NEOAVATARA

I have said for weeks that Barack Obama missed a golden opportunity to, at best, give protesters in Iran hope that they could hope to bring freedom to their nation, and at worst, could unify the world community to do more about Iran.

Obama, of course, so far has failed on both accounts.  And now his job gets even tougher.

Obama’s entire strategy, thought up for years by liberals in think tanks, is that if we just open up dialogue with the rogue nations, that they will come around and see the light of day.  Now, in all honesty, I partially agree with that.  G.W. Bush went to an extreme that Ronald Reagan and his own father would not have accepted.

Unfortunately, Obama has gone to the other extreme.  In a bid to keep ‘channels open’, Obama did nothing for weeks during the Iranian crisis.  It took him 10 days to say the word ‘condemn’; yet, it took him less than 6 hours to condemn the revolt in Honduras.  It speaks volumes that liberals are still not willing to condemn Iran.  Fareed Zakaria has a column that says that “Iran regime has become a naked dictatorship”.  Um, Fareed, the were always a naked dictatorship. You guys just wouldn’t accept that.

Obama’s bid to talk to the Mullahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will only get worse.   New reports from Iran state that some of the protest leaders are being executed.  How far those executions go will speak loudly.  Reformists continue to speak out about the election, but they are likely to fail in any reform bid at this point.  If it is a broad based whitewash of the movement, ala the post-Tiananmen crackdown by China, and Obama will have virtually no capital on the homefront to deal with the Iranian regime.  The irony is that many of the reformists are now calling the regime’s actions a coup, in similar vein to Honduras.  You think they would like to get similar support from the White House as the ousted Honduran President did?  Of course, but apparently Obama prefers a law breaking President to the freedom movement of Iran.

So where do we go from here?

Let us be honest:  Obama’s stance to sit down with Ahmadinejad did not even survive the first 200 days of his presidency.  There is virtually no realistic chance of that, if there ever was.  Obama apparently is against Iranian sanctions! The White House believe that talks will provide results borders on the delusional. Ahmadinejad, it will be noted, does not want to sit down with Obama either.  And knowing Ahmadi, he would just rant at Obama anyway; and knowing Obama, he would just sit there and listen to the rant.

There is only one way forward:  international sanctions.  But this will take a lot of work.  Only a unified front of Europe, Russia, and China would work.  China is the least willing, but Russia is close behind.  They may have been willing to make concessions during the protests (which, again, points to Obama’s missed opportunity), but now?  Now, there is no more reason for sanctions than there was before the election revolt.  In fact, there is even less reason, because they can always point to Obama’s own words: ‘We do not meddle in the internal affairs of Iran’.  Well, that is just great.

The Obama policy on Iran is an utter failure.  Fine, let us move on.  Good Presidents accept their mistakes and alter course.  Will Obama do that?  Unlikely.  His Ambassador the UN is still unwilling to even say the election was illegitimate. This, please note, from the same government that called the actions in Honduras a ‘coup’.  It is doubtful that if they can’t admit this, they will ever take a hard line stance on anything regarding Iran.  In his own way, he is as stubborn than George W. Bush.   What major policy has he shifted after admitting a mistake?  The answer is none.  And he will have to move quickly if he wants to correct the mistake.  The clock on Israel’s consideration of bombing Iran is ticking.