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Political Colors

Andrew has an unusually bad suggestion for the President: Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more. A thousand times, no! Leave aside the political damage he would do to himself here at home by brandishing a tie with the color of political Islam, […]

Andrew has an unusually bad suggestion for the President:

Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

A thousand times, no! Leave aside the political damage he would do to himself here at home by brandishing a tie with the color of political Islam, which is enough of a problem for Obama given the persistent, albeit fringe attacks on him on account of his ancestry, and just consider how inappropriate this is as a matter of relations with other states. I hope we would never suggest that the President deliberately wear the color blue or red before or after a British general election, and I hope no one would actually want the President to wear orange in solidarity with Yushchenko (though it could just as easily be misread as solidarity with the FPM) or yellow to side with the anti-Thaksin forces in Thailand. The President of the United States is not and must not be seen as a partisan in the elections of other nations. No matter the party and no matter the country, their cause is not and cannot be the same as his. For another thing, such a symbolic display of solidarity in the absence of action would be interpreted, correctly, as worse than doing and saying nothing. Nothing would please his domestic enemies more than to be able to mock his empty symbolism and falsely impute Islamist sympathies to him, and nothing would suit Mousavi’s enemies more than to be able to tie Mousavi to the United States through that symbolic identification. While we’re at it, it would be seen as an attempt to use worldwide sympathy for the movement in question to bolster himself politically while doing absolutely nothing for the people with whom he supposedly sympathizes. It would give the regime the pretext of treating Mousavi as an American lackey. They may do this in any case, but Washington need not enable or provide justification for this. The administration’s wait-and-see approach is the right one

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