Claudia Rosett at Forbes offers some excellent analysis one year after the brutal crackdown on protestors in Iran. She reminds us that at the time of the protests Obama offered little encouragement to the protestors-preferring instead to make milquetoast statements about the whole affair being an Iranian domestic issue and saying he didn’t want to “meddle” in Iran’s affairs. The President did however, weeks after the protests started, predict that Iran would become increasingly isolated if it failed to live up to its international obligations. Unfortunately, one year later it isn’t the Iranian regime that’s isolated, it’s the protestors. Rosett writes:
Instead, the opposite has happened. Iran’s dissidents have become more isolated, while Iran’s regime has been bending the world its way: mocking Obama, arming terrorist mascots, piling up nuclear bomb fuel and firming up international alliances, old and new. Since ascending to his second term in office, Ahmadinejad has twice peacocked in New York on the United Nations stage, in September and again in May. In February his schedule included a terror-trio dinner in Damascus with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and the terrorist leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. This week, while Obama was repeating the line about Iran finding itself more “isolated,” Ahmadinejad was in the middle of a three-country swing through Turkey, Tajikistan and China. When he compared the latest U.N. sanctions resolution to a “used handkerchief,” he was speaking from Dushanbe, en route to the current World Expo in Shanghai, where he felt free to describe Israel as “doomed.”
In another interesting side note (h/t Seth Leibsohn on the Corner), on the anniversary of the Iran protests, President Obama’s weekly radio address was about “fair play for doctors.”
Fantastic.