Obama strikes cautious note on Iran election Sunday, June 21, 2009 By Niall Stanage in New York Uproar on the streets of Tehran has created a dilemma for those who occupy the corridors of power in Washington DC.
The Obama administration last week sought to walk a fine line in relation to the issue, its support for the Iranian protesters unusually mild and implicit, rather than strident or overt.
The basic template for the White House’s response to the crisis was laid out by the president himself last Monday. Barack Obama told reporters he was ‘‘deeply troubled’’ by violence in Iran, adding that ‘‘the world is watching’’.
However, Obama was also careful to stress that ‘‘it is up to Iranians to make a decision about who Iran’s leaders will be’’, and said that he wanted to avoid ‘‘the United States being the issue inside of Iran’’.
The following day, he seemed to downplay the differences between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chief rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
In a joint interview with the New York Times and the CNBC television network, Obama said: ‘‘The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, in terms of their actual positions, may not be as great as has been advertised. We’ve got long term interests in having them not weaponise nuclear power and stop funding organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas. And that would be true whoever came out on top in this election.”
While it is true that Mousavi is hardly a liberal in western terms, the tone of the remark seemed out of step with a popular mood in the US – which is supportive of the protesters. Generally, foreign news stories do not reach a mass US audience – the crisis in Iran is an exception.
The man whom Obama defeated for the presidency last year, Arizona senator John McCain, said he was ‘‘incredulous’’ about Obama’s comment minimising the contrast between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. ‘‘The Iranian people, obviously, think there is some difference, or tens or hundreds of thousands of them wouldn’t be in the streets,” he said.
If McCain’s comments could be seen as predictable, the same could not be said of criticisms of Obama from other quarters. An Iranian specialist at the non-partisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Karim Sadjadpour, praised Obama’s previous remarks on Iran as having been ‘‘very thoughtfully calibrated’’, but told the New York Times that last Tuesday’s comments represented ‘‘an uncharacteristic and egregious error’’.
Defenders of the administration’s position argue that Obama is restrained by several factors. Prime among these is the idea that overt US support for the demonstrators could actually backfire, enabling Ahmadinejad and his supporters to paint them as American dupes. Iranian attitudes to the US are, at best, ambivalent.
While some public polling suggests Iranians are significantly less anti American than other populations in the region, US meddling in its affairs has left a bitter after taste. The most infamous example – American involvement in the toppling of Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically-elected Iranian prime minister, in 1953 – was acknowledged by Obama during his major address in Cairo earlier this month.
In one sign of the complexity of the issue, however, opinion is not neatly divided along party lines. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton and vice president Joe Biden are believed to favour taking a tougher line than Obama has done so far, though this has been officially denied by the White House.
But Obama has even won praise for his caution from some Republicans including senator Richard Lugar – a big player on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee – and Henry Kissinger.
During a TV interview, Kissinger said that he had been a McCain supporter last year, but said that ‘‘I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person.”
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