Tough talk and then what?

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jun 23, 2009 | by Dale McFeatters Scripps Howard News Service

President Barack Obama is again being pounded in certain Republican circles for not talking tough on Iran. They accuse him of insufficient table-pounding and finger-pointing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham called Obama "timid and passive." Sen. John McCain wants him to be stronger, "to lead."

Said Sen. Charles Grassley, "If America stands for democracy and all of these demonstrations are going on in Tehran and other cities over there, and people don't think that we really care, then obviously they're going to question, 'Do we really believe in our principles?' "

This demand for tough talk -- and, given our limited sway with Iran, that's all it would be, is talk -- ignores the courageous Iranian demonstrators. In numerous interviews and Web-site postings, they had made it clear that they want one thing from us: Stay out of it. It's our battle, not yours.

Suppose Obama did issue daily scathing denunciations of the Iranian regime. And suppose the predictable happened. The regime brutally crushes the demonstrations and sends thousands off to prison on the grounds that they are American agents acting on behalf of the U.S. government.

What would we do? We would sympathize -- from a safe distance. Indeed, we have a track record in this regard. Iranians certainly have not forgotten that the first Bush administration, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, urged their Iraqi Shiite brethren to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then stood passively by while Saddam viciously suppressed the insurrection.

The demonstrations have exposed what appears to be a deep rift in the regime. It now seems accepted in Iran, even by the Guardian Council, that the election was not only stolen, but clumsily so. The results were announced before the polls closed and the ballots were counted. Turnout exceeded 100 percent of the electorate in many areas, and incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have had to do impossibly well among all parts of the electorate, including groups that traditionally opposed him.

The turmoil in Iran has caused many of the neo-cons, who botched Iraq so badly, to re-emerge and begin talking grandiosely about "regime change" in Iran, thus proving to the clerics their darkest suspicions about American intentions. After 30 years, the Iranians don't need the latest U.S. president to tell them how we feel about the ayatollahs and their minions.