Should Obama Have Taken

Should Obama Have Taken

Sides in Iran?

In the tumultuous days following the recent presidential election in Iran President Obama was criticized for not supporting the opponents of President Ahmadinejad. His critics argued that if we had supported the protestors the current regime might have fallen and that it was a betrayal of our nation´s democratic ideals not to do so.

These critics were wrong in their analysis of the situation, wrong in their approach to democracy promotion, and wrong in their understanding of our nation’s interests.

To begin with the last point, the primary interests of the United States in the Middle East are to keep oil flowing smoothly to international markets and to maintain our influence over how the wealth that oil produces is invested. The region supplies much of the world’s petroleum needs, and without that supply the global economy–including the US economy–would be in very bad shape, much worse than it is today. Further, the billions of dollars that middle-eastern countries receive from the sale of their oil has been largely recycled back into our economy: through purchases of goods and services, through equity investments in US industries, and through buying much of our national debt.

Should the oil exporters align themselves either politically with some non-western power or economically with some non-market-oriented ideology, that too would have a major impact upon our nation´s well-being. Hence, regional stability and gradual, not violent, political change suit our strategic priorities.

What Mr. Obama´s critics should have known is that the region’s political stability is threatened by three long-standing conflicts: battles over land, intra-faith religious rivalries, and geopolitical maneuverings. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute, for instance, is fundamentally a fight over land taken from the Palestinian people by western powers. It is a struggle that has caused several regional wars in the not-too-distant past, as well as severe global oil shocks, and it is a struggle with the potential to explode again; this time with the backing of Iran and its Hezbollah agents .

Less well-known is the centuries-old unresolved conflict between the Sunni and Shia factions within Islam itself. Long despised and oppressed by the region´s majority Sunnis, the Shias remain a significant minority in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Now with the emergence of a potentially nuclear-armed, and assertive Shiite-led Iran, supported by a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq and a Shiite-based Hezbollah in Lebanon, the possibility of renewed religious warfare is very much on the minds of our Sunni-oriented regional allies.

Finally, there is the destabilizing effect of the historic arm-wrestling between the world´s great powers for influence over the region´s political orientation, trade routes, maritime access, petroleum production, and financial wealth. Russia fought with France and England for the Crimea; the Turks created the Ottoman Empire; the West divided that empire into the nations of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia; the Soviet Union supported Egypt in its wars with Israel; and now China and Russia are competing with Europe and the US in Iran.

When one considers the current centrality of Iran to these long-standing conflicts, finding a way for the US to re-engage diplomatically with Iran has great strategic importance.

The question is how to do it. President Obama´s critics argued that Mr. Ahmadinejad´s opponents could have toppled the current regime if we had only offered them our support. In making that argument, they assumed both that we have the ability to favorably influence events in that country and that democracy would be well-served by our attempting to do so. Both assumptions are false.

The easiest way for Mr. Ahmadinejad to rally the Iranian public in support of his policies is to make the opposition look like it is doing America’s bidding. The scars from prior US meddling in Iranian affairs have not healed. We overthrew freely-elected President Mossadeqh in 1953 and supported his hated successor, the dictatorial Shah of Iran. We supported Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, during which millions of Iranians died; and then we labeled Iran part of the ¨axis of evil¨. These wounds to its sovereignty and national dignity are ripe for exploitation by any demagogue wishing to crush his political opposition, and President Obama was wise to avoid that trap.

Second, siding with that opposition would be anti-democratic. The best evidence is that outside of Teheran and its professional, well-educated, secular, and business-oriented neighborhoods, Mr. Ahmadinejad was leading in the pre-election polls by a factor of 2 to 1. Therefore, despite some voter fraud, in all likelihood he won the presidential contest. If the US had supported the loser, it would have gone against all that we preach about honoring the will of the people.

Bottom line, President Obama exercised good judgment in his statements to the American press, to the Iranian people, and to the court of world public opinion concerning the Iranian election and its aftermath. We support the democratic process while deploring the suppression of peaceful assembly and free speech; we do not seek regime change by violent means; and respecting the will of the people, we will work with whomever emerges as the leader of Iran in the search for greater peace and stability in the region.