Europe in its grasp for energy. China will choke hold America because of our debt.

I agree that Obama’s administration needs to be absolutely thwarted. Calling an emergency RECALL election rather than a census makes sense (it hasn’t been a decade since our last census under GWBush); stop Obama sooner than later.

maverick muse on June 22, 2009 at 4:42 PM