Month: July 2009

Categories
Iran Political Philosophy Politics

The Intellectual History of the Green Wave

Abbas Milani explains the “intellectual history of the Green Wave” in Iran in a New Republic piece that provides a glimpse of the deeper theological and philosophical forces at work in the movement. Milani warns that this intellectual tradition “has not always found itself on the side of the angels,” but makes a strong case for it as an authentic incorporation of democracy and other “Western” 20th century ideas into an Islamic framework:

The roots of Iran’s current divide to a great extent lie at the turn of the century, when the country’s ayatollahs essentially split into two camps on questions of religion and politics. The first was led by Ayatollah Na’ini, an advocate of what is called the “Quietist” school of Shiism–today best exemplified in the character and behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na’ini, true “Islamic government” could only be established when the twelfth imam returned. Such a government would be the government of God on earth: Its words, deeds, laws, and courts would be absolute and could tolerate no errors. But humans, Na’ini said, were fallible and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task of establishing God’s government. As the pious await the return of the infallible twelfth imam, they must in the interim search for the best form of government. And the form most befitting this period, Na’ini argued, was constitutional democracy. The role of ayatollahs under this arrangement would be to “advise” the rulers and ensure that laws inimical to sharia were not implemented. But it would not be to rule the country themselves.

Opposing Na’ini was an ayatollah named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and the rule of law as inferior alternatives to the divine, eternal, atemporal, nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran and sharia. As Ayatollah Khomeini would declare more than once, his own ideas were nothing but an incarnation of Nuri’s arguments. But for the moment, at least, those ideas were on the defensive. It would be decades before they would reemerge to dominate Iranian politics.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The War on Terrorism Videos

My Congressman Pete King Pisses On Michael Jackson; I Repay the Favor

[digg-reddit-me]Reading the news stories about my Congressman Pete King’s “rant” pissing all over Michael Jackson’s dead body – saying “there’s nothing good about this guy” and calling him a “lowlife,” a “pervert”, a “pedophile,”  a “child molestor” – I expected to be incensed when I saw the video. It’s not that I believe Jackson wasn’t any of these things – it’s just that in the absence of any convictions and with the accusations in the second trial at least looking rather calculated – I’m still reserving judgment. I wouldn’t go around denouncing a dead man for being a child molestor based entirely on the media’s portrayal of him.

But rather than being incensed at a ranting Congressman, what I saw instead was a rather sober, if cliched, Rep. Pete King – just down the block from my house in Wantagh – trying to cut through the bullshit and express something he felt without a politically correct censor. He does well to remind us that our country has many unsung heroes – police officers, firemen, people who volunteer in cancer wards, teachers who work in the inner city. It’s always a good time to remind people of that point. King’s “rant” reminded me of the way I had admired him for his defense of Bill Clinton through the impeachment trial:

In that same spirit that led King to take on Michael Jackson (but without relying on smears and accusations and instead relying on the Congressman’s own documented words), let me say this to my congressman, mincing no words:

Whatever your other redeeming qualities, you are a bigot – and a disgrace to the House of Representatives.

You have repeatedly demonstrated that you equate Islam with terrorism in public remarks – notwithstanding your attempts to save face by saying you are not talking about all Muslims.

When asked about protecting civil liberties, you responded that “there are too many mosques in this country.”

When asked by Sean Hannity about previous statement you had made that 85 percent of mosques in America are “ruled by the extremists,” you said that many American Muslims are in reality “an enemy living amongst us.”

You denounced a mosque for running subway ads as “especially shameful because the ads will be running during the seventh anniversary of September 11, and because the subways are considered a primary target of terrorists” – equating, once again, the religion of Islam with terrorism.

You recently claimed that the FBI was investigating a number of Long Island mosques – which if true, was classified and endangered active operations; and if not true, is a lie for your propagandistic purposes.

I first realized you were a bigot when I read your novel Vale of Tears back in 2004 expecting a standard thriller – but what I got instead was page after page of anti-Muslim invective, approvingly noted by the narrator – an Irish American Congressman from Long Island who bore a striking resemblance to you.

And all of this bigotry is justified by your reaction to September 11 – which transformed you from a sensible moderate to a bigot and a fetishist for executive power. Since then, you have had little time for such niceties as the rights of citizens and American values – as you focus on this fight against “the enemy living amongst us,” thereby targeting the rights of us all. When asked about balancing American values with government power over citizens, you advocated the government using any means necessary – ignoring civil liberties and constitutional protections – as “if there is any doubt, [you] want this resolved by going out and getting the job done.” “If there is any doubt” you want to err on the side of constricting the liberty of citizens! This is not consistent with your oath to uphold the Constitution. Given this, it’s not that surprising that you think Guantanamo – a place where hundreds have been tortured according to America’s own records – goes too easy on them – that it’s like “Club Med.”

You are not the type of congressman we need. Your bigotry is embarrassing. Your disregard for American values is abhorrent in a public servant, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Whether you decide to challenge Kristen Gillibrand for New York’s Senate seat or remain in your House seat, I will do my best to make sure you no longer represent me.

That’s from me, Joe Campbell, addressing you in the no-bullshit style you so value. Go ahead – rant about that.

Categories
Latin America Law

The Collateral Damage in Honduras

The Associated Press sums up perfectly the factual case against the coup d’etat by the military and other elements in Honduras:

Despite a Supreme Court ruling, Zelaya had also pressed ahead with a referendum on whether to hold an assembly to consider changing the constitution. Critics feared he might press to extend his rule and cement presidential power in ways similar to his ally Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

But instead of prosecuting him or trying to defeat his referendum idea at the ballot box, other Honduran leaders sent masked soldiers to fly Zelaya out of the country at gunpoint, and congress installed Micheletti in his place. [my emphases]

These Honduran leaders feared what Zelaya might be intending – and so send soldiers to expel him from the country. The right-wingers defending these actions as “defense of democracy” are ignoring (or are ignorant of) these basic facts:

  1. These critics did not know Zelaya was proposing to amend the constitution to allow him to run again which would unconstitutional – they feared he was. (With good reason – but it is important to make the distinction.)
  2. Despite a range of options for blocking or removing Zelaya within the realm of law, they chose to go outside of this, thus subverting the law itself. They could have prosecuted him. They could have created some type of impeachment proceedings. Instead they asked the military to act against their commander-in-chief.

Another relevant fact is that the only Zelaya was not “removed” from office in a lawful proceeding. The military claims that Zelaya resigned – after being presented with the option of being imprisoned or resigning. Zelaya claims his signature on this document is fraudulent. This is a far different proceeding than – for example, Richard Nixon’s – when he resigned. The fact that all of this was done outside of legal channels makes it, by definition a coup, and as such, especially given the role of the military, it undermines any future executive as well as the institutions of democracy itself. Zelaya himself seemed to have little respect for these institutions – but they were collateral damage in these attempts to “defend democracy” and remove him as well.

Categories
Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Noam Chomsky’s Useful Fantasy

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve long been a bit puzzled by the respect given to Noam Chomsky’s politics. Yesterday, I listened to a lecture given by Chomsky this past Friday which seemed to consit of his meandering thoughts on the state of the world and the economy. I have to credit it for being interesting – and persuasive in a manner which all lasting worldviews as well as conspiracy theories are.

But there are several reasons I still find it difficult to take Chomsky’s politics seriously. His worldview has an all-or-nothing quality to it – as it is based on a number of presumptions which he does not attempt to prove and which inform every aspect of his view. These Chomskyian assumptions include:

  • Everything of significance is controlled by a small number of wealthy individuals.
  • These individuals deliberately and consciously inflict great evil on the world for their personal gain.
  • These individuals control American foreign policy and government and thus America has become a malignant empire which violently imposes the will of this oligarchy on the world.
  • The American people are opposed to this, though they have been propagandized to accept it.
  • The American people are also being exploited by having their jobs shipped overseas.

Chomsky preaches only to the converted – those who accept these premises. He has a certain understanding of the world which is quite different from that understood by at least most Americans who are his primary audience – but he does not attempt to speak to these masses. His presentation is directed squarely at those who agree. Chomsky makes little secret of this. As he wrote regarding American torture under George W. Bush:

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber.

For Chomsky, who starts out assuming the evil intent of those he opposes, this is a reasonable supposition. None of this makes his views necessarily wrong. But it makes his presentation unpersuasive to me. I do sense the attraction of his views though – similar to that of the fantay world of vampires or Harry Potter or Star Trek – except no one confuses these interesting and at times revealing fantasies with the world we live in.

His insistence that the many evils of the world are the result of secret and evil planning strikes me as improbable, as in my own experience, I have found that most awful things are not the result of deliberate and evil planning but stupidity and accident and coincidence and incompetence.

The other thing I noticed in his work is his easy lies, his distortions and omission of facts to fit his propagandistic purposes. Some of these are easily figured out by anyone paying critical attention. Others are harder to smoke out. For example, in the lecture referenced above he speaks of the current poverty in Bangladesh and then observes:

We might, incidentally, remember that when the British landed in what’s now Bangladesh, they were stunned by its wealth and splendor. And it didn’t take very long for it to be on its way to become the very symbol of misery, not by an act of God.

In this accusation, he is unusually indirect – as he generally specifically blames the Western elite for the evils of the world. But perhaps in this case, he realized how nakedly dishonest this observation was. After all, any slight knowledge of the history of the world in the 17th century begins with the fact that the “standard of living” – to use a modern term – was extremely poor for all but the most wealthy. The wealth the British were impressed by was that of the royalty – who were busy exploiting the people before the British arrived. At the same time, Bangladesh became “the very symbol of misery” not because the fate of it’s citizens deteriorated from the moment the British arrived – but because they did not progress at the same rate as the Western world. The greatest strides in reducing poverty in Bangladesh have in fact come in the past two decades (as poverty decreased by nearly 20%)  under the precise economic liberalization that Chomsky opposes with all his intellectual skills. (This also coincides with the introduction of microfinance.)

Similary, in his article on America and torture – in which he tries to make the case that torture has always been one of the tools America uses to force its will onto the world – he mentions that in the war in the Phillipines, there was “widespread use of torture”  by the Americans. He fails to mention that President Theodore Roosevelt and his War Secretary Elihu Root prosecuted and punished those soldiers and commanding officers who were found guilty of torture.

I find Chomsky’s views to be quite interesting as well as fantastic. In the same way that a well-thought out fantasy can reveal important truths about reality, so can Chomsky’s work. But it is difficult to accept as a serious worldview.

[Image by MatthewBradley licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Health care Politics

Organizing a Grass Roots Movement for Health Care Reform


[digg-reddit-me]About a week ago, I got an email from Mitch Stewart, the Director of Organizing for America, the organization that is tasked with marshalling the remnants of Obama’s campaign organization to create grass roots pressure for change. It read almost as if it were a campaign email:

Joseph –

The fight to pass real health care reform will come down to one thing: you.

That’s because the efforts in Washington, D.C., to fix our broken health care system and provide affordable coverage for all Americans are only part of the battle.

By teaming up with your friends and family and organizing for real reform in your community, you can make the difference in this debate. Together, we’ll make sure the President’s plan succeeds across the country…
In communities around the country, folks will be knocking on doors, making phone calls, and doing all they can to seize what may be our last opportunity to change health care in America forever – as the President has said, reform needs to “happen this year, or not at all.”

The goal of the email was to get people to buy “Health Care 09” t-shirts. But unlike the campaign emails – which often led to me buying whatever they were hawking to demonstrate my support, reading up on the issue (if I had not already) and blogging about it, this email prompted me to no action. A few months ago, I wrote about this issue in a post about the “Paradox of Organizing for America.” The problem I saw then was that while “Obama for America” had a clear, singular goal – electing Barack Obama president – and citizens were faced with the motivating factor of being directly involved in achieving this goal – voting, and convincing others to vote as they were – neither of these factors which were essential to the success of Obama for America are present for Organizing for America.

But this email demonstrates another problem, a problem inherent in the legislative-centered approach to policy that Obama has taken in general – and his rugby-scrum strategy for achieving health care reform in particular. How can he motivate the grass roots to back him if there is no clear bill or idea to rally behind?

Clearly, their strategy is to make this a binary question: Are you for or against health care reform? Everyone is for health care reform – as our system is quite obviously unsustainable. But there are many, many valid questions critics and supporters of the various progressive-type health care reform plans have:

  • Will this reform be sufficient to “bend the curve”?
  • Should medical malpractice awards be capped?
  • Should we be moving towards a single-payer system?
  • Would non-profit insurance organizations be a better approach?

On policy grounds, many of those who support health care reform disagree about how it should be done. Now, Organizing for America is asking them to push for reform, with details unrevealed and undecided. What they are asking for is, simply, a leap of faith – to trust that the Obama administration knows what they are doing, and that they will do the best they can.

They key fact that the Obama administration and Organizing for America are pushing is that this is the time. As the email quotes Obama: “[R]eform needs to ‘happen this year, or not at all.'”

The grounds for this claim are political rather than policy-oriented. As a matter of reflective policy-making, it would undoubtedly be better to gradually experiment with different approaches, testing them to see which are successful and gradually building support for a wholesale reorganization of health care. But politically, this is untenable. First – with the retirement of the worst generation of Americans and the exponential rise in health care costs, our federal deficit is set to explode in the next thirty years. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to reign in costs and “bend the curve.” This is a problem that should have been dealt with while the Baby Boomers were in power, when the problem first became evident – but, as usual, they abdicated their responsibilities. Second, Obama now has more going for him domestically than he likely will at any other point, including if he were to win a second term. Obama’s popularity is high; he has 60 Democrats in the Senate and a sizeable majority in the House (and the president’s party has traditionally lost seats in the first midterms after the presidential election); he has several key Republicans willing to compromise – and various business and other interests willing to support some legislation.

The difficulty Organizing for America faces is motivating the many policy-oriented and otherwise savvy Obama-supporters to support the administration on this issue without having set its position in advance. Organizing for America seems to have a clear idea of what it wants from the grass roots: pressure for the idea that we need reform now. What’s less clear is how to get the grass roots to buy into their part of the strategy. Buying t-shirts is what you do after you buy into the strategy – not before.

It’s not clear to me that Organizing for America has realized its job is no longer to preach to the converted – but to convert bystanders into activists.

[Image by tandemracer of her baby’s six-month doctor visit licensed under Creative Commons 2.0]

Categories
Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

The People’s Rage At A System That Had Failed Them

Frank Rich uses the new film Public Enemies and the saga of Bernie Madoff to try to get at the momentous forces rippling through our society as this financial crisis reveals the rifts and trade-offs and makes explicit the social bargain that is submerged during prosperity:

“Dillinger did not rob poor people,” wrote one correspondent to The Indianapolis Star. “He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.”

Gorn writes that the current economic crisis helped him understand better why Americans could root for a homicidal bank robber: “As our own day’s story of stupid policies and lax regulations, of greedy moneymen, free-market hucksters, white-collar thieves, and self-serving politicians unfolds, and as banks foreclose on millions of families’ homes, workers lose their jobs, and life savings disappear, it becomes clear why Dillinger’s wild ride so fascinated America during the 1930s.” An outlaw could channel a people’s “sense of rage at the system that had failed them.”

As Gorn reminds us, Americans who felt betrayed didn’t just take to cheering Dillinger; some turned to the populism of Huey Long, or to right-wing and anti-Semitic demagogues like Father Coughlin, or to the Communist Party. The passions unleashed by economic inequities are explosive because those inequities violate the fundamental capitalist faith. It’s the bedrock American dream that virtues like hard work and playing by the rules are rewarded with prosperity.

In 2009, too many who worked hard and played by the rules are still suffering, while too many who bent or broke the rules with little or no accountability are back reaping a disproportionate share of what scant prosperity there is.

Categories
Palin Politics

Happy Birthday, America! Our Modern-Day George Wallace (in heels) is giving up the little power she has

[digg-reddit-me]Sarah Palin represents the worst of America, in all its attractive yet self-destructive glory. She is ignorant – and does not care to educate herself. She is confident, without much reason to be. She is unreflective, and proud of it. Like a wahhabi among Muslims, she does not consider most of her fellow-countrymen “pro-American.” Like a reincarnation of Richard Nixon (or a classic Marxist) she seeks power through class warfare. Like a second coming of George Wallace, she waves the flag in defense of prejudice and hatred and incites crowds to near-violence.

And  yesterday, Sarah Palin announced she would resign her office. She sounded the same themes she had in her national debut – those themes that I hopefully deride as yesterday’s but fear may be themes again tomorrow. This is no surprise, as as in her first speech on the national stage she accused those examining her record – the media – of being part of the “Washington elite” and looking down on her – and ridiculed her opponent as a crusader for terrorist rights.  And when a comedian made a joke that she saw she could exploit, she talked used this as her excuse to rail against the “Hollywood/NY” elites who did not understand real American values.  Again and again she invoked the same, old tired class warfare images.

The question is, why does this woman – who has a solid shot at the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination – decide to give up her governorship?

As everyone acknowledges – and especially given her tawdry history of small-time lies, personal vendettas, and misuse of public power and funds – she may be trying to sidestep some brewing scandal the press hasn’t gotten wind of. Even Will Kristol, the foremost Palin defender in the country acknowledges this. But if this does not turn out to be the case, there are still significant reasons why she might be stepping aside – in a calculated move to better position herself for 2012.

As Kristol later suggested, she might be – in this instance, “crazy like a fox.”

As Marc Ambinder points out, as Governor of Alaska, she is a sitting duck and marginalized from the centers of power she so desperately wants to be part of. The heady presidential campaign clearly gave her a taste of something she now craves – the attention and adulation of adoring crowds. She seems to believe she is destined for greater things than merely governing a state with a population the size of a medium-sized city.

But as long as she is governor, she is generating a record that can be picked apart and attacked – and she is unable to effectively reach out to the Iowa and New Hampshire Republican primary voters she will need. At the same time, her national ambitions – and her role in the McCain campaign – have hurt her in Alaska – as her popularity has dipped and legislators have begun to feel as if she is looking beyond Juneau. As only 51% of voters in Alaska said they would reelect her as governor, she would likely face a tough campaign.

At the same time, Palin is facing the same problem as many other governors: the states are facing a crunch, and without help from the federal government are going to have to make drastic cuts in services or raise taxes. In Alaska, the downturn – and the drop in the price of oil – has lead to a deficit of nearly $3 billion over the next two years, with little chance of recovery until the price of oil goes back up. By resigning in the middle of this year, she gets to avoid the painful cuts in government services or raises in tax rates that will be needed to keep the state functioning. Governing during this deficit explosion would make it harder (though for Palin, far from impossible) to deride Barack Obama’s deficit spending (most of which Obama himself inherited from another former Governor who liked to cut taxes and increase spending).

Given these two motivations, one can see why Will Kristol suggests this move might be crazy like a fox.

But remember this: by giving up in the middle of her term, Sarah Palin has forever disqualified herself from the presidency. I’m sure she doesn’t think so – and I’m sure her most ardent supporters do not think so either. She may make a solid run for the Republican nomination – and, she may get it. But every reason she gave for resigning would be doubly true if she were to win the presidency. Her family would be under greater scrutiny, and the butt of more jokes. Lawsuits against her would eat into her time – as they did Bill  Clinton’s. If the relatively low-level of scrutiny and pestering lawsuits she is subject to now have intimidated her from staying in office, imagine what pressures she would face sitting in the Oval Office.

The American people will remember that when the going got tough in Alaska, she went. And she didn’t accept any blame – instead, she played the same game she has played as long as she has been in the national spotlight. She blamed the media elite and everyone else who isn’t “proud to be American” and who instead “deride[s] our ideals.”

America can forgive her the class warfare. They can forgive her inciting her supporters to near-violent outrage. They can forgive her betrayal of the man who brought her out of obscurity. They can forgive her for using her children as political props. They can forgive her for all of her small lies. They can forgive her her ignorance. And they can love her for her saucy winks, her baseless confidence, and her faux-religiousity. What the American people cannot forgive and will not look past is a quitter – and the message from yesterday’s events – the message that comes through loud and clear above her strident attempts to distract – is that Sarah Palin is a quitter.

Never again will the Barracuda of Wasilla attain the glory that was hers for one glorious September night – as she strode onto the stage, confident beyond reason and shining with the light of Destiny.

This I hope, and I pray. For our nation’s sake, most of all. But for the moment, what can we do but celebrate that our modern-day George Wallace has stepped down, and the spectre of a Palin presidency is just a bit further away.

[Image by sskennel licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2009-07-03

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Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Media

The Honeymoon Is Over

David Rothkopf sees the events of the past few weeks as an indication that Obama’s press honeymoon is over:

Mark it on your calendars.  It was in June 2009 that Barack Obama’s honeymoon officially ended.  And to be more specific, it was this past week.  Through some mysterious alchemy, this was the week that Bush’s economy became Obama’s, Bush’s wars became Obama’s, and the ups and downs of a real workaday relationship with the press also introduced Obama to a more accurate sense of what life was like for Bush and for all his other modern predecessors.

While the change is clear for the reasons I will note below, no one should lament the end of the honeymoon, even though it may be hard for Obama and his colleagues in the Administration not to…the intractable problems keep piling up in the president’s inbox and the responses to them inevitably male them the unwanted property of this president rather than merely a legacy from the last…

Categories
Barack Obama Foreign Policy Iran Israel Latin America Politics

Explaining Obama’s “Double Standard” Regarding Iran and Honduras

[digg-reddit-me]A number of Obama’s critics have pointed out a disparity between Obama’s treatment of Iran on the one hand – and Israel and Honduras on the other.

In their view, Obama has refused to take a side in Iran even though he clearly should be on the side of the protesters if he values life, liberty, and the American way. In Israel, Obama has pressured the Israelis while giving free reign to the Palestinians who are really at fault. While in Honduras, Obama has clearly taken the side of the leftist friend of  Hugo Chavez who was removed from office with the endorsement of courts and Congress of Honduras as they sought to protect their democracy from the president’s power grab. In all of these cases, they claim, Obama has taken the side of anti-democratic forces – and only interfered with our “friends” – presumably because Obama is desperate for the approval of the European Union, which is in itself anti-democratic and leftist. This portrayal of Obama is based on their observation that in Iran Obama has reacted to major violations of the values he claims to hold with muted tones – but in Israel and Honduras he has reacted to minor violations with strident tones.

This caricature of Obama presumes he is acting in bad faith at all times, which is increasingly the sole item of agreement among the Republican opposition; and it attributes to Obama a nonsensical and inconsistent worldview. But you don’t have to be a right-winger to notice the sharp differences in tone between Obama’s cautious approach to Iran and his more aggressive approaches in Honduras and Israel.

David Rothkopf proposes one explanation – that frankly seems a bit too Beltway for me, but I’m sure is a factor in Obama’s change in tone between the Iranian coup d’etat and the Honduran one:

[A] reason for the swift action on Honduras is that old faithful of U.S. foreign policy: the law of the prior incident. This law states that whatever we did wrong (or took heat for) during a preceding event we will try to correct in the next one … regardless of whether or not the correction is appropriate. A particularly infamous instance of this was trying to avoid the on-the-ground disasters of the Somalia campaign by deciding not to intervene in Rwanda. Often this can mean tough with China on pirated t-shirts today, easy with them on WMD proliferation tomorrow, which is not a good thing. In any event, in this instance it produced: too slow on Iran yesterday, hair-trigger on Honduras today.

While I’m sure the law of prior incident played a role, it seems to me that there is a more basic explanation for this disparity – which likewise explains the difference between Obama’s approach towards Israel. The difference in how Obama dealt with these various crises comes from how Obama understands power in foreign relations. The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie H. Gelb, in Power Rules, defines it:

Power is getting people or groups to do something they don’t want to do. It is about manipulating one’s own resources and position to pressure and coerce psychologically and politically….And American leaders would do well to learn, finally, that power shrinks when it is wielded poorly. Failed or open-ended wars diminish power. Threats unfulfilled diminish power. Mistakes and continual changing of course also diminish power.

Teddy Roosevelt understood this implicitly when he said:

Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Alternatively, George W. Bush used grand language, made many threats:

From Egypt to Georgia, President Bush … wrote rhetorical checks he had no intention (or ability) to cash.

What Bush did not seem to realize – and what right-wingers today still do not seem to realize – is that it weakens the United States to declare, “We are all Georgians!” as Russia invades Georgia and we do nothing – as happened under Bush. Yet the rhetoric is not the problem – as it actually strengthened America when John F. Kennedy declared, “We are all Berliners” and the Soviet Union, given the lengths Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had gone already to protect West Berlin, believed the young president was willing to protect Berlin at high cost. Many right-wingers have cited Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” as a model for what Obama should say to Iran. But what made Reagan’s exhortation more than mere empty rhetoric and bluster was the personal relationship he had with Gorbachev after years of meeting with him. And when Reagan made this statement, he was not demanding it – he was rather challenging Gorbachev to live by the values he claimed he held. Reading the actual speech this challenge is prefaced by an “if.” This is a very different proposal than what right-wingers want Obama to say: which is to endorse one side in an internal conflict and refuse to negotiate with this member of the “Axis of Evil.” Reagan on the other hand negotiated with the “Evil Empire” and stayed out of internal Soviet politics – realizing that the endorsement of an enemy could be toxic.

What Obama has shown in the past several weeks is an impatience with hollow rhetoric which presumes conflicts in other countries are really about us. The striking oratory he does use always seems to have a specific purpose – to reach out to Muslims angered by what they see as a war against them, for example – or to call on Europeans to send more troops to Afghanistan. Obama sees words in foreign policy as tools to be used rather than ways of expressing our feelings about other nations. Thus, despite his apparent feelings about Iran – and his great sympathy for the Green Wave – he does not feel the need to express this publicly if he does not see what it will accomplish. With many Iranians publicly saying they did not want Obama to take the side of the protesters publicly as it would undermine them (for example, here and here), he had little reason to do so.  So far he had not been willing to undermine his and America’s power by using puffery and empty threats on Iran just to please his domestic audience, despite pressure from the right-wing.

But Obama did speak more forcefully on Israel and Honduras. Why? Because in these two places he has significant leverage – and his words can have an impact. Also – in neither of these places was America regularly called “The Great Satan.” (Imagine if Ahmadinjad had endorsed Obama in our election. Would that have helped Obama?) With regards to these nations, Obama can say what America wants and put pressure on those in control there for it to happen as America supplies significant funds to both nations – and has diplomatic, economic, and military alliances.

Speaking about Iran, on the other hand, Obama can only offer wish lists – which he would not be able to pressure Iran to fulfill – and when Iran ignored him, America would look weaker.

I also believe there is another factor at work. I have already stated that I believe the Obama Doctrine – that will and is guiding his foreign policy – is a focus on creating and maintaining states of consent. One of the basic principles which is necessary to create a state of consent is Rule of Law; another is the freedom of people to peacefully protest and speak freely. Obama has limited himself to condemning those actions which have violated the principles underpinning a state of consent. Not having direct knowledge of the election results in Iran, he remained quiet – though the administration raised questions. When confronted with evidence of the violent suppression of peaceful protests and attacks on free speech, he condemned these in strong terms – though he still refused to take a side, saying the battle was internal. In the case of Honduras, the State Department had been working with opponents of President Zelaya as he took illegal and unconstitutional actions to see how Zelaya could be checked. This is why they knew so quickly that the coup d’etat was a clear violation of the Rule of Law. The American State Department had been working with the Honduran Congress and other leaders to determine what the constitutional steps would be to remove Zelaya. At the same time, the intervention of the military set a bad precedent, undermining ability of the people to consent to their government. As Der Spiegel explained:

Anyone who sees the coup as some sort of effort to rescue democracy must ask themselves what version of democracy involves removing the elected leader of a country from office while holding a pistol to their head.

Obama has here still neglected to side with either party – instead insisting both parties follow their commitments to the law of their land, which the military violated. The American position is that Zelaya should resume his place as rightful president – and impeachment or other proceedings could then occur, although the deal being negotiated instead merely ties his hands to prevent him from any further dictatorial actions (demonstrating that the military actually weakened their hand in dealing with Zelaya in overreacting.)

In each of these cases, Obama displays a common goal – to maintain and allow the space for states of consent – free from military or other violent forms of coercion.

What right-wingers are declaring inconsistency is one of results – not goals. The differences in responses can be quite clearly explained by looking at what leverage Obama had and by a consistent moral demand that the nations of the world govern by consent and not force.

[The above image is a product of the United States government.]