Jennifer Foster: Obama’s mixed signals on Iran are telling

As Iranians continued to protest their disputed presidential election this week, President Obama said at a news conference Tuesday that the U.S. is “appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days.

“I strongly condemn these unjust actions,” he said.

Initially, that sounded pretty good, especially when compared to his previous statements. The people of Iran have been waiting for nearly two weeks for Obama to find his legs on their crisis.

But then he called on Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney, who has been communicating with Iranians on his blog since the election. Pitney’s question originated with one of those Iranians, and it went like this:

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Wow. I hope no one expected a straight answer on that one.

Obama has said he doesn’t want the United States to become the “foil” in Iran’s internal conflict between its conservatives and its reformers.

OK. But must that relegate Americans to being inactive observers as the Iranians struggle for freedom?

On the validity of the election, Obama took a pass. “We didn’t have international observers on the ground,” so outside observers can’t verify whether the election was truly free and fair, he said.

True. But we do have the 2005 election results and the 2006 Iranian census. A British think tank studied them in the context of the most recent election, and a province-by-province analysis raised “serious questions” about the validity of Ahmadinejad’s supposed 2 to 1
victory.

Not 24 hours after Obama urged the Iranian government to respect Iranians’ “right to speech and protest,” a frantic young woman called CNN to report a bloody showdown in Baharestan Square. As protesters began to gather near the Iranian Parliament, she said, hundreds of militia members spilled out of hiding at a nearby mosque. She robotically recounted seeing men and women being thrown off a pedestrian bridge and beaten “so that they would die.”

Then humanity, and reality, caught up with her, and hysteria poured forth.

“And this was – this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this … You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom … This is horrific. This is genocide. This is a massacre. This is Hitler. And you should – you people should stop it ... A long time we have this and nobody takes action. It’s time to act.”

The president’s supporters argue that diplomacy is more complicated than a simple denunciation of the Iranian government’s outright abuse of its citizens. I marveled at how condescending that argument is. And I wondered what that Iranian woman would make of it.

But is this really so complicated?

Referencing Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman shot to death during a protest last week, Obama said, “I think that when a young woman gets shot on the street when she gets out of her car, that’s a problem.”

Yes, it is. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

President Obama gave mixed signals to Iranians this week when he dodged Nico Pitney’s question.

But it doesn’t matter. The whole world already knows the answer.

Jennifer Foster is a political enthusiast who lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.