So Obama has come out with a lengthier, “tougher” statement on Iran, some of which is redundant because he has said it before and most of which is unnecessary. John is appropriately critical of the move towards what some are calling the “Biden-Clinton line.” Unfortunately, I am being reminded more and more of Obama’s response to the war in Georgia, which was initially quite sane and responsible and devolved in a matter of days to more or less the same reckless foolishness that McCain had shown from the beginning. Obama never said that we are all Georgians, but he hewed to the same line on policy as those who did, and eventually he came around to endorsing the official version of the war in which “Russian aggression” was all that mattered.

Then as now, I get the sinking feeling that all of this new “more forceful rhetoric” is nothing more than delayed CYA (which is all the good this statement will do anyone), and it reconfirms my old claim that Obama tends to yield to that side that can do more political damage to him. Even though the hawkish voices who have been berating Obama are relatively few and do not represent most people in the political establishment or in the country, they have been able to pull Obama in their direction in just a little over a week because they are more influential, better-connected, more vocal, more on message and more aggressive. While the numbers favor Obama on how he handled things in the last week, I seem to have been simply wrong in assessing the ability of the critics to pressure Obama. There is a unified chorus damning Obama for weakness and dithering. There is not much in the way of organized resistance to this chorus, and the administration itself is divided (as administrations often are). For the most part, even most of his reliable supporters qualify and hedge their defenses of his recent actions (cue Roger Cohen’s complaints about “reading prepared lines”), and while his response to date enjoys wide support I have to wonder how deep it is.

One of the potential problems in defending Obama’s earlier restraint in terms of what would be counterproductive for the protesters is that it can create the expectation that Obama must abandon restraint in the event that the protests are not succeeding. After all, to frame things in terms of what is counterproductive for the protesters seems to accept that the protesters’ success ought to be the primary goal of U.S. policy, which means that the administration would have to change its approach if the protests are not succeeding. This overlooks that the protests have never been likely to succeed, and it misses that Washington cannot let its Iran policy and all of the other interests that hinge on that be dictated by internal Iranian affairs. Despite the reality that Obama was initially giving the protests their best chance to succeed, the more time that passes with the regime still in place the louder calls for being “more forceful” will become. If these calls are heeded, it will ironically make the protests even less likely to succeed for the same reasons why “more forceful rhetoric” or “more aggressive” support would have been a mistake over the last few days. Nonetheless, the pressure to show “more aggressive” support will continue to grow and will cease only in the unlikely event that the protesters prevail.

Obama has moved in the direction of the hawks at least partly because the more hawkish people have allies in the Vice President and the Secretary of State, who have been pressing the President for “tougher” statements almost from the beginning of the protests. It is also a reminder that, as with the war in Georgia, Biden’s influence is a malign one, and it is a reminder that Obama may take longer to get to the mistaken position on foreign policy his opponents have taken, but he will still get there because he does not fundamentally disagree with them about projecting power to defend “values.” Evidently, national security ideology will out.

It seems that the elements in the administration urging restraint are losing ground, which eerily mirrors the weird lack of confidence many advocates of engagement have in their own proposals on Iran policy. Having spent years resisting arguments that Iran’s government is irrational, will never negotiate, cannot be trusted and will not be compelled to change course by additional punitive measures, many advocates of engagement seem to be willing to throw in the towel at a time when engagement is not only more likely to be successful but also even more imperative. Robert Farley has now coined a phrase that deserves the Newspeak award of the year: “non-interventionist coercive strategy.” Coercion is a kind of intervention.

As I said before, Nixon went to China after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. For that matter, detente advanced under Brezhnev, who had just smashed the 1968 uprisings in central and eastern Europe; Sadat made peace with Israel after the Arabs had almost overrun the country in 1973. There was a time when we understood that these sorts of governments needed to believe that they were secure before they could take the risk of negotiating with old foes on major national security questions. What is so strange is that the psychology of strength and weakness that hawks apply to U.S. foreign policy (usually wrongly) all the time would be quite appropriate to apply to the internal politics of an authoritarian state, but they don’t do this because they are too busy citing the authoritarians’ abuses to justify confrontational policies against them. If they stopped for a moment and applied their constant fear of “showing weakness” to an analysis of the internal politics of the authoritarian regimes in question, they would see that the presence of a viable, vibrant opposition is probably the surest guarantee that the regime will make no deals with Washington. Authoritarians are most likely to make deals on security and foreign policy issues once they feel secure and in place. The ones who cannot afford to make a deal are those who are vulnerable and fear appearing weak, which invites internal challenges.

P.S. By the way, it won’t fly to say that the administration’s language has been consistent between last week and the start of this week. Expressing “concerns” about something and saying that one is “appalled and outraged” by the same thing are two very different sorts of statements as a matter of conveying displeasure diplomatically. Everyone can see perfectly well that the rhetoric has escalated, and whether or not Obama has escalated his rhetoric because of the critics who have been demanding “more forceful rhetoric” or for some other reason, he has escalated it. More to the point, his critics will take this language as vindication that their early, misguided demands for “tougher” language were right and his caution was not. Whether or not he was affected by the drumbeat on the Post op-ed pages, he has started moving in the direction that those writers wanted. One could even try to defend changing rhetoric as circumstances change, but to deny that there has been any change is silly and, I’m sorry to say, something we have seen several times from Obama over the last two years.

Do you think it’s an accident that when the neocons were in charge Hezbollah led the Lebanese elections but when we ditched the neocons, the Lebanese ditched Hezbollah? Do you think it’s an accident that when we ditched our far-right extremist government here in favor of a realist liberal that the liberals in Iran advanced their cause remarkably? Much further than anyone had a right to hope? ~E.D. Kain’s friend

Leaving aside some of the questionable descriptions in this quote (far-right? liberals in Iran?), yes, it was an accident! Perhaps the only thing more annoying than the use of green fonts and the sheer earnestness of some Westerners about the last two weeks is the maddening desire to describe events incorrectly to relate events in the Near East to our own political process. The Lebanese didn’t “ditch Hizbullah.” They maintained the status quo and kept the incumbent government in power, which means that Hizbullah remained in the opposition despite the fact that the opposition won the most votes. No one seems eager to paint their blogs yellow and ask where the Shi’ites’ votes went, and no wonder. Most people aren’t really that interested in having every voice be heard and fully represented, are they? We already know where their votes went–the Lebanese system is geared to misrepresent the population in parliament according to established rules that govern the settlement after the civil war. If winning 55% of the vote means that “the Lebanese ditched” the opposition, what would an opposition victory look like?

Suppose that a couple of districts had voted slightly differently, and the opposition had prevailed. We would undoubtedly hear from hawks how Obama’s election had “caused” a Hizbullah/FPM victory, but that wouldn’t make it true. A good way to test the silliness of a statement is to think about how reasonable it would sound if it were being made by your opponents against your preferred politician or in favor of one of their leaders. When people babbled about “the Arab spring” in 2005, they were horribly wrong. Enthusiasts for an “Obama effect” on the international scene are in danger of misrepresenting what has happened and what is happening to suit their hopes. This will come back to bite them. Suppose that Khamenei had decided to rig the election for Ahmadinejad, but to do so less blatantly. Would anyone believe hawkish arguments that the Cairo speech led to Ahmadinejad’s apparent victory? I would hope not, because such claims would be unfounded.

There can’t be that many countries where people earnestly believe that their elections influence the behavior of electorates in other countries. As far as I know, no one has attempted to tie local British and European election results to our presidential election or anything that Obama has done, but it would make no more sense. The Indian elections passed by almost unnoticed over here, as the incumbent government retained and even expanded its majority, and the ruling AK party lost ground in Turkey in municipal elections, and both of these were driven entirely by domestic political concerns. The “Obama effect” is rather narrowly focused, isn’t it?

The United States and the West must unite as never before. Although in the past blunt economic sanctions have hurt the average Iranian, it is now imperative that America and its allies adopt ever more stringent, focused sanctions to bring this regime to its knees as quickly as possible. The world should use available financial sanctions to precipitate a run on the Iranian rial and cause the collapse of the Iranian economy. It is better that the Iranian people suffer for a short period of time and regain their freedom and prosperity than for them to suffer under this regime with the complicity of the Western world for years to come. ~Hossein Askari

This is madness. Have the current sanctions brought the regime anywhere close to its knees after decades? There is not a single example where economic sanctions actually compelled a non-democratic regime to change course on an internal political matter. We have no reason to believe that it will work. What we do know is that it will make average Iranians poorer. The nascent Iranian middle class that everyone is so pleased with will be impoverished, and their economic prospects will go from bad to worse. Causing a run on the rial would annihilate whatever savings average Iranians have and magnify their current inflation problem, which could have a political radicalizing effect and not one that we would find attractive. Tanking the Iranian economy would mean that unemployment shoots up even higher than the already miserable 20%+ that it is now.

That’s assuming that the things Askari proposes could actually be done. What sanctions do we seriously think we can impose at this point that would have a desirable effect? Suppose that we somehow got every major power and all of Iran’s trading partners on board. In that unlikely event, how would starving the Iranian people of goods and contacts with the outside world make them more capable of throwing off the regime’s yoke? How long is the “short period of time” during which the worsened suffering of the Iranian people is tolerable? Sanctions hurt the weakest and most vulnerable first, and they affect the powerful and wealthiest last. Leaving aside the question of whether it “works” in five or ten years’ time, how is such a policy remotely just? For twelve years I heard the immoral argument that Hussein was somehow “making” us impose the sanctions on Iraq, and that all of the human suffering we were inflicting was really not our responsibility. For how many years would we be willing to go through the motions of the same ineffective and immoral policy with Iran? Why are so many advocates of engagement and rapprochement so lacking in confidence in their own ideas about what a sound Iran policy would look like?

Why would such an imposition of sanctions not allow the authorities to claim the mantle of nationalist resistance against international hostility? Milosevic held on for years longer than he would have been able to do otherwise because of the hostility towards Serbia that most of the world showed in the ’90s. Why would imposing extremely tight sanctions not put the protesters on the defensive and blunt their earlier criticism about Iranian economic grievances? As bad as the government’s mismanagement and corruption undoubtedly are, economic conditions can always get worse under tightened international sanctions, and the regime will be able to argue truthfully that conditions have worsened because of policies advanced by Washington.

Of course, we all know that there are states that have no interest in sacrificing their business with Iran for the sake of causing internal political change. Russia and China, and perhaps the two other members of the so-called BRIC, have no desire to lend support to an effort to police the internal affairs of another state. Even though they are too large and important to the global economy to risk the same treatment, these powers have no reason to want to provide a precedent that could be applied to their clients elsewhere in the world. If they could be imposed, how would tightened sanctions affect the regional economy and the oil market? People propose these outlandish policies and don’t even bother to address their possible consequences. We are still in global recession. How much worse are the chances for recovery if Iranian oil exports are targeted with sanctions and the price of oil shoots up past $100 again?

This is hardly the most important aspect of the debate over the Iranian protests and the administration’s response, but it seems telling that according to Rasmussen’s new poll (via Scoblete) there is not one demographic in which a majority believes that Obama has been insufficiently aggressive in his support for the protesters. This seems all the more striking given that an overall majority (54%) of likely voters believes that it makes a difference for U.S. national security who is the next Iranian President. The 54% who believe this are wrong, but what is interesting is that they think it matters for the United States whether or not Mousavi prevails and they are still not inclined to embrace the criticism that the administration has been “timid and passive,” as Lindsay Graham put it yesterday. Just 35% believe Obama has not been aggressive enough in his support; 43% believe the level of support has been “about right” and 9% (including 15% of Republicans) think he has been “too aggressive. This is good news. It means that there is no political gain with the public by being more “forceful,” which should make the administration less susceptible to pressure to take a “tougher” line that most of its members seem to understand would be a mistake.

The other noteworthy thing about these results is that 38% of Republicans think Obama’s support for the protesters has been the right amount or even too much (23/15), and 46% of independents think the same (41/5). Even among self-described conservatives, just 49% think he has not been aggressive enough, and as we have seen only one-third of all voters agrees with the Krauthammer/Wolfowitz/McCain/Graham line.

The poll also has a new crosstab feature, the “Political Class Index,” which is supposed to distinguish between popular and elite opinion. Rasmussen has defined the distinction this way:

The Political Class and Mainstream classifications are determined by the answers to three questions measuring general attitudes about government. Most Americans trust the judgment of the public more than political leaders, view the federal government as a special interest group, and believe that big business and big government work together against the interests of investors and consumers. Only seven percent (7%) share the opposite view and can be considered part of the Political Class. Another seven percent (7%) lean towards the Political Class.

As I read the crosstabs, elite pressure on the administration to take a “tougher” line will likely be minimal and will be limited to the usual suspects. 78% of the “political class” respondents (including leaners) approve of Obama’s response, compared to just 38% of the “mainstream” respondents. However, even among “mainstream” respondents only 41% agree with the view that Obama’s support has been insufficient. So there is a real constituency for the nonsense we have been hearing, but it does not represent anything like a majority of the public at this time.

So to recap, we have “no horse in this race,” we should do nothing, we have to negotiate with whichever government emerges, and the victory of the reformers would change nothing about Iran’s nuclear program and “would not stop the country’s rivalry with the United States,” all of which “hard-core non-interventionists” have already been saying for days and days, but it is “naive” to say that an internal Iranian political dispute is really none of our business. Okay, then. It’s not really clear what makes one the hard-headed realist position and the other the naive non-interventionist one, as the two are identical positions. One thing I have noticed in this debate is that virtually everyone has been lobbing the charge of naivete at everyone else, including people who agree with them on 99% of the policy substance, which tells me that there isn’t very much to the charge

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.

The sentiments are fine, the judgement is lacking. ~Alex Massie on David Cameron’s Iran comments

This gets at what has been wrong with so much of the criticism directed against the administration’s response: it is all sentiment, and no judgment at all, or rather it is the bad judgment to allow sentiment to dictate everything. The out party has the luxury and all the incentives to engage in as much mawkish sentimentality on foreign policy as they please, because they are not speaking in an official capacity for the country’s government, but that doesn’t really make it any better. After all, Cameron aspires to be and, thanks to the ongoing implosion of Labour, probably will be the next Prime Minister. He needs to demonstrate that he is credible and responsible, much as Republican leaders need to regain credibility shredded by yeas of indulging Wilsonian foolishness, and Cameron isn’t going to do this by attacking Brown from the interventionist side.

One of the many things that have kept British voters from trusting the Tories in government again is that as much as they may loathe Labour they simply cannot bring themselves to put the Tories in a position of responsibility. This was mostly a matter of distrusting their handling of domestic affairs and simply finding them repugnant, but I think it is fair to say that this distrust extended to foreign policy as well. Whether it was because of their obsession with Europe earlier in the decade, their leaders’ embarrassingly strong attachment to the Bush administration that made Blair seem independent and thoughtful by comparison, or their continued closeness to American advocates of aggressive, ‘forward’ policies in the former USSR and Near East, Tory leaders did not give the electorate much of an attractive alternative to Blair’s militant do-goodism. Now that Brown is showing some restraint and prudence, perhaps in part because he never adopted foreign policy as his personal project, Cameron seems eager to rush forward and catch the falling standard of insufferable Blairite moralizing.

Back in 2006, Cameroons liked to boast that their boss was very interested in having more “Love, Actually moments” with the Americans. (On re-reading that article from three years ago, it is significant that the Love, Actually-infatuated Cameroons were hosting the mad John McCain at party conference in part because of his “maverick” tendencies to criticize Bush.) That is, his supporters were telegraphing their desire to tell Washington where it could get off on a more regular basis. One wonders if this would still hold true in an Obama-Cameron era, and if so would it mean that the cautious, prudent Obama we are seeing right now would be coming under fire from Cameron for being insufficiently outspoken and aggressive on human rights, democracy and the like?

Leverett and Frum discuss the Iranian election and protests. Leverett is making a great deal of sense in the linked clip, especially when the conversation turns to the likely consequences of regime collapse and Iranian strategic interests. Most people seem very keen to think about how regime collapse might lead to good outcomes and work to our benefit, but very few people think about how things could become worse. As the resident pessimist, allow me to offer up some grim, but nonetheless plausible scenarios*. I not only share Leverett’s skepticism about the possibility of benefiting from regime collapse, but I want to go beyond that and consider all the ways that it could be quite harmful to our interests and the region.

What I have seen no one discuss is the potential for separatist groups, particularly Kurdish and Baluchi groups, seizing the opportunity of a distracted or tottering regime to try to hive off autonomous or independent enclaves, potentially encouraging separatists in neighboring states to intervene more directly on their behalf or copy them inside the states where they reside. Pakistani Baluchistan is unstable enough without a successful example of Baluchi separatism being established across the border. Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan could likewise experience greater unrest and violence as Iranian Kurdish militants take advantage of the upheaval. Even if such regions did not entirely break away from Tehran’s control, they could serve as bases for the destabilization of neighboring states, all of which are our allies.

Regime collapse will likely mean the breakdown of state control and general weakening of the Iranian nation-state apparatus, which could conceivably create more poorly-governed or stateless areas. Why we should want more such areas in the vicinity of our two wars is a mystery. Things could get very nasty if outside powers make open displays of support for ethnic separatists, as that could trigger an Iranian nationalist movement that could seek to expel or destroy minority groups perceived to be in league with foreign powers. Religious minorities would also not be likely to fare well in such an environment. The resulting humanitarian disasters that would make us struggle to remember why it was that we wanted the regime to collapse. Have we learned nothing from the refugee and IDP crises created by the war in Iraq? As dreadful as the current regime is, it may serve functions that cannot be readily replaced by a successor. This is why conservatives are normally wary of dramatic political change: even institutions that are corrupt fulfill necessary functions, some of them latent that we do not immediately perceive and do not realize will not be replaced once the institutions weaken or collapse.

One of the reasons why calls for more forceful U.S. pressure are wrong is that the examples cited in such arguments, such as pressuring Marcos to step down in 1986, presuppose U.S. leverage over an ally and client. Analogies to “color” revolutions are wrong because they presuppose some grudging acceptance of democratic norms regarding transparency and fair elections that can be used eventually to drive incumbents from office. Shevardnadze could be forced out as easily as he was because his patrons in Washington were no longer willing to defend him. Without a foreign patron ready to pull the plug, those holding power rarely give it up, which means they will have to be compelled in some way either by members of the military and security services or by direct action of the population. That will mean the dramatic and violent transfer of power, which has its own costs of radicalization and the potential for triggering broader civil strife. The regime that emerges on the other side of the chaos will not necessarily be any less repressive or authoritarian than the one we see now. If we would agree that the revolution replaced a brutal dictatorship with something even worse, we should not assume that whatever replaces the current regime will be an improvement. It would not be hard to imagine a successor to Khamenei or a non-clerical political leadership assuming emergency powers that could lead to the establishment of a military junta or some other form of despotism. It is always possible that there would be no significant improvement in social or political freedoms, but only a great deal of upheaval and suffering between now and then. That is frequently the experience of revolution. For the last twenty years, we have grown accustomed to remarkably peaceful transfers of power as old regimes fall, but we need to remember how exceptional and unusual in modern history this has been.

In any case, the idea that Iranian pursuit of influence in neighboring states would lessen under a different, more democratic regime seems deeply mistaken. Iranian pursuit of influence in what is now Afghanistan predates the revolution–and I mean the constitutional revolution of 1908–and it is difficult to see how any future Iranian regime, regardless of its character, will not be very involved in trying to influence Iraqi politics. As for the pursuit of nuclear weapons, it is worth bearing in mind that Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons during its pre-Musharraf, relatively more democratic phase, and as we all know Khan was feted as a national hero and was extremely popular. Why we think that Iranians would not welcome the acquisition of nuclear weapons with similar enthusiasm is never made clear.

* By “plausible,” I mean scenarios that I think could conceivably happen in the unlikely event that the current regime actually collapses under the pressure of the protests.

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights. ~Barack Obama

Evidently, this is supposed to horrify those of us who have been arguing that Obama’s cautious, minimal response was the right one. I am having difficulty figuring out how exactly Obama is supposed to have offended me. In my first post on how the U.S. should respond to the election aftermath, I said:

Except for the most generic statements condemning violence and urging peaceful resolution to the crisis, Washington should say nothing, and I mean nothing.

The new statement doesn’t go very far beyond this, so I can’t say that I’m feeling all that outraged by Obama’s meddlesome ways. At least, not yet I’m not. The reason why I recommended that the response be as minimal as possible is that once a government begins addressing more specific grievances, people start to expect the government in question to do something about those grievances. Once they hear expressions of moral support, they may begin to look for something more tangible and concrete, and all of a sudden we’re on our way to trying to push through a new round of sanctions on the country, Congress begins passing legislation for funding and organizing anti-regime elements and before you know it the crisis has somehow become our solemn responsibility to resolve. The demand to speak out is how it always starts. The practitioners of moralistic cant Serious Foreign Policy Thinking nowadays like to claim that Americans have become too averse to their cant because of the disasters that have been wrought on account of such preening, and they are right about that much, but what is never clear is why we should let them get their feet in the door once again.

Obama has added some general remarks in support of free assembly and free speech, which, as Peggy Noonan pointed out the other day, are things that America obviously supports. How thick would someone have to be to think otherwise?

Much of the latest Obama statement is a rephrasing of things he said in an interview the day before or earlier in the week, if not simply lifted directly from his speech in Cairo and his Inaugural Address. In other words, anyone with a memory that extends back beyond 48 hours ago has already heard him say things exactly like this, and he has already said much of what was in the statement when talking about Iran earlier on. Mark Silva noted this similarity and asked a good question:

And, when one starts quoting one’s own talking points, what is one accomplishing more than talk?

Of course, that is the point some of us have been making all week. What good is such talk, unless it is supposed to be making us feel better? Joyner has referred to the new statement as “more tepid than many would like,” which is a good way to put it, because this seems to be an issue of what many in the West would like to hear rather than what would actually be wise or helpful to the protesters. The President’s critics seem to be self-congratulation addicts in need of a fix. They haven’t heard any ringing Americanist bromides in days, weeks even, and they are beginning to go into withdrawal. Why won’t the President take pity on them and engage in some good, old-fashioned irresponsible bluster? Perhaps he could utter some embarrassing teleological certainties about History, or declare his insights into the political preferences of God. That should help get them through the night. Imagine how galling it will be for the professional democratists, those whinging advocates of the “indispensable nation,” if the Iranians manage to find their own way towards some greater self-government without any real help from Washington. I don’t think it likely this will happen, but if it doesn’t it won’t be because the President failed to speak more loudly and aggressively in favor of the protesters.

Had Obama been out in front of the cameras every hour of every day for the last week declaring how outrageous and unacceptable the Iranian government’s behavior was and demanding that it stop, someone might reasonably expect him to do something about the outrageous and unacceptable behavior. Naturally, the same insipid critics who want Obama to “say more” would be demanding that he “do something” and not just talk. They have never explained what they want him to say, but simply that he must say more and say it more forcefully, which is convenient for them, since they can keep claiming that whatever he says never quite measures up. At the same time, every change in phrasing, no matter how minor and no matter how many times Obama has said something similar before, will be taken as a cue to call for Obama’s defenders to abandon him. It is imperative that at no point do his critics explain why his restraint is mistaken or why their irrational exuberance would be better. After all, what would we expect when these critics have no argument to make?

Just as one does not extend security guarantees one has no intention or ability of fulfilling, so as to avoid undermining the credibility of all security guarantees, the President is not going to box himsef into a corner rhetorically such that he will then be obliged to intervene directly through action when he knows that there is nothing that he can do that will positively affect the outcome of the crisis in Iran. There is almost nothing worse for a government to do than make empty threats that it knows ahead of time it cannot back up. Even when there is no formal guarantee, implicit promises of aid and support, such as those Saakashvili believed had been made to him by the United States, can lead to ruinous courses of action that harm the side in a conflict we find most sympathetic. Perhaps one of the few things worse than making empty threats is to use empty rhetoric that has real, negative consequences for the people the government is ostensibly trying to help. We should all be very clear that the latter is what the President’s critics are demanding that he do, and he is right to ignore them, as I wish all of us would.