Republicans urge Obama to get tougher on Iran

[coyotes_geek]

CG: Politics at it's finest. Not exactly sure what republicans want Obama to do here. In reality, probably nothing. They'd rather have the opportunity to criticize, since this is an issue they can probably get some political traction on in the minds of Americans.

**********************

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama should take a firm stand to support the street protests that have engulfed Iran since its disputed June 12 presidential election result, U.S. Republican senators said on Sunday.

"He's been timid and passive more than I would like," said Senator Lindsey Graham on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" television news program.

"We could be more forceful than we have," Republican Senator Charles Grassley said on CNN's "State of the Union" show.

Their comments came as pro-reform Iranian clerics stepped up criticism of the government in Tehran on Sunday after more than a week of popular defiance against Iran's leadership, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The hard-line anti-Western Iranian leader overwhelmingly won last week's election, according to official results, but his main challenger, Mirhossein Mousavi, has accused the government of massive electoral fraud and called on Iranians to protest.

At least 10 people were killed on Saturday in street demonstrations.

Obama has walked a fine line in his comments on the election, wanting to avoid being seen as "meddling" in Iranian politics but facing pressure from Republicans to be a more forceful advocate for those protesting the election.

On Saturday, Obama urged Tehran to "stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people" his most forceful comments yet on the Iranian crackdown.

"I would like to see the president be stronger, although I appreciate the comments he made yesterday," Republican Senator John McCain, who lost the 2008 election to Obama, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"This is not just an Iran issue, this is an American issue. This is what we are all about," McCain said in reference to the anti-government protests in Iran.

But Democratic senators said too much outward U.S. support for dissenters could undermine them.

"It is very crucial ... that we not have our fingerprints on this, that this be truly inspired by the Iranian people," Senator Dianne Feinstein said on CNN.

Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she did not know of any U.S. meddling in the Iranian election or in its aftermath.

"To the best of my knowledge there has been no interference with the election. There has been no manipulation of people following the election," she said.

"These questions have been asked as late as this past week of people in the clandestine operations who would know this, in a formal setting, and that is the answer we were given."

Obama, in the forefront of diplomatic efforts to halt an Iranian nuclear program the West fears could produce atomic weapons, recently acknowledged that the United States helped overthrow Iran's elected government in a 1953 coup that installed a pro-U.S. monarchy in power.

That government was toppled by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Ahmadinejad warned the United States and Britain on Saturday not to interfere in Iran's affairs, according to Iran's official ISNA news agency.

(Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh; editing by Paul Simao and Vicki Allen)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090621/pl_nm/us_usa_iran_senators_1

[Winehole23]

Ya gotta get tuff, Mr. President.

[coyotes_geek]

I guess we know who the party of liberty, freedom and democracy Really is

Please enlighten us. Because it sure isn't the republican or democratic parties.

[Winehole23]

Like you're doing, but tuffer.

[DarrinS]

The supreme leader already tried to use Obama's first mild statements as propaganda. Probably nothing else Obama can say at this point. I was really glad to see Obama change course, ever so slightly, and strongly condemn the violence on Saturday.


EDIT> Any further criticism is pure partisanship, IMO.

[coyotes_geek]

The supreme leader already tried to use Obama's first mild statements as propaganda. Probably nothing else Obama can say at this point. I was really glad to see Obama change course, ever so slightly, and strongly condemn the violence on Saturday.


EDIT> Any further criticism is pure partisanship, IMO.

Agree on both counts. Condemning the violence and supporting the right to protest is about as far as Obama should, or can, take it.

[doobs]

The first few days, Obama's response was lacking. He was speaking about how pleased he was with the robust debate in Iran, and how he didn't want to meddle, and how there's little difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. His recent change in tone was welcome.

I have no real complaints about his current stance. Tough enough to make his point, but not so tough that he's jeopardized the opposition or his ability to speak both directly to the Iranian people and to the Iranian government. The Iranian people already know where the US stands in relation to their government.

[PixelPusher]

On the money:


Bombing, Sanctions, And Rhetoric (http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/06/21/bombing-sanctions-and-rhetoric/)
Posted on June 21st, 2009 by Daniel Larison

Among mainstream conservative columnists, George Will and Peggy Noonan have received some attention for their willingness to reject the most conservatives’ criticism of Obama on Iran, and their disagreement with the “more forceful rhetoric” position has been noted as evidence that the debate over this is not necessarily breaking down along predictable ideological or partisan lines. On the other hand, Steve Benen thinks he has discerned the pattern: “this is a situation featuring neocons vs. everyone else.” Benen is partly right, but this doesn’t explain things fully. For one thing, not every neocon has attacked Obama on this question of rhetoric.

For what it’s worth, in that bloggingheads segment I linked earlier Frum makes a point of refusing to join the bandwagon criticizing the President for insufficient rhetorical support. On at least one point, Frum is correct: we don’t need more “empty talk” on this subject at the highest levels of our government. Empty talk is exactly what most of the President’s critics want, and more than that they want empty talk that could endanger protesters’ lives. Most disagreements among neoconservatives are not as great as some would have it. The “good” neocons that Andrew has been talking about share the same goal of regime change with the “bad” neocons who think the protests will be crushed, but it is actually the so-called “good” neocons who have the most invested in discrediting Obama’s handling of the situation. The “bad” ones don’t really care about whether Obama fervently cheers or ignores the protesters, because they believe the protesters are bound to fail anyway, and in any case they are focused squarely on eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, which the protesters’ leaders have no intention of abandoning.

Those whom Andrew calls the “good” neocons are working from all the same faulty assumptions that have informed their arguments for years, and to the extent that others share these assumptions they are also likely to side with the so-called “good” neocons in finding Obama’s response lacking. These people are generally hawkish, but more than that they think that showing “toughness” and “resolve” is vital at all times. These assumptions all derive from a dubious proposition, which is that foreign pressure and coercion undermine authoritarian and Islamist regimes among the people they rule, when there is good reason to think that such pressure helps these regimes to consolidate power and use foreign pressure and coercion as distractions to rally their subjects to their side. We have heard how sanctions supposedly weaken a regime, despite all evidence from the Iraq, North Korea, Burma and Cuba sanctions experiences that they make the regime relatively stronger vis-a-vis its opposition. As recently as the Gaza campaign, we heard how bombing campaigns will alienate a population from extremists and turn people against them, despite what common sense tells us about how people respond to attack by outsiders. Instead of turning against extremists, they not only rally to them in the short-term, but tend to become radicalized against the outsiders who are launching the attacks, and the more indiscriminate and destructive the attacks the more radicalized they are likely to become, which worsens the long-term chances of ousting the extremist rulers.

Even the least coercive kinds of outside pressure, condemnation and criticism, will often have counterproductive effects in the same way. This is particularly the case in countries with proud and nationalistic people, who tend to conflate their country and regime and will frequently identify with both. Americans should be able to understand how this works. The more nationalist of our two parties, the GOP, is full of Jacksonian nationalists who bristle at any foreign criticism of America, no matter how accurate or justified it might be, and Americans as a whole are more nationalistic than our European friends for all sorts of obvious reasons. What could easily be recognized as a criticism of or response to specific policies is always treated by these people as raw, unthinking anti-Americanism. Instead of making Americans more willing to look critically at government policies, foreign criticism and condemnation tend to make most Americans automatically dismiss the criticism as little more than “anti-American rhetoric” and the most nationalistic among us are inclined to attack other Americans as “anti-American” for criticism of foreign policy. If this is true here, why would it not be true in other countries? Leave aside the question of whether our government’s involvement in the 1953 coup makes our government unusually ill-suited to comment on internal Iranian affairs, and just consider how angrily we would react against a traditionally hostile foreign government’s statements about our domestic political controversies.

What we can conclude about most forms of foreign policy idealism is this: the obvious, common sense similarities among all nations must be ignored when they tell us that other nations will react just as poorly to coercion, threats and insults as we would, while acknowledging the equally clear differences in national history, religion, and culture must be rejected when these differences get in the way of convenient ideological narratives about how everyone wants to be free in exactly the way that we mean it. When debating how best to fight other nations, they are to be treated as essentially different, but when it comes to understanding political conditions in other countries everything unique and specific about those countries must be discounted and ignored, and anyone who pays attention to them must be mocked as a “cultural relativist” for daring to believe that culture is significant as something other than part of a propaganda effort to demonize and vilify another people.

[PixelPusher]

On the money, runner-up:


The neocon mind (http://mattsteinglass.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/the-neocon-mind/)
June 22, 2009, 12:23 pm
Filed under: Conservatism, Iran

Andrew Sullivan has a good letter from a reader explaining why it’s so infuriating to watch neocons, as stupid as ever, imagine that the events in Iran somehow vindicate their position, when in fact the opposite is true. Of course, the opposite is always true: everything is always constantly refuting neoconservatism, much as everything is always constantly refuting Aristotelian mechanics, Maoist economics, and various other completely wrong doctrines.

I just wanted to note that for me, the kernel of untruth that replicates into a totality of error in neoconservative thought is the…well, actually, there are two kernels. I was about to write that the kernel was the identification of “America” with “freedom”, such that anyone who loves freedom, which is everyone, must ipso facto love America. Hence everyone loves America, and anyone who doesn’t love America is some kind of abomination inimical to the universe, and must be destroyed.

But in fact there’s a deeper kernel to the neocon mind, and that is an inability to cope with the ambiguity of information; or, to say the same thing, the ambiguity of reality; or, to say the same thing, the multiplicity of human subjectivity. The neocon mind is binary: Saddam either does or does not have WMD. If he has WMD, we must invade. The Iranian people either do or do not support their government. If they do not, then they will welcome American efforts to overthrow it. Neocons find it difficult to handle the discounting one must apply to large quantities of complex information drawn from different sources in order to come to a reasonable conclusion. They don’t work with a good theory of mind that allows for comparing unreliable info (from Curveball, say) to reliable info (from Hans Blix, say). And because they don’t recognize the ambiguity of the underlying info, they have no room for accepting the fact that different people have different perceptions of that info, and that actions have to adjust to the reality of varying perceptions. They can’t accept that some people, say, might believe with justification that the US is not altruistic and freedom-seeking; people like that, they think, are simply wrong, so we don’t need to pay attention to them. They live in a world of Newtonian ballistics, where the state of the world is exact and knowable, where bad guys are bad in the way that an 8-ball is black, and a given bankshot either will or will not sink it in the corner pocket. And so the solutions they apply to the world’s problems tend to be ballistic, as well. So far, they have a success rate of 0.0%. That’s a piece of hard data which even a neocon ought to be able to process; but for some reason they never do.

[boutons_deux]

Who TF listens to Repugs anymore? A bunch of wrong-headed, hate-filled losers wanting America to fail.

[George Gervin's Afro]

Who TF listens to Repugs anymore? A bunch of wrong-headed, hate-filled losers wanting America to fail.

Dead Enders..:lmao

[FaithInOne]

I would love to live and flourish in an america that has failed based on the far-left's standards.

[Cry Havoc]

Obama most probably wants to make stronger statements toward Iran, but he knows that there is nothing that can be done. This is a completely internal matter, and unless something extreme happens, we aren't going to get directly involved. No matter how "tough" we act, since it's just words, they have very little to fear from us. There is little reason to make a statement now unless something changes.

[boutons_deux]

dubya's Poppy encouraged the Marsh Arabs to rise up against Saddam, then stood by as they got slaughtered, and then their marshes drained and destroyed, along with their way of life.

Talk tough, and carry a small dick, is how the Repugs and neo-c*nts do international politics (and don't ask the chicken-shits to actually fight the wars they blood-lust for)

[johnsmith]

dubya's Poppy encouraged the Marsh Arabs to rise up against Saddam, then stood by as they got slaughtered, and then their marshes drained and destroyed, along with their way of life.

Talk tough, and carry a small dick, is how the Repugs and neo-c*nts do international politics (and don't as the chicken-shits to actually fight the wars they blood-lust for)

Not big on proof reading your stuff are you?

[boutons_deux]

johnsmith trash talks typos, since he can't come up with anything else, ever.

Still wanna fight me, dickless?

[sam1617]

Who TF listens to Repugs anymore? A bunch of wrong-headed, hate-filled losers wanting America to fail.

As opposed to you, who appears to be a wrong-headed, hate-filled loser, who appears to want America to fail?

[Spurtacus]

Ya gotta get tuff, Mr. President.

What the hell do you want him to do? Appoint McCain as chief strategist on Iran relations?

[Winehole23]

*sarcasm*, DPG.

[Cant_Be_Faded]

To the american marriott, it should absolutely mindblowing how similar the neocons positions and the muslim authorites positions on this situation are. MIND BLOWING. LOL @ at least 8 more years of democrat supremacy at this rate.

[Nbadan]

...Obama should label them in the 'Axis of Evil' - that'll do alot of good

[johnsmith]

johnsmith trash talks typos, since he can't come up with anything else, ever.

Still wanna fight me, dickless?

You keep asking me that question and I keep answering, sure, why not?

I'll meet you outside of your class once 6th period is out.

[sook]

To the american marriott, it should absolutely mindblowing how similar the neocons positions and the muslim authorites positions on this situation are. MIND BLOWING. LOL @ at least 8 more years of democrat supremacy at this rate.

The far right has always been extremist. History should tell you that, the islamic terrorists we're fighting at the moment are probably just as far right as your local guy on fox.

[DarrinS]

The far right has always been extremist. History should tell you that, the islamic terrorists we're fighting at the moment are probably just as far right as your local guy on fox.

:rolleyes

[coyotes_geek]

Republicans speak, Obama listens...................

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090623/pl_nm/us_obama_21

[jman3000]

:lol I knew this would happen. I said this is exactly what would happen last week.

Some members of the GOP jump the gun in their Iran comments and bitch about the president not following suit. Obama makes his comments at the right time and now their going to try to make it look like they were influencing him.

[DarrinS]

:lol I knew this would happen. I said this is exactly what would happen last week.

Some members of the GOP jump the gun in their Iran comments and bitch about the president not following suit. Obama makes his comments at the right time and now their going to try to make it look like they were influencing him.


meh, it was probably Biden and Shillary.

[jman3000]

No... it was John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

[DarrinS]

I guess I meant who really influenced him.

[jman3000]

So was I. It's just that my sarcasm was so intense it came off as being sincere.

[Cant_Be_Faded]

For those of you that did not listen to Obama's press conference today, he did an absolutely splendid job of answering the reporter who asked something along the lines of "Did McCain and *neocon here*'s comments influence you to change your tone on the Iran situation?"

It was gold. He scoffed the shit out of anyone stupid enough to believe he would give a shit about the republican opinion on this situation.

[jman3000]

I think Graham's a bit too effeminate to be a neocon. IDK... maybe that's a prerequisite.

[Ignignokt]

For those of you that did not listen to Obama's press conference today, he did an absolutely splendid job of answering the reporter who asked something along the lines of "Did McCain and *neocon here*'s comments influence you to change your tone on the Iran situation?"

It was gold. He scoffed the shit out of anyone stupid enough to believe he would give a shit about the republican opinion on this situation.

its not that he gives a crap about the republican oppinion, is that he keeps adopting them.:lol:lol FiSA:lol nafta :lol

[coyotes_geek]

For those of you that did not listen to Obama's press conference today, he did an absolutely splendid job of answering the reporter who asked something along the lines of "Did McCain and *neocon here*'s comments influence you to change your tone on the Iran situation?"

It was gold. He scoffed the shit out of anyone stupid enough to believe he would give a shit about the republican opinion on this situation.

Well then it's settled. It's just an amazing coincidence that one day after being criticized by republicans for being soft he cranks up the intensity. And if Obama really was just doing it to silence his republican critics he would have told us so.

[coyotes_geek]

its not that he gives a crap about the republican oppinion, is that he keeps adopting them.:lol:lol FiSA:lol nafta :lol

Yep. Turns out that W was on to something good afterall. At least Obama seems to think so.

[Winehole23]

Well then it's settled. It's just an amazing coincidence that one day after being criticized by republicans for being soft he cranks up the intensity. And if Obama really was just doing it to silence his republican critics he would have told us so.IMO it had more to do with Iranian authorities cranking up the violence.