Last week, many conservatives attacked President Obama's wise decision to stay relatively quiet on the Iranian unrest, therefore preventing the regime's attempts to blame "outsiders" for massive discontent over possibly fraudulent election results. Jonathan Chait noted that criticisms of Obama for being weak or timid didn't bother to engage the president's argument: More aggressive American involvement, given our history in the region, would hurt the reformers rather than help them.
I should have mentioned this at the time, but I think there are generally two reasons for conservative outrage over Obama's response: One is a general narcissism and nostalgia about American power; the other is simple politics. Some of the conservatives attacking Obama have been betting that the regime would come through the protests intact all along, and having criticized Obama for failing to be more belligerent, they can now say he "missed" an opportunity to destroy Iranian theocracy entirely. They didn't engage Obama's argument against interfering because they didn't care whether he did or not; they just wanted to be able to criticize him after the fact for failing to bring down the mullahs.
Via Andrew Sullivan, we have Melanie Phillips making this exact argument:
What a disgrace that this man is leader of the free world; and at such a point in history. If he had put America stoutly behind the protesters and championed them against the regime, by now they might have toppled it.
This is the Three Little Pigs theory of Iran: All Obama had to do was huff and puff, and he would have blown the entire Iranian regime down. It's pure fantasy. Islamic theocracy in Iran may have been fatally injured by the reform movement, which exposes democracy in Iran as a myth. Only time will tell. But nothing we could have done in the past two weeks would have ended the regime.
-- A. Serwer
