Republican senators criticized President Barack Obama on Sunday for not taking a tougher public stand in support of Iranians protesting the outcome of the country's contested presidential election, with one saying the president had been "timid and passive."
As thousands of Iranians have flooded city streets in the past week to demonstrate for a new election, Republicans have been turning up the heat on Obama. The president has sought to send a measured message to the Iranian leadership, with which he still hopes to open a dialogue over its nuclear program.
"The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on a Sunday morning talk show. "He's been timid and passive more than I would like."
As the demonstrations, particularly in the Iranian capital of Tehran, have continued and the death toll among protesters approaches 20, Obama has been stiffening his response while trying to avoid giving Iran's theocratic leadership the opportunity to blame the U.S. for the unrest that has swept the country since the June 12 vote.
Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the victor by an overwhelming margin, but the speed with which the outcome was announced and Ahmadinejad's victory in areas where he was at a clear disadvantage caused outrage among backers of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.
In the meantime, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has put himself in the center of the dispute by warning that the leadership would not tolerate further demonstrations and unrest in the street.
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Khamenei had pushed the conflict toward a "very brutal outcome" by refusing to call for a new vote and issuing threats against demonstrators.
Democrats in the Senate say Obama has struck the right balance.
"He's got a very delicate path to walk here," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. "You don't want to take ownership of this."
"The worst thing we could do at this moment for these reformers, these protesters, these courageous people in Tehran, is allow the government there to claim that this is a U.S.-led opposition, a U.S.-led demonstration," said Dodd, emphasizing Obama's longer-term goal of engaging Iran over its nuclear program.
The United States and much of the Western world believes Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. Iran says it is only trying to develop nuclear reactors to generate electricity.
Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, agreed with Obama's response. "I think the president is handling a rapidly evolving, very complex situation about as well as you could expect. He has put us clearly on the side of the reformers, clearly on the side of fair and free elections, clearly condemned the violence," he said.
Graham, a strong conservative voice in the Senate, said he did approve of Obama's somewhat stronger statement of Saturday in which Obama called on Iran's government to halt a "violent and unjust" crackdown on dissenters. "The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights," the president said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, voiced disappointment at the overall administration response to the chaos that has gripped some Iranian cities.
"If America stands for democracy and all of these demonstrations are going on ... obviously they are going to ask, do we really care about our principles?" Grassley said.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., countered that Obama had found the correct mix of toughness and diplomacy.
"We should not politicize this issue here in the United States," Casey said. "The biggest threat down the road ... is Iran's nuclear program."
Graham and Dodd spoke on ABC's "This Week." Grassley and Casey appeared on CNN's "State of the Union." Bayh spoke on "Fox News Sunday."
Associated Press
Obama Pressured to Strike a Firmer Tone
WASHINGTON — As tens 
Mr. Obama is coming under increased pressure from Republicans and other conservatives who say he should take a more visible stance in support of the protesters.
Even while supporting the president’s approach, senior members of the administration, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, would like to strike a stronger tone in support of the protesters, administration officials said.
Other White House officials have counseled a more cautious approach, saying harsh criticism of the government or endorsement of the protests could have the paradoxical effect of discrediting the protesters and making them seem as if they were led by Americans. So far, Mr. Obama has largely followed that script, criticizing violence against the protesters, but saying that he does not want to be seen as meddling in Iranian domestic politics.
Even so, the Iranian government on Wednesday accused American officials of “interventionist” statements.
But several administration officials acknowledged that Mr. Obama might run the risk of coming across on the wrong side of history at a potentially transformative moment in Iran.
The administration’s concern over how to calibrate the response to the protests in Iran reflects the competing goals Mr. Obama is trying to balance: keeping faith with democracy advocates in Iran while not staking out a position that is so tough that it kills any chance of engagement with the Iranian government on America’s national security interests, including the Iranian nuclear program and Iran’s support for militant Islamist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Some criticism of the Obama administration’s cautious posture may be politically opportunistic, coming from rivals who are eager to draw distinctions between Republicans and Democrats, to portray the administration as generally weak when it comes to international confrontation.
But Mr. Obama also drew criticism from politically neutral observers when he said in an interview on Tuesday with The New York Times and CNBC that from an American national security perspective, there was not much difference between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Moussavi, his closest competitor in the election.
“Either way,” Mr. Obama said, the United States is “going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.”
The remark struck critics as off key and dismissive toward Mr. Moussavi, when he has become a symbol of freedom and democracy in Iran. “Obama’s posture has been very equivocal, without a clear message,” said Representative Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who is the House minority whip. “Now is the time for us to show our support with the Iranian people. I would like to see a strong statement from him that has moral clarity.”
Several administration officials, while acknowledging some unease about Mr. Obama’s measured policy, pushed back against the criticism. “He’s the president of the United States,” one senior official said. “We don’t get to say that it’s about 100,000 people on the streets and nothing else. It absolutely is about that, but when there are a range of issues we have to deal with, including the nuclear one, you don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one thing.”
Another senior administration official said he worried that if the United States were perceived as trying to influence the outcome of the election, it would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, for the White House to negotiate later with the Iranian government about its nuclear program.
“If they think what we’re about is regime change rather than changing the behavior of the regime, they’re likely to hunker down,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.
But some foreign policy experts questioned whether after recent events, the United States should or even could sit down to a negotiating table with a badly discredited Mr. Ahmadinejad.
To be sure, the United States is in a more delicate position than other countries because of its enormous symbolism in Iran, where “Death to the United States” is still chanted at Friday Prayer.
So Mrs. Clinton, on a visit to Niagara Falls, Ontario, last weekend, offered a noncommittal comment on the election, saying, “We obviously hope that the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people.”
Then the Canadian foreign affairs minister, Lawrence Cannon, stepped to the same microphones to express Canada’s “deep concern” about voting irregularities, and demanded a “fair and transparent counting of ballots.”
Many Iran experts lauded Mr. Obama’s measured stance just after the election. But some of that support evaporated on Tuesday when he said there was not much difference between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Moussavi.
“For Barack Obama, this was a serious misstep,” said Steven Clemons, director of the American strategy program at the New America Foundation. “It’s right for the administration to be cautious, but it’s extremely bad for him to narrow the peephole into an area in which we’re looking at what’s happening just through the lens of the nuclear program.”
Mr. Obama’s comments deflated Mr. Moussavi, who is rapidly becoming a political icon in Iran, even supporters of Mr. Obama’s Iran policy say.
“Up until now, the president had very thoughtfully calibrated his remarks on Iran, but this was an uncharacteristic and egregious error,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “People are risking their lives and being slaughtered in the streets because they want fundamental change in the way Iran is governed. Our message to them shouldn’t be that it doesn’t make much difference to the United States.”
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Source: New York Times – Politics – June 17, 2009
Posted: Knowledge Creates Power
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