Obama, Iran, & The Rising Of The Sun

The White House, along with the assistance of the NYT, is now taking credit for the revolt in Iran, tying the motivation of rank and file Iranians to risk life and limb in protest of their government to Obama's Cairo speech occurring two weeks before the election. This becomes truly an act of divine intervention when one realizes that the "speech was not broadcast in Iran, where the goverment jammed signals to block satellite owners from watching." But Obama and his many Obamaphiles in the MSM are not about to let facts get in their way. It is impossible to imagine a more aggrandizing and arrogant spin of fantasy.

Update: Via Gateway Pundit, now Rahm Emmanuel is explicitly mouthing this ridiculous meme.

The Washington Post reported today:

. . . Since taking office, Obama has argued that reclaiming America's moral authority by ending torture and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay provides essential diplomatic leverage to influence events in such strategic parts of the world as the Middle East and Central Asia. The speech he delivered to the Islamic world in Cairo eights days before the June 12 Iranian election sought to do that by providing what the president saw as an unvarnished accounting of U.S. policy in Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"We're trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves," said a senior administration official who, like others, declined to be identified, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Obama's approach to Iran, including his assertion that the unrest there represents a debate among Iranians unrelated to the United States, is an acknowledgment that a U.S. president's words have a limited ability to alter foreign events in real time and could do more harm than good. But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic's Islamic authority in its 30-year history.

Yesterday, the NYT attempted to make essentially the same argument. The claims of the White House and their NYT sycophants to the contrary, Obama contributed nothing to the cause of this rebellion. There is not a single fact to suggest that this rebellion in Iran occurred because of an "Obama effect," nor that "the mere election of Barack Obama in the United States had galvanized reformers in Iran to demand change." In his prior acts of outreach to the mad mullahs, Obama only bestowed legitimacy on Iran's theocracy.

The fact that Obama's Cairo speech never made it into Iran kind of puts the kibosh on the White House claims that the speech played a role in motivating the protests. Further, even if Obama's Cairo speech was not jammed throughout Iran, nothing Obama said in Cairo could possibly be construed as giving impetus to Iran's rank and file to risk their very lives for democracy. Indeed, Obama clearly signalled in the speech that he had no intention of continuing to promote democracy in the Middle East. And lest there be any question about that, Obama "zeroed out funding for pro-democracy programs inside Iran from the State Department budget for fiscal 2010."

A viable argument can be made that we are seeing the wages of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. As I wrote last year:

The greatest threat to Iran today comes from a democratic Iraq on its border that honors the traditional Shia practice of quietism - i.e., maintaining a wall between mosque and state. Iran is a deeply troubled country of 60 million people held under the rule of a medieval theocracy by ever greater repression. The theocracy itself is illegitimate when looked at in terms of a millenium of apolitical Shia tradition - a tradition shredded in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and his velyat-e-faqi, a new philosophy justifying and requiring theocratic rule. And indeed, the most popular religious figure in both Iraq and Iran is now Grand Ayatolah Ali Sistani, an adherent to the quietist school.

And if you want to see how that was having an impact on Iranians, do see this 2007 Boston Globe article, "Shi'ite Cleric Gains Sway Across The Border."

That said, even if Iraq plays some role in Iran's uprising, it is beyond challenge that the major causes of Iran's rebellion have been present for years. Brutal repression, a mysoginist culture that legally treats women as second class citizens, a thoroughly corrupt theocracy, unemployment above 20% and inflation at equal numbers. All of that is multiplied in importance by the fact that a majority of Iranians are under thirty years old and who have little opportunities open to them under Iran's theocracy. Most of these causes were present in Iran a decade ago and gave life to the "Tehran Spring" uprisings. The final straw giving rise to those uprisings was a belief that conservatives were keeping the reformist President Khatami from enacting reforms. In the instant case, what has caused today's revolt is the perception that mid level cleric cum Supreme Guide Khameini committed massive election fraud in order to keep a reformer out of office.

For Obama or his sychophants to claim credit for this uprising leaves one near speechless. It follows the same logic as saying that, because Obama said the sun will rise yesterday, the fact that it rose today is proof that Obama is the cause of it. That this tripe is being peddled by the NYT yesterday and reported without the scorn it deserves from the Washinton Post today - apparently without either even checking to see whether the speech was broadcast in Iran - establishes possibly the high water mark of the MSM's unquestioning love for the One. They are not a questioning press. They are instead unfiltered conduits for raw spin from the White House. To go any further than this in order to show their love for the One requries a hotel room.