McCain repeats an old complaint about Obama and Iran (via Scoblete):

“History will judge this president incredibly harshly, with disdain and scorn for his failure to come to the moral assistance of the 1.5 million Iranians that were demonstrating in the streets of Tehran,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep today. Those demonstrators, McCain said, were “crying out … literally crying out … ‘Obama, Obama, are you with us?’ … If we had given them some moral support, it might have made some difference.”

McCain isn’t the first to make this charge, and it isn’t any more persuasive this time than it has been before. “Coming to the moral assistance” of protesters facing a crackdown sounds a lot like issuing strongly-worded statements and not much else. As Scoblete says, this is baseless criticism.

We have no way of knowing how future historians will assess Obama’s response to the protests. It seems significant that the people most outraged about Obama’s insufficient moral support are not members of the Iranian opposition and aren’t living in Iran. If Obama failed the Iranian opposition so miserably, why aren’t many of them saying so? Could it be that vocal American support for their cause is harmful to them? Had Obama been more vocal in his response to the protests, what difference does anyone think it would have made?

When Hungarians rose up in 1956 with the expectation that they would receive U.S. support, they were understandably angry that no support was forthcoming. Their uprising was brutally crushed, and Hungarians still remember the U.S. failure to keep the promise they believe that our government made. Of course, the fault there was with the official “rollback” doctrine promoted by Dulles. Much more harm can be done by giving the impression that the U.S. will provide support when it has no meaningful support to provide. Promising more than we could deliver would not have made the protests in 2009 and 2010 any more effective, but it might have led to more people getting killed.