On the Today show, Sen. John McCain said that President Obama should make a forceful declaration about the election in Iran. "He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election. The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights."
President Obama said this:". . . the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it's the US that is encouraging those reformers. So what I've said is, `Look, it's up to the Iranian people to make a decision. We are not meddling.' And, you know, ultimately the question that the leadership in Iran has to answer is their own credibility in the eyes of the Iranian people."
How short a time it has been since both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were claiming that Barack Obama was too inexperienced to handle complex foreign affairs and to be commander in chief.
So, who looks unpresidential now? Even right-wingers and neo-cons are praising Obama's handling of the Iran crisis. Bot Pat Buchannan and Bill Crystal have said so.
Ralph
Add to the list of Republicans praising Obama's response to the Iranian crisis:
ReplyDeleteSenator Richard Lugar, long-time senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the few moderate Republicans left in office.
Former Bush administration negotiator with Iran, Nicolas Burns.
So -- looks like McCain and Rush Limbaugh are out of step even within their own party.
Obama's response is such a simple thing of beauty. "We're not meddling" is the only respectful [and effective] antedote to three decades of misguided [and meddling] foreign policy blunders.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah. Wasn't McCain the "bomb, bomb, bomb - bomb, bomb Iran" singer?
ReplyDeleteThat he was . . . . time for a re-run on that video clip.
ReplyDeleteAnd today, there is word that the Iranian government is now blaming the U.S. for fomenting the protests.
ReplyDeleteSo, they'll say it anyway; but think how much more reasonable their complaint would have seemed to the world if Obama had done what "bomb bomb McCain" had insisted.
Who knows? Maybe we did have some clandestine role in encouraging the response; but it seems genuine and of-the-people and massive, not a manufactured protest. We might have helped, but we couldn't have created this.